Download User Guide - Berkeley Futures Limited

Trading With J-Trader
Column
High Price
Explanation
For example, if you were buying a butterfly, you’d be buying one lot of leg 1, selling two
lots of leg 2, and buying one lot of leg 3: that’s four legs, but only one butterfly: so the
total traded volume is 1.
Highest, and lowest, price at which the strategy has traded during the current trading day.
Low Price
Closing Price
Last Traded Price
Closing price. This is generated from the settlement prices for the individual legs.
Price at which the strategy last traded.
Using Strategies (MELs)
You can create and trade “multi-exchange leggers” (MELs): strategies that are not supported by
exchanges.
You can use MELs to trade both inter-market (e.g. trading the DAX against the FTSE) and intramarket
(e.g. LIFFE Short Sterling against Gilts). Other uses include buying/selling an index against
futures for the constituent securities, or using the automatic-execution capabilities of MELs to
simulate icebergs.
MELs are executed automatically once the price criteria are met. There is a small legging risk to
trading unsupported strategies like this, namely the risk that one leg executes while the other fails; to
reduce your exposure on larger trades, you can specify a clip size, e.g. send 100 lots in clips of 10.
J-Trader will calculate a ‘MEL Price’ for your strategy, using the parameters defining the relationship
between the legs. This is a synthetic price, existing only locally on J-Trader and not at the exchange.
Once a leg is executed, it exists as an entirely normal order at an exchange, unrelated to any other
orders anywhere (except on your screen).
Note: If you have the Strategy Calculator (page 64), you can create exchange-supported strategies.
Creating a MEL
To create a MEL:
1 On J-Trader’s main screen, click Settings. The Settings screen appears.
2 Click the MEL Template tab.
The –Templates— frame (top half of the screen) is for defining the attributes of the MEL.
The –Legs— frame (bottom half) is for defining the legs it contains.
Notice between the frames, which you can use for maximising one frame (or returning to two
frames).
3 In the –Templates— frame, click Add and fill in the row, as follows:
© Patsystems Ltd 31/05/2011 15:19:00 53