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If you pick a financially weak firm, I suppose this counter-party risk could exceed the market risk of trading itself. This suggests a due diligence review of the prop firm's financials (ideally by a CPA firm familiar with prop firms) should be conducted before committing any funds.

This is an interesting point. Does this mean you have a counter-party risk with the prop firm? In other words, would you lose your deposit (and any accumulated profits) if the prop firm terminates due to bankruptcy or fraud?

Hedging and speculation using options has been around a long time. I don't think they fully explain the remarkable growth in options volume. Some other explanatory factors include: 1) ETF's: They used to be considered exotic alternatives and now they are some of the most popular trading...

With the attachment ...

Attached is a screenshot of a Volume Query from the Options Clearing Corporation website. They announced that options volume traded in 2010 marks the eighth consecutive year a new annual trading volume record has been set.

I just purchased a new laptop and went through a similar decision process. That HP looks like a great deal, but feedback I have gotten from HP and Dell users indicates that Dell quality and support is superior to HP with regard to PC's and laptops (HP makes better servers). I went with the...

jwcapital, thanks for posting this great example. A question for you on scalping the ES in particular: You indicated you have been trading the ES for six years. I'm not sure if you meant directional trading or long gamma scalping of a delta neutral position. If you meant long gamma...

Interesting point on forex which echoes what I've heard from other currency traders. In contrast to stocks and stock indexes, I've noticed that intraday forex (spot and futures) does not have reliable technical patterns on the faster time frames ... 1 min, 5 min, 15 min ... requiring a slower...

As previous posters indicated, you don't have a sufficient track record to draw conclusions. However, assuming you have a decent trading system and money mgmt, I believe that trading in shorter time frames is generally more effective than trading in longer time frames. More effective...

Don't give up on an options contract because the options volume is low. If the underlying futures contract has high volume, then you might get a liquid options market with fair bid/ask spreads in any case. Worth looking at the bid/ask spread along with the volume figures, as I'm assuming the...

You can usually find volume figures for options contracts on the web sites of each futures exchange (CME, CBOT, EUREX, ... ). I'm not aware of a more convenient source that combines the options contracts across exchanges and ranks them by volume. However, volume on the option contracts rank...

Eaglemount, I'm interested to hear about your current experience with Echo, versus your previous experience with Bright? Did you consider remote trading with Bright before you went to Echo? I understand that both Bright and Echo are good firms, so I would like to know what really...

I think you are correct, but I would like to confirm my understanding on this topic. I know you can trade futures in an IB IRA account, but I read somewhere (on another discussion board) that IB handles margin for SSF's using the stock margin model, which is different from the performance...

A question for current and former options market-makers (MM): Why such wide bid-ask spreads on ITM options? For example, let's say two strikes in-the-money with two months until expiration. For stocks under $50, I've noticed spreads tend to be 15 to 20 cents, and 20 cents and higher for...