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It's possible there's different tax treatment in the US. The other major benefit is that there's an underlying you can trade readily. You cannot buy or sell a cash index (SPX), so an option position in SPX may be more difficult to hedge. American exercise is considered a benefit by some.

Really? Certainly meats, grains, and softs are not European exercise. In this particular case, Coffee is definitely American-style. triggertrader--you do not pay anyone until they exercise the option, but you will have to post margin.

Of course! And when it wouldn't, I took it back to the Honda dealership to be fixed. Anyway, I'm a huge fan of IB, and I'm sure Salvatore has his hands full with tons of "I refuse to read the manual, so fix it for me" queries. I don't envy him his job. Still, there's always room for...

I suppose you're right. I guess I'm the only one trading pairs or electronic ags. My tickets are all documented, repeatable, and serious problems with these two types of trading. Although, I'd argue IB's motivation should be to get what they sell working right, rather than trying to get rid...

It's not specific to options, but margin requirements are on the home page, under Quick Links: "Performance Bond Requirements". http://www.cme.com/html.wrap/wrappedpages/clearing/pbrates/PBISHomePage.htm?h=2 Options are much more complicated to compute margin for--they use SPAN. Your...

Sugar tends to have some very long term trends, partly due to the substantial time lag between ramping up (or down) supply to meet demand (sugarcane is a perennial, so there's at least a year delay before supply can be ramped up--some can be made up in sugar beets, which are annuals, but they...

I had one ticket they requested I gather a bunch of information for (several screenshots, historical data, copies of statements, etc), ignored it for 3 weeks, then responded and said, "If this is still happening, please gather all that data again." Most of my tickets have at least gotten a...

Market Makers have a different set of rules. This one isn't quite on point, but you can see how market makers have rules superseded and redefined: http://www.cme.com/files/20050808S-4308.pdf From the Globex regulatory filing: http://www.cme.com/files/regulatory.pdf "The following...

I'm pretty sure this is a rule violation. http://rulebook.cme.com/Rulebook/Chapters/pdffiles/005.pdf CME Rule #534: No person shall accept from, or place for, the same beneficial owner simultaneous buy and sell orders for the same product and expiration month, and, for a put or call...

ES margins have *dramatically* better margin treatment than SPX (particularly if you're short an option). ES is American style, SPX is not. ES needs a slightly different option pricing model (Black instead of Black-Scholes) due to the fact futures decay in value from the cost of carry...

You can, of course, just buy sugar calls. Call = Put + long futures contract.

To be fair, only 30% of LTCM's debts were in short options, and it wasn't the largest category. (Not that they didn't blowout spectacularly, but pointing to vol selling as being THE cause is not correct).

I have some names, but I'll take the positive spin of this question instead. :-) I've gotten fantastic support from the Japanese team (if you "chat" at 8pm Pacific Time or so, you get them), Aiko in particular went above and beyond. Aimee is also pretty helpful and patient. As other...

Good grief, man. You're in the *AG FUTURES* forum. Posting in a *CHEAPEST BROKER ON AG FUTURES* thread. What does eminis have to do with it?!

My favorite "classic" IB tech support response was just this week. I noticed that electronic wheat continues to post a bid and ask after the market has closed (whereas all other e-markets show blank bids & asks after close). The response from IB: "Do not place orders in closed markets."...

So, do you think this is a clearing issue with IB trying to clear through NYBOT? (I read one of the reasons ICE bought NYBOT was to clear through them) Or is this some sort of "help NYMEX out" thing?

You should switch to NUE. They only sell Alt A mortgages in addition to steel.

Bloomberg is too expensive for me (~$500/mo or so?). At the moment, I've got to do it the hard way--I have a spreadsheet of conversion ratios, and I plug in quotes I can get through Schwab. This pain has led me trading in smaller size on the treasuries, or sticking to Eurodollars.

The OP might also want to check out the ten year vs 30 year (2:1). Technically, the chart looks much stronger.

Wake up on the wrong side of the bed? How can they be approximately precise enough? If you're buying the TU/ZB spread x1000, is 3:1 "precise enough"? I don't know, but the point is that if you're doing big trades, figure out the CTD & DV01 rather than a simple ratio. If you're doing small...