Goldman Sachs has spotted an odd way you could make money trading Bitcoin futures
“With no large institutions operating across exchanges, there is likely an insufficient scale of arbitrage to drive spreads out of the market.”
Goldman are beginning to get on my tits.
Sure, these are hardly nice guys. But... My 2 Satoshis...
So they arb a gap between long and short-term futures? It makes them money (short term), but the futures are cash settled, so no BTC are really involved. They wouldn't be open on this if they really thought it was a 'big play' they would just do it.
It doesn't mean they're affecting the market or price - and the futures market still really isn't large enough to affect the price massively around the world. Since volumes do not allow spreading risk for market raids by playing the market via futures at the same time as manipulating it. This of course comes with the caveat: 'yet'.
Also they can't put their client money into the market just like that, it's too risky and probably off-limits for many, many reasons (regulatory and otherwise).
Eventually futures markets could end up being the tail wagging the dog. It will come, but so far, it's not the case.