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ES margin was as high as ~37k a few days ago, this means that it was only offering a 3.4x leverage on ~125k notional, its pretty retarded if we consider the fact that they have continued to offer 4x leverage on SPY all this while. None of IB's margin algorithms make any sense and they are...

Exactly, its like IB wants to force liquidate your positions with these ridiculous margin hikes.

They have actually increased it further, I've decided to move to another broker, probably lightspeed, this is the final straw for me.

IB offers 1:4 margin for a large number of single stocks and many of them have been making 20+% intraday moves recently, the implied volatility is clearly far higher than the SPX yet IB thinks its safer to offer more margin for these things. You either do not trade at all or you are just...

Yea of course they could but that'd be retarded and they'd lose all their customers since the notional value of one ES contract is only ~130k, 1m is like 7 times of that. There's a difference between playing it safe and pure stupidity, raising the margin to 3 times that of the exchange...

Not sure what you meant by that but nobody is supposed to know whats going to happen in the next hour, we'd all be billionaires if there was some way to know for sure. This has been the most profitable month for me like ever, I had some pretty epic months in 2008/2009 but none have even come...

You can get more leverage with SPY now, IB has gone nuts.

This wont be a bear market for 10yrs unless no vaccine/cure is found in the next decade.

Yea the margin hikes are getting ridiculous now. ES is up to 27k, effectively reducing leverage to slightly over 4x, CL is over 10k, so slightly over 2x there, I think you can actually get more leverage if you trade the non-leveraged ETFs. Either something really bad is happening out there or...

Believe it or not, its my best week ever. Made as much as I did in 1 week what usually takes me a year.

Finally got some air out of the bubble.

Probably IB's crappy servers crapping up again, I was being forced logged out at 930est/1600est daily 2 weeks ago and my orders/cancellations were consistently being held (light blue status) and sent to the exchange only much later (up to 2 minutes sometimes) when markets started to move...

Exactly. Only about a year remains before elections, Trump is certain to lose if the economy tanks so there is absolutely zero incentive for China to compromise now, Xi is afterall, already president for life.

Well then you will have to find some way to cut your expenses if you want to grow your account faster, trading a bigger size relative to your account isn't the way to do it.

How is your account still in the low 100ks after 6 years if you are already up 130k ytd? Have your been withdrawing all your profits or have you not been making any money in the last few years? Also to answer the original question. Your trade size should always be consistent wrt the size of...

Of course it wouldn't make a difference if you are a trading god who can buy the troughs every single time, but this isn't what the data set is about. It only measures the actual RTH gain (which is 10pts in my example), and that pales in comparison with the ETH gain. Like I said the gain for...

Gap fills shouldn't change the conclusion of this data set. If the S&P gaps higher by 50pts, fills and ends the day 60pts higher, the actual gain for the day(RTH) is only 10pts, not 60pts. Only a person with the ability to time the market perfectly would have netted the full 60pt gain.

This would make sense since investors have essentially been compensated for holding risk (overnight), you are always going to underperform the market if you only daytrade long the indices.

I think you are scalping too heavily, $0.40 on a $350 stock is nothing, heck the spread is sometimes greater than that (after factoring in HFT activity), you will just end up enriching HFTs and your broker if you continue to trade this way. You need a different strategy if you hope to make any...

Yeah life is uncertain and stressful, I'm not arguing that a day job makes all of that go away. What I'm saying is that trading/running a small business adds to that stress because those things add more uncertainty into your life.