| Unfortunately it’s mostly wrong. And the reason it’s not public is much simpler. These markets are both standard contracts on CME matching engines. The CME uses a system where orders (and fills) are entered via a direct TCP/IP connection between the trading system and the exchange. There is no opportunity for any system besides the trading systems (computers, switches, etc) on each side to see the order. The CME then distributes the market data to a variety of paths in the form of price updates to an order book. That is the price and quantity of buy and sell orders at each price point. While these data feeds aren’t public, the cme gets paid for the data, it is widely disseminated, but it’s had the trading system identification removed. This whole story comes from people with market data contracts observing these feeds. There are other exchanges that provide more information about who is entering orders but infrequent but large participants don’t like this because it allows the market makers an information advantage against them. And large block participants tend to correlate with real economic activity (oil producers and consumers for instance). If a market maker knows an order is for one of these participants they can presume the size is going to be bigger and thus charge more for liquidity (in the form of of widening the price on their bid/ask spread offerings). Half the job of a modern HFT is predicting this sort of thing. So the cme keeps it this way so one set of their market will keep using them. It’s part of the balancing act a two sided exchange has to navigate. |