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Well, it is certainly true that most of the surviving proprietary firms in Chicago will have a staff of traders dominated by those using some sort of spread or arbitrage strategy. How much those traders want to share with someone, of course, is another matter altogether.

You MUST tell your sales point of contact that you will be spread trading. The risk dept. will make some adjustments to your account default settings. Having said that, they will quickly take that back if you are simply letting naked legs run wild in the market. Spread trades mean offset or...

I started out scalping in the T-Bond Pit in the early 90's. After buying a couple rounds of drinks for some floor brokers and asking them who was consistently profitable they all exclaimed in complete inebriated exhuberence: "The Spreaders". At that point, I switched my clearing to...

I believe that John Coates, the academic promoting this view, has a very legitimate point for a certain type of trader, namely, a proprietary firm or bank desk or HF trader. This is a different animal that your portfolio manager type ( which would be more correlated to the Warren Buffett...

It's not just the NFA quite frankly. Or even the securities industry. I now question everything done by an auditor. Look at what happened with Arthur Andersen LLP and the Enron debacle.

Well, the real spine of the issue is: how many corporations and financial entities are audited by accountants too lazy and too incompetent to directly confirm the entity's account balance figures against what the Bank can confirm ? This is a much broader issue than just futures clearing...

What is your price point ? Trading Technologies and CQG Integrated Client is not an option for you if you can't spend a couple thou per month. And there are some other options that get much pricier... The fact of the matter is that the strategy is used by bigger and well capitalized prop...

Wow, the United States is getting it's ass kicked by most of the European countries. We clearly need: 1. A tri-colored flag, and 2. More debt. We are losing our superpower status to the European socialists.

Lazy accountants cannot pick up a phone and directly check a party's purported account balance with the custodial banker. That fucking simple.

The only platform that I know of that can do that is the Bloomberg Time & Sales functionality. Although I use X-Trader Pro, I have never tried to use the TT X-Study function personally - maybe we can get lucky and someone who has can opine.

Even if your premise regarding the macro trend for raw crude is exactly correct, the nearer term severe upside risk you are exposing yourself to in terms of an incidental geopolitical 'flight-to-quality' bid overwhelms it. You can be correct on a macro sense, but can you weather a 25%...

Considering the content of the OP's thread and the vacuous logic undermining the science behind the point - this is clearly the most lucid and smart response I have seen in some time on ET. Brilliant.

Bacon is the perfect investment vehicle. Air freshener, exhalted food item whose essence is truly intoxicating, converts from living food item to wood smoked long-lasting edible gold. I will keep T-Bills issued by the Fed in my name in the trading account, and lots of bacon in a large...

I will continue to post as provocative and insightful information as I dare - up to the point where I have paying clients complaining about Intellectual Property they paid for. I also bought an MCRI subscription for several months in the early 2000's - and soon outgrew it to the point where I...

One of my very intelligent clients appeared on Fox Business News yesterday afternoon and was interviewed by Liz Claiborne about his PFG account. He explained that after the MF debacle, he had wisely opened several futures accounts in order to spread his risk out. When she asked how much he...

MF and PFG would have been much less severe if a lazy auditing accountant could just pick up a phone and call the custodial banker directly in order to verify the FCM's reported figures. Our industry is going down the tubes because every freaking auditor is lazy and apparently inept and...

This exerpt came from an NFA Complaint in February of 2012 in which PFG was fined $700K regarding their shoddy compliance practices. Seems that the NFA thought their third party auditor was suspect: Page 4, Item 10: http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/CaseDocument.aspx?seqnum=3182 "An...

You guys are being way too lenient with the one entity who has all the legal power and is charged with law enforcement - the CFTC. Can anyone dispute that the CFTC has the legal authority to query the holding bank directly with respect to verifying the FCM's reported figures ? Would the CFTC...

The concepts put forth are worthy regarding MRCI, it's just that there is very little actionable intelligence or substance - especially with correlations. And a good price action model will pick up effects like "seasonality" and "carry" as well if that is being priced into the markets.

Depends upon the inherent skillset and disposition of the client - some are plain vanilla missionary position, and others are smarty pants who cannot leave anything alone. Many of my really experienced clients ( hardcore pros who were very competent before they hired me ) frequently make...