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I had a busted futures trade once. The price moved very rapidly down to my buy limit price and reversed within a few seconds when other buyers came in. I don't know exactly what caused it but expect some automated program went a little crazy. The average trader probably could not get...

Someone on ET recommended a while back ForexCSV as a free source for historic exchange rates. I don't have a link to their web site any longer but have been running their Data Downloader to bring in what I need. However, it stopped working on January 1. Does anyone know how to get this data...

Say a hurricane is moving towards the Gulf of Mexico. I speculate that production will be shut down so buy oil and gas futures. Is there something wrong with this? Same example as above except I buy the futures immediately after I have confirmed that production has been adversely impacted...

bullrat, With your HSA, are you still able to get discounts from medical providers like regular insurance? For example, with my plan, a typical doctor might normally charge $200 but has a contract with the carrier to offer the service for $100. So long as you still get those kinds of...

I generally agree with your points but you won't be able to use simple "stops" with pairs trading. You'll need something more sophisticated like a real time download of prices to Excel to allow you to calculate the price delta between pairs and then an upload to execute your stop orders...

I was trying to find the other Globex currency contracts and see if they were tradeable through IB. In addition to EUR and JPY, I found Canadian $, Swiss Franc, British Pound, and Mexican Peso.

In addition to the Euro mini (E7) and Yen mini (J7), are there any other currency futures contracts available in TWS? I haven't been able to find symbols for other contracts.

The last dividend was just 1.4 cents a share and I don't think there was one the year before. But little dividend income they get from the underlying shares is eaten up by the funds administrative expenses.

For a cash account, there shouldn't be any requirement to set up an IB account. Just deposit whatever their account minimum is, fill out the forms, pass their quiz, etc. Be sure you weren't filling out the form for being an "accredited investor" which isn't needed to open an account.

Be careful doing anything fancy to gain access from behind a corporate firewall or you might be looking for employment elsewhere.

Savings and Loans investing in high risk investments is how the S&L crisis came about in the 80's. If you define "no risk" as the risk of investing in U.S. Treasury securities, than any higher return involves some risk. If it did not, then the borrower would not be paying more than Treasuries...

The standard operating procedure for some brokers is to not adjust limit orders when a stock goes ex-dividend (i.e. completely the customer's responsibility) or to only adjust buy orders.

You'll have to decide if you want to play the pair based on absolute spread or the ratio of their values. The former is easier (you can do it with 1 contract on each side) but the later is more market neutral (over the long run). But I agree with the other poster that you have to be careful...

Here in the Miami-Dade area I've seen some data recently on the supply/demand for housing (i.e. inventory divided by recent sales rate). For houses under $500k the ratio has stayed reasonably constant indicating an OK balance between buyers and sellers. But for higher priced hourses, it's an...

Besides the fees, you need to consider execution quality. Not easy to evaluate except through experience. Butgood execution will often times offset the savings you get from a discount broker (e.g. someone who charges $5 for a 5000 share market order).

There are 24,000 ET members. If we each made a shot in the dark short term ES trade, 12,000 of us would be right. If we repeated this, 6,000 would be right twice in a row. Even after seven rounds of this there would be nearly 200 traders (or monkeys throwing darts) with perfect scores. So I...

I agree that $1M in cash isn't so much to invest (not trade). If you want a steady income stream to live on, even with moderate risk, you won't be able to generate even $100k in annual income. More like $60-70k if you don't have the opportunity to earn it back.

The ETFs do indeed pay dividends. It is less than the dividends on the underlying stocks since the dividend declared is net of the annual operating expenses. QQQ is an exception, no dividend, since few of the Nasdaq 100 issues any dividends and it is entirely eaten up by the expenses of the ETF.

Rapid execution on IB as Nitro indicates. But plenty of times the price changes (almost always to my disadvantage), in the 1/2 second or so that it takes to get an execution for a market order. So be sure top build in some slippage when computing simulated profits.

You get (have to pay) the dividend if you purchase (sell short) the stock by the market close 3 days before the record date. Since stocks are usually reported as "ex-dividend", the magic date is the day before the stock trades ex-dividend. There was once a thread that questioned if...