Morley Conn
π€ SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It goes back to experience.
Pricing a lot of block trades and knowing where you think you're going to be able to hedge that risk.
Another factor is market tone on the day.
Is it a positive day?
Do you think it's going to be difficult to get your hedges in?
Or is it a negative day and it's going to be difficult to find buyers of the underlying securities?
That sort of tone, it's only sitting on a desk and seeing and experiencing it for a prolonged period of time that you'll really get a sense of how to price and how to trade it.
The term block trade is pretty wide anyways, because it depends on the underlying market.
Like I have a screen set up that any trade in theory, a million dollars or more is considered kind of a block trade, but a million dollar trade, you know, a million dollars worth of trade in something like a very liquid trade underlying the TSX 60 or 300 or the S&P 500 for that matter, that's nothing.
Like block trades would be in the hundreds of millions, like sizable trade that would be very challenging to trade would be hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trade.
But in theory, a trade in excess of a million dollars could be considered a block.
But as mentioned, trades of that size in very active ETFs,
are not a big deal.
It's only more sizable, but it's going to depend.
There's going to be some types of ETFs where $10 million is going to be a very significant move, moving 10 million worth of those securities.
Whereas in more active, big indices, as mentioned, it's going to be a lot larger.
But we use the gauge of a million dollars, but it really does vary from ticker to ticker.
Yes, there's a lot of work that goes behind the scenes.
Each of the banks for our ETF market making operations, we have teams of developers that support our models.
So we get, as mentioned from the custodians, we will get...