AMX, Adaptive Market Contracts, are financial contracts: futures and options on market indexes.
Similarities to exchange traded contracts: These contracts mimic the terms and conditions (structure) of existing futures and options on market indexes either publicly available on the exchange or over-the-counter (OTC contracts). Examples: digital options, futures, European options on equity market indexes (e.g. S&P500) or broad interest rate and fixed income indexes (e.g., standard U.S. notes and bond futures and options, Credit Derivative Indexes (CDX) ) etc.
Differentiating features:
Similarities to exchange traded contracts: These contracts mimic the terms and conditions (structure) of existing futures and options on market indexes either publicly available on the exchange or over-the-counter (OTC contracts). Examples: digital options, futures, European options on equity market indexes (e.g. S&P500) or broad interest rate and fixed income indexes (e.g., standard U.S. notes and bond futures and options, Credit Derivative Indexes (CDX) ) etc.
Differentiating features:
- Customizable: customers can specify contract terms: notional value, strike price, payout, expiration to suit their particular needs (Note: initial margin and maintenance margin shall be determined by Adaptive as it needs to conform to regulations). In particular, we anticipate most contracts will be of smaller denominations (or small notional values), as market contracts have large notionals and may not be practical for Adaptive customers.
- Counter Parties (of Bilateral Contracts): all contracts take two parties each. Customers will post their own contracts to allow other customers to enter as counter parties. We envision that Adaptive will be the counter party in most situations, and will be posting bid/ask for contracts at various strikes and expiration (option chain) with small notionals--in effect Adaptive will the primary market maker, at least initially.
- Disintermediated and Autonomously Enforced: our contracts will be built as smart contracts on a distributed ledger platform. There will be no intermediary agent to administer the term of the contracts. Instead, the smart contracts will execute its terms autonomously, and transfer margin flow and final payments automatically when an objective criteria are met.
- Most basic digital contract: e.g., if S&P is down 15% at expiry, you get paid out $500.
- Futures and European Calls and Puts on S&P500 with small notional amount. The smallest futures contract on S&P500 is the new Micro E-Mini (MES), which represents a notional exposure of 5 x Index level (the conventional E-Mini, ES, is 50 x Idx). At S&P500=3000, this represents a notional exposure of $15,000. For a small investor with portfolio balance in the tens of thousands, even the MES may be too large to offer the resolution the customer may need to hedge their portfolio exposure effectively. With Adaptive Contracts, we allow much smaller notional amounts. Adaptive will post bid/ask on contracts with $1000 notional exposure. And the customers can create their own contract with any notional amounts they desire (and for which they can find counter parties to). Further more, currently MES/ES does not trade much beyond two quarters (6 months). Adaptive can post contracts with 1, 2, 3 or even 5-yr expiration, to allow cost effective hedging by long-term investors.
- Futures and Calls and Puts on US 10-yr Government Bond. Currently, the CME has the standard 10-yr contract (TN) with a notional of $100,000. Adaptive will post contracts with $1,000 notional. Similarly, TN contracts do not trade much beyond the first two quarterly contracts, and Adaptive Contracts can have much longer expiration.