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If you're trading during normal market hours, why not just trade a couple of shares (like 5) of the Q's until you are consistently profitable? Your commissions will be lower and your losses will be miniscule. Right now you're looking at almost 0.5% of your account value just on commissions alone...

I've had multiple accounts (401k, Roth, and personal) with Fidelity for years and never had any issues. Not saying you didn't have some weird experience, but that's hardly a reasonable sample size to say: "Everyone should avoid at all costs..."

Not sure of an "off-the-shelf" solution. I'd double check the alerts thing on TOS to see if that works since that's built in. While you are at it, check the IB ordering system as well. Since you are only using price as your trigger, you may be able to set up some kind of OTO loop (One Triggers...

I assume you are talking native to the platform and not via some custom API solution. Might want to look at TOS. I thought you could set up alerts that would re-activate once they triggered, so in theory you could have some kind of bracket setup which ping-pongs back and forth. Not sure if you...

Also, although you use local time to get the time a tick occurred, I believe you can get the IB server time as an event when you connect. This allows you to make sure your local time is in sync with the server.

"Tick" can have a couple of meanings: 1) Smallest increment of a trading instrument. 2) A single trade. In this case, you are referring to #2. You probably want to read up on Interactive Brokers data feed, as it is not a true "tick" stream in the sense that many other vendors (where every...

Yahoo actually had a pretty good sized forum...probably as good or better than the IB one. Also, the demo environment can be an issue to work with some times. Maybe try one bar of a single day. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/TWSAPI/info

Might want to download the demo test app and then submit the same request to see if it passes on the demo. If it passes, you've probably missed setting up some parameter. If that's the case, just set a breakpoint before the testclient submits the request and see what you are missing. TWS can be...

For actual development, the demo account is not really the way to go. That's fine to just proof a few things, like: "Can my code connect to TWS", but not what you want to develop production code on. You want a paper account, and to get that you need to actually have a real account with them...

Thanks Robert, that explains it. I was looking at the Index and not at the appropriate month futures contract. The January future was trading about $2 lower than the index. In fact, in the CBOE guide on VIX futures/options mentions that specific scenario on page 32...

It's probably a "slap-the-forehead" easy one, but for some reason I'm just not seeing it, so can someone 'splain it to me please? From Fidelity quote at 10:55 PST: Vix @ $23.15 Jan 21 2015 10 Call @ $11.6/$11.8 Bid/Ask Jun 17 2015 10 Call @ $10.2/$10.4 Bid/Ask Jan Option value + strike = $10 +...

Can you handle the volatility during the flareups when the market takes a hit? (60% from Sept/Oct of this year). VXX hasn't been around for that long: Jan 2009 = right before the kick off of a huge bull market. VIX hasn't been around that long either and it's not exactly an apples/apples...

What is "Aborning?"

That's a lot of "ifs." Don't you think "if" it were that easy everyone would do it?

One interesting method I came across is termed the "slingshot" hedge developed by a guy named Cottell. His book is available online somewhere and there's some YouTube videos, but the short/sweet version is to hedge using a long OTM put which is financed by short OTM call verticals. His version...

Is this a "hold-til-bust" swing trade or do you have some sort of stop in place? Seems like a pretty ballsy trade. They're still paying almost 10% dividend, but if that gets cut, you might see some more downside action. Plus the damn thing is hitting 10 year lows.

Just out of curiosity, why don't you leg in to the position instead of "all-or-nothing"? I can see the issues if you're paying $7.95/trade, but with one of the deep-discounts, you don't really have to worry about that.

You're overlooking the fact that it's in a pretty steep downtrend and could see $27 (or lower) before it sees $32. Sept 32 calls will net you a whopping $0.45 right now.

LNG looks interesting from a liquidity and options standpoint. How is that thing in such an uptrend, though? Their earnings are in the red as far back as I could see and not a single positive quarter?

The huge sell off in UNG has sort of stabilized somewhat since 2012 and the weekly premiums are attractive enough to keep it in there. It's a small portion of the portfolio and kind of marches to its own drummer. If it stops working, it'll get the boot. I would do covered puts, but can't do that...