Recent content by ccooper

I spent a week there a few years ago, and felt safe, and I am obviously not a local. That was in General Santos and Davao City, which are probably the safer parts of the island. Internet connections were adequate. But make your own decisions.

traderhf, it seems clear that you are not yet trading in size. Therefore, I suggest this approach. Stick with IB at first since the spreads and liquidity are good, and it is easy to trade with them. You can, as another poster suggested, get them to raise your limits, but it doesn't really...

I trade at this size every day, on multiple venues, and can share these observations: 1) IB's arbitrary limit on the order size in unimportant. Regardless of the size of your order, you will receive partial fills in the 1-2 million range, so it really doesn't matter how big an individual...

I tested some rebate trading last week, using IB as the broker. Although I received the rebate, I was charged $2.92 in regulatory fees and taxes, plus the IB commission of about $1.00. Thus you can't make money simply by doing wash trades, you have to have an edge aside from the rebates --...

I am using FCStone for some of my trading. I, too, withdrew money last year over the same issues, but put it back eventually. There have been no problems since. Also, I must say that customer service has been fine at FCStone.

Note that commissions are negotiable at MBT, not at IB. More importantly, swap rates are also negotiable at MBT. Therefore, based on your comments, it might be worthwhile for me to give MBT another try.

If we assume that your findings are accurate and a fair representation, there are a few possible explanations for the different experiences we have had. 1) My testing is 24 hours, with an emphasis on less-liquid trading times where the problems usually show up. Perhaps yours were only sampled...

That is correct. I have run side-by-side real-time trading comparisons, and find that MBT is worse than IB. IB is also better than Currenex and HotspotFXi, though sometimes those relationships change. IB is also better than EBS for most currency pairs.

The OP quoted volumes that are not sufficient for EBS. IB is the best choice. Their liquidity and spreads are better than Currenex right now. Executions are no problem at all. Yes, their technology does tend to change, but all of the platforms have those issues to some degree, including EBS and...

Aggregating the top works a little bit, but not as well as you might think. All trading venues have pretty much the same set of liquidity providers. And most of them trade in small chunks. For example, the average trade size on EBS is only 2 million. Thus you can hit the top all at once, but you...

No, it is not bollocks. IB implements what is usually called "last look" which gives the LP the option of not taking your offer. IluvVol may not have seen this very often, because if you are trading very liquid pairs, or small amounts, it will usually look like your price is being taken. In...

IB is great. Against the retail brokers, no comparison. Side-by-side vs. HotspotFXi, Currenex, EBS, and MBTrading, IB is the best, with the only exception being EUR/USD and USD/JPY on EBS.

I'm at 7.5 million for EUR/USD, comparable for others.

The swap rates are negotiable with MB Trading. If you have enough volume, you can get them decreased. When I was trading there, my net swap costs were about one percent (subtract one direction from the other).

From the timestamps, I deduce that you are in Central time zone. IB forex shuts down every day at 17:00 Eastern time, and doesn't start up until 15 minutes later. That, of course, is the reason you are missing data. The missing data shouldn't be a problem, because you can't trade during those...