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1000 sats \ 3 replies \ @0xIlmari 11 Mar \ on: Psychology and btc price bitcoin
I will add one, maybe interesting, maybe useless, tidbit.
We know that "price" is a compression of distributed information, but not everyone realizes how mind-bogglingly complex the input to the compression is.
Sure, you might say, "there's multiple exchanges", some might smugly say, "there are order books", meaning multiple actors bidding at different levels and amounts.
Fewer people still might be aware of futures, meaning people bidding on future prices of an asset, at different times (expiration dates) - each of those expirations having its own order books. This in itself is a fascinating view into the market's expectations of the future. This already needs some compression to represent and glean intelligence from.
And then you might've also learned about options which adds the dimension of "strike", meaning not only are actors bidding on future but are pricing individual price levels (and very differently so).
(More acurately, options markets express traders' expectations of future volatility through some extremely complicated, albeit interesting, math.)
I look at this table almost every day. It's incomprehensible if you've never seen an options matrix. Every row in that table has its own order book (two, in fact, for CALL and PUT) and that's just for one of many expiry dates.
So the derivatives market has all these dimensions:
- expiration date
- strike
- CALL/PUT
- order book
with only partially correllated expectations. And that's just one asset.
Participants in those markets more often than not need to offset their positions on the spot market to stay delta-neutral, so their expectations continuously influence that singular number we call "price".
Great context -- all of this is dark territory to me. This isn't exactly the same, but tell me if this is a sensible thing to say:
I've often thought that what these financial products do is to allow you to make utterances, of varying complexity, about the world. Natural language let's you say I saw a tree but also If settlers were to try to build in this area, there would almost certainly be a great uprising. Whole forests have been set afire. In just this way, these other financial products allow you to make statements of belief, expectation, and probability about reality, and to anchor those statements with value.
If that's right, then all this aggregated information -- the exchanges, the order books, the interactions market participants have with each other -- is, collectively, bringing reality into crisper focus. But you need to be able to say complex things to have a complex understanding.
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Your intuition is spot on.
But allow me to provide some contexts, should you find it useful.
The origin of futures is traditionally traced back to the Japanese rice exchange in XVII century and it's just a tool to solve a very important problem for producers: prices are cyclical and volatile, but they want to secure a predictable price for their produce. So they can sell contracts for delivering produce (that may not have even been sown yet) in the future (harvest), at a price determined now. (Of course, the buyer effectively takes over the cost of carry, plus risk of price change, which is why they charge a premium.)
The price of a future is a fairly straightforward thing - it all revolves around the premium over spot (sometimes under). And with the math tools at the time, you could even calculate things like an annual yield, therefore "inventing" a yield curve for futures.
Options are a seemingly simple evolution - you add an optionality to exercise the contract, so the buyer can back out of a deal that went poorly over time. Simple as it sounds, it immensely complicates the math behind pricing such an instrument.
So while options existed for some time earlier, they were not widely traded because noone knew how to price them accurately. It took a whole new heavyweight branch of mathematics to develop in the 20th century, culminating with work of Black, Scholes and Merton in the 70s, particularly the "dreaded formula", a nasty solution to a nasty stochastic partial differential equation. But that's okay, we had computers at that time, and the market exploded.
After this unnecessary exposition, back to your question.
Futures and options have now become the building blocks in the language of financial engineering which indeed allow you to make simple and complex utterances in the market, such as:
- "I think the long end of the futures curve is going to flatten over time" => Sell a long-termed futures spread (a combo of two opposing futures with different expirations)
- "I think the price will stay in a $60k-$90k channel over the next quarter. I want to be paid off if I'm right but want to limit my losses if I'm wrong." => Short an "iron condor" (a combo of 4 different options)
- "I think the volatility will decrease over the next half-year but I want to stay neutral on price itself." => Short any option (but more commonly a straddle or strangle) while continuously trading the underlying to maintain a delta-neutral position
These utterances may be business-driven (you have a structure of future flows and liabilities that you want to balance with some objective in mind) or purely speculative. But everyone brings their own particular set of needs (long this, short that) to a single marketplace and a single number emerges.
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This is awesome -- looking forward to poking at some of these things. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
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