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Interactive Brokers has its own "market maker" -- it's called Timber Hill, and it actually existed long before the brokerage itself. I doubt they'd front-run you so blatantly, but then again you can never tell (and I do mean you can never tell, no matter what any company says, as it only takes...

But there's a (potentially money-losing) problem with your analogy: financial instruments are nothing like a biased coin, whose odds are known and simple. If you're using "odds" in trading, you are implicitly predicting the odds. If you want "odds" that are known, you're better off heading to...

Yet something going up or down can also be modeled after geometric brownian motion, which is no better than zero-expected-value gambling (before execution costs) -- in other words, completely worthless as a trading or investing tool. Again, I am not saying that "trend following" is worthless...

I truly hope you're joking. I truly regret that you probably are not. If "trend following" has nothing to do with prediction, then "trend following" has no use whatsoever in either trading or investing. Fortunately for anyone attempting to use these techniques, kut2k2's statement is...

In the US, I'd say that any futures market with high volume will have the lowest slippage, especially if you're talking about retail-sized trades, as all the liquidity is forced into one place by law.

Sad to hear it. I really miss Don's posts on ET; he could keep a thread positive even when other posters turned nasty. I don't think I've seen anyone else online with a greater ability to rise above the muck. The warmth of his personality was obvious even on an online forum. He will be missed.

I hope you're aware stop market orders can lead to really awful fills. When P&G executes at $.01, I would guess that the seller in such cases used a stop without a limit, then when a mini-flash-crash hit (or a not-so-mini flash crash hit), his order got hit. You don't want to be "that guy"...

There's a huge difference between market and limit. The best bid or offer can vanish in a flash, leaving you with a fill as bad as $199,999.99 (if you're a buyer) or $.0001 (if you're a seller). You may be able to get it busted, or you may not. Why take this risk? Modern electronic markets...

Agreed. The current system of "news embargoes" etc. is antiquated. With modern (or even 1990's) technology, I can see no good reason for market-moving information to be released to any outside server before it's publicly released from some single point of dissemination. And market-moving...

I'm pretty sure it stays with your account by default as long as you stay above the $25k minimum. But be aware that the overnight margin is still a max of 2x -- the 4x is intraday only. A possible alternative, if your broker offers it, is "customer portfolio margin", which doesn't have...

What you made in one day is almost completely irrelevant; what really matters is the return-per-unit-time you can reasonably expect in the future. And that return will probably always decline, unless you continually improve, as the market is only getting more efficient over time, owing to...

Why is Nick Leeson's opinion on anything financial even being reported, much less read? We don't see people flocking to serial killers to seek out advice on compassion, yet it seems to be a frequent trend that those whose only claim to fame is an epic failure in finance are able to leverage it...

I disagree. I guess it depends on what you value. Family life and civic engagement, for example, are generally worse than they were decades ago, and the Internet has given us artificial means of interaction such as Facebook that are IMO nowhere nearly as fulfilling as face-to-face interaction...

I'm sure that increasing the tick increment will improve the size of the best/bid offer a bit -- at some cost in increased spread, mind you. But I'd say that the biggest cause of the relative lack of obvious liquidity in microcap equities is the fragmentation and the payment-for-order-flow...

If you use their smart route, my guess (based on the rule 606 report for MB Trading, which is at least one broker with the "MBTR" route) is that they're routing your orders to Credit Suisse: http://www.mbtrading.com/f/disclaimerSR14-Q4.pdf Credit Suisse may or may not be paying your broker for...

"next Steve Jobs" -- it's simultaneously amusing and revolting to see such predictions by financial news "talking heads". If you need a good laugh, do an Internet search for "next Bill Gates", or for "next Warren Buffett" articles that are at least 10 years old. These "future superstars" never...

Single-threaded performance is relatively fixed, regardless of budget -- the fastest general, single-threaded performance can be had in $400 gaming chips (overclocked, of course). The top "supercomputers" today consist of networks of 000's of standard CPUs (sometimes with GPUs, which are even...

Actually, the report seems to describe a single quarter. So for IB, if we assume independence for each quarter and for each trader, then annualizing gives: 1 - ( .465 ^ 4 ) = .953 i.e., a 95.3% failure rate (and that's for the best brokerage in the list -- the worst in this list would score...

The situation depends somewhat on what market you're trading. If you're talking about US equities, there is no reason to put in market orders. Current US equity markets are based largely on the original Island ECN, which didn't even allow market orders. The exchanges bought Island and similar...

I get the full feed of US equity trades, and looking at yesterday's TFI trades, I can see that much of the volume of TFI is sub-penny (e.g., trades at $24.0799, when the best ask was $24.08). This is an obvious sign of B/D internalization and/or sale of order flow to wholesalers -- they tack on...