Contract Subscription

A Nymex Access Proposal

The Concept

It has been noted that few traders actually generate trades from options.
In the light of this the idea is
if you are not interested why do we download?
The advantages of this are clear:

• the download is faster
• data abstraction (building factories) is much faster
• less memory is consumed

Inter Market Relationships

It is suggested that the subscription is by Contract
Note that Contract CLHO and CLHU (inter-crack spreads) would require some form of control intervention
We could not allow say Outright CL and CLHO without HO being included
Options would require that the underlying future was also turned on.

Action Points

Add a Table C_contract_subscriptions
With Columns C_user_no, C_contract_no, C_subscribe
The C_subscribe column being negative selection
The GUI would title the select widget as "Exclude The Following Contracts"
The reasoning behind negative selection is:

• if a new contract is added the default is download (saves adding a row per user to the table)
• users should not be forced to comply with a new dialog and things should work as before
• corporate explorer would not need to suppport the additional table

Server changes to determine whether to download the contract

Special Attention

• Should Firm Supervisors set these or the Trader (the later seems reasonable as the concept of subscription is limiting yourself)
• change user and the effect of reaching orders when the contract has not been downloaded
• the account dialog and its contract display
• the account trades position dialog and allocations which depend on contract download

Skill Base

DBA's to create table and stored procedure
Server skills to create server only linked list or array
Client skills to create a dialog to control the subscriptions
Middleware skills to pass message through the API and codegen/broker

Conclusion

This is a really good idea but there is a major concern of downloading reference data on the fly.
The Market Processing Unit would have to accept the addition of a new contract
creating its squares and cubes for outrights and intras.
The API may not smoothly accept an additional download of contract data.
Clearing Users would have to have all the contracts that maybe used in all the available accounts
The Audit Trail Issue mentioned below may prove to be a killer.

The idea needs alot more research

Suggestions

Add a Pushbutton to Logon Dialog to allow User to change default Contract settings
From PB pop up a dialog to display all contracts and allow user to change selections.
Initially this could be just a choice of turning on or off options or futures(?).
Later enhancement would be to selectively choose contracts -
will need to check cracks and options to make sure that underlyings are selected
and if not automatically select them.
Option market messages will get sent to GUI's - do a check to see if subscribed to options
and if not ditch message
Andy

What about historical information?
For example, how would the audit trail handle receiving a request for contract information that has not been downloaded.
Audrey

Produced by DCW for Nymex Access.