Bitcoin Micro-Futures (MBT) Contracts Start This Week!!!!

I've had this day marked on my calendar ever since the announcement was first made.

Today is the day bitcoin micro-futures come to market.

A Perfect Union: Bitcoin & Futures

When bitcoin futures came out a few years ago, I was overjoyed. It was the union of two of my favorite things: bitcoin and futures. 

What did this mean for the bitcoin market?

Bitcoin futures help large traders to hedge exposure. In other words, the product allows institutional traders to legitimately purchase large amounts of bitcoin.

An Even More Perfect Union: Bitcoin & Micro-Futures

With the recent increase in bitcoin's price, retail investors (like me) have a hard time trading bitcoin futures. At a price of $50,000 the position size is difficult to maintain. 

Translation: You need a ~$100,000 account to trade bitcoin futures. 

Today is a new day!

Starting May 3, the CME is trading micro-sized bitcoin contracts (MBT). These contracts are available at 1/10 the size of one bitcoin.

Translation:  You'll only need a ~$10,000 account to trade micro-bitcoin.

You can think of this like a stock split for futures contracts. This will increase the number of retail traders that can trade in the market.

Stay tuned for technical MBT charts at the end of the month. We'll also be including MBT in automated trading strategies. You can sign up for updates about that here.

NinjaTrader 7 MBT Add-on Instructions

If you follow me, you know I use the old NinjaTrader 7 platform. See below for instructions on how to add MBT contracts to the NinjaTrader 7 platform manually: 

    From the Control Center, navigate to Tools -> Instrument Manager.
    Select “New”
    Fill out the information as below:
        Master Instrument : MBT
        Instrument type: Future
        Tick size: 5
        Currency: US Dollar
        Point Value: 0.1
        Session template: CME Micro Bitcoin Futures
        Description: CME Micro Bitcoin Futures
        Exchange: Globex

    Next, select the ‘Misc’ tab; scroll down to the ‘Interactive Brokers’ Symbol Map and enter the below:
        BRR|CMECRYPTO|||0.1

    Click "OK" to save your changes.

Please note that BTC and MTB cannot be enabled at the same time due to them having the same mapping.

Please disable the BTC instrument.

    From the Control Center, navigate to Tools -> Instrument Manager.
    Search for BTC.
    Once found, click BTCand select "edit".
    Click on the 'BTC' tab
    Scroll down to the Symbol Mapping for Interactive Brokers and add the word "-disabled" just after the instrument name.

        BRR|CMECRYPTO-disabled|||5

    Click "OK" to save your changes.

That's it. 

Trade well.