Technology has made a deep impact on futures trading, open out-cry trading on crude palm oil futures trading generated an average much below 2000 contracts a day when I was still a runner in the cpo futures trading pit in KLCE but electronic trading can help generating more than 2000 contracts in just a few seconds in cpo futures trading presently.
I still remember the chaos day that open out-cry cpo futures trading volume hit 5000 contracts when I was a trader in a newly set up futures company called KAF-Refco, we did 3000 contracts that day! Since the trading copy, as mentioned in previous post, had its limitation by not exceeding 20 contracts per copy (under the KLCE rules), just imagine how many copies would have been raised for the 5000 contracts traded that day! We floor traders had to sort out all the trading copies for more than 3 hours after the cpo futures market was closed at 6pm!
30,000 open positions was basically at the high end in open out-cry trading but electronic trading has the open positions hit 280,000 before coming down to about 180,000 when this post is written.
As we all know that Locals in cpo futures trading are the speculators but also the market makers. In open out-cry trading, they were the pits traders jumping up and down "insanely" in outsiders' eyes who stood at the 5th floor Gallery watching down the big trading floor on all kinds of hand signals and body gestures in a very noisy environment in DayaBumi Complex.
Today, there is no more such a marketplace. Locals sit in cosy rooms finger press on their keyboards to do trades... no longer jumping up and down with hand signals!