I, for one, appreciate your honesty with your finances.
The solution is to change your financial life to match or exceed whatever they see as minimum standards for you to have a margin account. Since you are not getting anywhere with IB customer service (big surprise there, considering their...
Ask all ET posters what they average per day. You will find the average to be about $100 per day, if they are honest.
I would ask to see the boyfriend's broker's PRINTED P&L statement for August before I would believe his claim.
1. I would not wait more than a year to test any system. Life is too short.
2. I would wait the year because it runs the system through one whole fiscal cycle, including a good sampling of unexpected events and ranges of volatility and volume.
3. I would not test, let alone trade, any system...
Banks don't print money. They distribute it to the masses on leverage, as you pointed out. Without the Fed (a private for-profit corporation, not part of the government, and cannot be overruled by the government), the banks have no new cash and noplace to make deposits of their own.
In case anyone missed it, successful traders pay 50% of their gross income to the government in one form or another. Thank God for family limited partnerships.
I don't object to IV's posting ON TOPIC in other's threads, but I do object to them starting threads of advertisement. Be content with the banner ads and thread participation, or fuck off. Perhaps ET needs to change their sponsorship privileges.
Enjoyed your post. Once I max out my abilities on the current vehicle, I may move to the ES, where 100k per day is possible. I will settle for less, for now, until I have mastered myself and the vehicle.