Ooops – There go the Treasuries!

Published on: September 30, 2024

We’ve had a lot of calls at support in the past week about US Interest rate products no longer appearing in the Jigsaw platform. 

It turns out that it’s not the platform but that some of the electronic prop firms have stopped supporting it. I don’t have a list of them at this point, so I’m not sure which ones have dropped treasuries as of publishing but I did see one email claiming it was fraud prevention. I think that’s just a little bit cheeky!

My personal take on this is slightly different. For most instruments, the queue position is First In, First Out (FIFO). When you enter an order, it ‘fairly’ goes to the end of the queue. Many prop firms have what they call a “simulated live” environment, where they pay you profits from SIM trading. That means there’s some software somewhere emulating fills. Which is an imperfect process.

Emulating fills is tricky. You are in the queue ‘logically’ but you are not in the queue physically. It involves an amount of “guessing” where you would have been in the queue at the time you placed your order. With FIFO – it’s tricky but doable with a reasonable degree of accuracy. 

The queues on many interest-rate products are not FIFO. The queue position is based on order size – so bigger orders get filled first.  

In Crude – calendar spreads take precedence over outright orders. That makes sense there – exchange-based spreads are a huge proportion of Crude trades – and the exchange wants both legs filled.’ Having one leg of a spread filled is not welcome!

Also, remember that a while back, many of these prop firms banned scalping. 

So – what do I think is behind this? Well to me – these are simply symptoms of the fact it is very technically challenging to simulate fills – but more so when you are trading very short term or when the queue position isn’t FIFO. This can lead to people gaming the system in ways that would not be possible on a real market. 

Some might call that fraud – some might call it arbitrage. 👀

So what?

The “so what” of it is – if you are trading with an electronic prop firm that doesn’t place your trades on a live market, you need to understand how the queue position works for the instruments you are trading. Talk to your prop firm about how they simulate the fills. 

The last place you want to be in any business (and I consider trading a business) – is setting a business up and then having it taken away from you. If the queue position of your instrument ISN’T FIFO – it might be better putting your energy into trading a different set of instruments, as this might not be the last shoe to drop.