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IB's usually 10+ pips on the AUD.NZD cross but it's very dependent on time of day. Can be 15-20 pips when trading commences at 5:15pm Eastern.

I've wondered about this myself and suggest you do an Internet search. What you will find is that while tax reporting, wash sales and long term versus short term capital gains rules are clear for stocks and futures, not so for forex. The first problem is that forex gains/losses are not...

In getting the account from $25 to $107, did you at least earn minimum wage?

It's only an interim measure like when your security device malfunctions (as happened to me) or when the battery dies. They ask a number of questions to authenticate who you are.

Bad things happen in 3s. So if it happens to you again you'll have your answer - you have bad luck.

You should have called to get a new temporary password a day before the first one was set to expire.

In TWS you can set up Hot Keys. I have ones for Transmit an order, Cancel an order and increase/decrease price and volume. So I can click on an order and hit one key to cancel it. Very fast.

I'm waiting for the day that an error like this in TWS causes equity to be too low and IB's program that liquidates positions to achieve required margin runs amuck with everyone's account.

Last July when oil approached $150 a barrel this board was filled with "oil will never get down to $50 again". Yet six months later, here we are. Look at the long term trend line. Oil will go up and eventually set new highs. Demand will increase and it's getting harder to find. Large...

I remember having some orders in to buy QQQ at the open on 9/11. Before 9am I saw a breaking bulletin on CNN.com about the first plane hitting the WTC and cancelled the orders. The markets never opened that day so no advance notice.

No problem in my account. But I'm waiting for the day that such a problem causes their system to detect insufficient margin and they automatically liquidate positions.

I think you can get a margin account at some other broker. IB is rather strict with many of their policies for risk management purposes (which many of us think is the right approach).

You can change these values in TWS to whatever you like. From the Account Management screen, right click on a security. One of the options is "Adjust Average Price".

If you haven't had any activity but the balances change, the only thing I think it could be is the interest earned/charged which is based on settled cash and therefore from your actual balances a couple of days earlier. If you continue to clear out your USD each night, there should be no...

I only enter orders directly into TWS, mostly with SMART routing. Occassionally I route directly to NYSE. I've never been charged a cancellation fee.

OK. It was about the time that Congress was grilling Geithner about the trillions needed to bail out the banks and the market was falling. Thought this was the root cause. In any case, I turned my head away from my account value and hung in there. Got out about an hour ago and earned plenty...

I'm new to trading the Yen. Without resorting to going through a lot of data, can someone comment about the frequency with which there's such rapid strengthing as there was today. It went from 90/USD to near 87/USD in just over one hour.

You're not going to win with this approach. Just watch the tick changes and look at the spreads and you'll see what I mean. On the futures open there's occassionally a few pips to be made. And every once in a long while (see AUD/USD on 12/26/08), something weird happens. But otherwise it's...

But enough orders get executed with IB at better than the limit price to make their commissions a moot point. For example, I traded some AUD today and got 0.4 pips better on the buy. The sell was at the limit price. And the commission . . . 0.2 pips each way. So effectively the trade was...

I'm not going to loose any sleep over this. I'm not expecting such a tax to be implemented. But if it was, I would expect it to be levied on U.S. taxpapers based on global trading. That is, trading overseas wouldn't help. No different than interest and dividends earned on foreign...