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This poor handling certainly shakes my confidence in IB. It's almost as if they took this abrupt action against their customers to spite some issue that arose with their regulators.

If there is a compliance issue at IB that would be solved using a 3rd-party IRA custodian, then it's a good bet that IB is scrambling right now to contact custodians to arrange a fast-path transition process for their IRA customers who wish to trade futures and remain at IB. This solution would...

This thread has been very instructive. I would have simply assumed that any broker would extend spread margin offered by the exchange. So this is a good question to ask when looking for a futures broker.

That sounds very odd. I would have assumed that futures brokers would encourage their customers to trade spreads because it reduces risk and adds commissions.

Have you contacted Amp to ask them about the spread margin? They might have some particular requirement, like a certain ratio, or that you have to enter the order as a spread and not leg it.

Before comparing poker with trading, an interesting comparison is poker vs chess. One of the key differences in these games is that you have full transparency in chess where you can see the position of your opponent so you can act accordingly. In contrast, you don't see your opponents position...

One of my concerns about encrypted drives is that in some schemes the drive encryption key is tied to the CPU or some other hardware identifier on your system. This is great security in the scenario where someone removes your hard drive and attempts to access the data using a different system...

A couple things don't sound right. Where did you get the overnight margin of 10K for that spread? It should be considerably lower. Who is your current futures broker that is requiring this margin? Referring to your first post, keep in mind that NQ is essentially a proxy for the tech sector...

You need to review the IB documentation and watch the webinars to refresh yourself on the various order types and the terminology IB uses for these orders. To summarize, if you want the limit order to apply to the price of leg1 only, create it as a regular limit order. Then "attach" a second...

Bone, I noticed your symbol expression is for two exchange-traded (implied) calendars which add up to the fly. Isn't there a symbol available for the exchange-traded fly itself, or do you always have to construct it this way?

Agree fully. The more common scenario is long/short for a hedged spread, but you can be long/long if the markets run inversely to each other. For example, being long SPY and long GLD in a market crash is a hedged position. For the case of inverse ETF's, you make a distinction between being...

Just keep in mind that most book authors write about trading strategies after they stop working.

There is an of industry of products for protecting your source code from reverse engineering. Search under "C# obfuscator".

To be broadly diversified, you'll need lots of spread trading opportunities in many sectors. This aligns best with a trend approach that qualifies candidates based on a fundamental relationship and statistical correlation. There are some trading groups you can reference. The Bright traders...

Thanks for posting this tip!

Was the fix accomplished by some configuration you performed, or did you download an update from TurboTax?

This post is a little off-topic, but this thread reminds us that some futures contracts have a forward curve with liquid back months and others trade primarily in the front month only. In the interest rate complex, Treasury futures trade mostly in the front month but Eurodollars have liquid...

As an example to help to illustrate my point, the attached chart shows two time series. They are actually two sine waves and one is displaced (shifted forward) from the other. But you can imagine they are two price series for the sake of discussion. The correlation between these two series is...

And to add another point to my last post, high correlation often works against mean reversion when the price series are moving together in synchronicity and not diverging/converging from each other. High correlation in the markets has reduced the viability of mean reversion trading (aka, pairs...

This is a common point of confusion with regard to two different statistical concepts, correlation vs cointegration. Mean reversion requires only cointegration. You can have two time series that are uncorrelated and exhibit high mean reversion.