Minis abound. 
You can trade fractions of shares. Heck, the average trade-size is barely 100 shares, and 50% of trades are less than that. Minis, as it were.
There are e-mini futures contracts on the S&P 500 index, and the newer micro e-mini futures product is the CME’s most successful, says the derivatives market operator.
Starting Aug 31 there will be micro options on e-mini futures for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. As of Aug 10, there are mini CBOE VIX volatility futures too, with a 10th of the face value of the conventional contract (expiring Aug 19).
One can spend less to have exposure to stocks and market-moves. The same notion animated a push toward decimalization before 2001 when it was implemented.
Decimals didn’t kill the stock market but they gutted analyst-coverage. Spreads – that is, the difference between the cost to buy and sell – funded research. In the 1990s there were on average 60 underwriters per IPO, and there were hundreds of those.
Today, there are five underwriters on average, the data show, and IPOs don’t keep pace with companies leaving markets through deals. The Wilshire 5000, which in 1998 had 7,200 components, today has 2,495, factoring out micro-caps comprising just basis points of total market-capitalization.
Half the companies in the Wilshire 5000 have no analysts writing, while the top few hundred where trading supports it are festooned with quills – pens – like porcupines.
I think the inverse correlation between markets and the proliferation of minis bears some connection. It’s not the only thing, or perhaps even the biggest. But there’s a pattern.
And you should understand the market so you know what to expect from it. After all, who thought the March bear turn for stocks would be the shortest in history?
No one. Including us. Market structure, the way the ecosystem functions, explains it far better than fundamentals. But read to the end. We’ll say more.
Are the minis playing a role?
Look I’m not knocking fractional shares or tiny derivatives. Rather, let’s think about the ramifications of growing layers separating trading from underlying assets. Consider:
- You can trade the stocks of the Nasdaq 100, the largest hundred at the exchange.
- You can trade them in fractions without paying a commission.
- You can trade the QQQ, the popular Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that tracks the performance of the 100. ETFs as we’ve explained repeatedly are substitutes for stocks, not pooled interest in owning them.
- You can trade e-mini futures contracts on the Nasdaq 100.
- And now you can trade micro options on the e-mini Nasdaq 100 futures.
- And you can trade options on the QQQ, and every component of the Nasdaq 100.
- And you can trade the S&P 500 with exactly the same kinds of instruments, and SPY, the ETF.
It’s ingenious product-creation, and we’re not criticizing the innovators behind them. It’s that I don’t think many people ask what effect the pursuit of mini increments of investment will have on market-behavior and prices, things that matter particularly to public companies depending on the market as a rational barometer.
And investors join public companies in caring how markets work. Derivatives are becoming an ever-larger part of market volume. They’re layers of separation from underlying assets that become ends unto themselves, especially as increments shrink.
Why trade the stocks? Trade the rights on how they may behave – in tiny slices.
It disguises real supply and demand, which drives markets up relentlessly. Until that stops. Then markets collapse violently. These are chronic conditions in markets with too many derivatives.
Just saying.
Speaking of the market, it did as we wrote last week, with Market Structure Sentiment™ bottoming Aug 7, presaging gains a week out. Now options are expiring (including the VIX today), and Sentiment is topping, and behavioral volatility is massive, larger than we’ve measured at any point in the pandemic.
Maybe it’s nothing. Sometimes those data pass without a ripple. The FAANGs look good (low shorting, bottomed Sentiment). But we may be at the top of the Ferris Wheel after all those minis drove us this short, sharp way back up.
