Page 31 - Bloomberg Businessweek-October 29, 2018

◼ FINANCE Bloomberg Businessweek October 29, 2018

Lassiter, a professor of history at the University much to open a restaurant in California, says John,
of Michigan. a former chef at a Beverly Hills hotel.
Politics aside, businesses are rushing into Boise John Del Rio, a real estate agent sporting a
to fill every West Coast craving. In nearby Eagle, the beard, baseball cap, and sunglasses, just registered
new Renovare gated community is selling 1,900- to moving2idaho.com, where he’s planning to blog
4,000-square-foot homes with floor-to-ceiling glass about all the things that make his new home great.
and “wine walls” that start at $650,000—a bargain He left Northern California two years ago with his
by California standards, says sales agent Nik Buich. wife in search of a place with less crime, lighter regu-
About half of buyers are from out of state, he says. lation, and more open space. Del Rio, a conservative
Julie and John Cuevas left Southern California with a libertarian bent, is reassured to see average
a year ago to open Madre, a “boutique taque- people walking through Walmart with handguns
ria” in Boise that would make many of their fel- in their holsters. In Idaho, he says, “nobody even
low transplants feel at home. It’s more fusion than flinches.” �Prashant Gopal and Noah Buhayar
typical Mexican fare, with taco fillings including
kimchi short rib and the popular “Idaho spud and THE BOTTOM LINE Most people in California can’t afford
to buy the typical home there, and that’s putting pressure on
chorizo.” It would have cost them three times as other markets.

Anyone Want Bitcoin

Futures? Anyone?

32

● The contracts, seen as a step toward bringing crypto to Wall Street, remain a tiny market

On a Sunday evening in December, as the Inc. Some people were expecting tens of thousands
cryptocurrency craze consumed the world, trad- of contracts per day to trade, he says, “and the mar-
ers waited eagerly at their computers to witness ket just wasn’t ready for that to happen.”
the debut of a flashy financial product. Ten months later, some of the hopes for Bitcoin
Bitcoin futures were set to start trading on Cboe futures look more like pipe dreams. Cboe and
Global Markets Inc.’s exchange at 5 p.m. Chicago CME combined traded about 9,000 contracts a
time. Futures allow an investor to place bets on day in the third quarter. “It has not been what you
the price something will hit at a later date without would call a roaring success,” says Craig Pirrong, a
having to buy the asset itself. Industry enthusiasts finance professor at the University of Houston and
hoped the contracts would help bring Bitcoin trad- an expert on futures trading. “Institutional players ● Average number of
ing into the financial mainstream, ushering in big have stayed on the Bitcoin sidelines, and as long as CME Bitcoin futures
contracts traded daily in
investors with bulging pocketbooks. they are, the futures contracts are likely not to gen- the third quarter
In the months leading up to the debut, Bitcoin’s erate substantial amounts of volume.”
price had gone ballistic. It surged about 600 per- The average of about 5,000 daily contracts 5,053
cent from when Cboe revealed its plans in early at CME in the third quarter is up from roughly
August to when CME Group Inc. started trading its 3,500 in the prior quarter. Still, by comparison,
own version in mid-December, which coincided CME traded more than 18 million contracts daily
with Bitcoin’s high of roughly $20,000. It’s since in the second quarter on products tied to every-
lost more than half its value. thing from oil and gold to interest rates and the
It’s not surprising that Bitcoin peaked within S&P 500. “We’re not seeing huge flows” for Bitcoin
hours of the kickoff of CME’s contracts, according to contracts, CME Chief Executive Officer Terry Duffy ILLUSTRATION BY SALLY THURER
Michael Unetich, vice president for cryptocurrencies told Bloomberg Television in July.
at Chicago-based Trading Technologies International The folks at Cboe have said much the same