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I gave up a very stressful, high-paying job to trade full-time for 1/3rd the money I was making with the job plus trading part-time. I've never worked as hard as I do now, but I am happier than I've been in a long, long time. I also see far more potential in trading since I now have the time and...

Quote from esc_trader: ...Additionally, firms or clearing firms on the back end benefit if they are trading contra to your orders (IB makes no secret of this practice), since they 1) have the first opportunity to trade against you, and will do so "internally" This is not true, and is...

Another risk of "bidding" (buying at the bid) instead of "taking" or "lifting" (buying at the ask) is that you will only get an execution when you shouldn't want one - when the current trend is reversing and everyone suddenly wants to sell. For a newbie that is trying to ride a trend...

Quote from Merlin: Depends on which futures your tracking. The S&P are awful for trading most listed stocks (NYSE)... Did you mean to say that the NQ/ND and NDX are unrelated to listed stocks? It's my understanding that the SP and ES drive a lot of the moves in the larger S&P components...

It doesn't matter where your ini file points - you will get redirected to the server on which your account is homed. I was able to ping IB's gateways throughout the outage, so it looks like at least the internet connections and their gateways were up. TerraNova claims to have remained up...

Good show, inandlong! The name-calling noise isn't limited to just that directed at other members, either. What's the point of posting to every thread that the options market is crooked (including propaganda sigs that take half a page), or that the SEC/NASD/specialists/big firms/Black...

Do brokers have special rates for these tiny CME TRAKRs contracts? If they cost the same to trade as other futures (e.g. ES, NQ, 6E), the commissions would be prohibitive. The AIGCI contract, for example, is around 25.00, and the multiplier is only $1. So, if it moves 10%, you win/lose $2.50...

Is it just me, or does "Discharge, failure to follow firm policy." sound pretty benign, and like the firm was trying to be nice? The original poster doesn't mention exactly what happened, but he may very well have done anything from pyramiding a loser to stealing someone's password and...

Quote from Girlpower: Cost cutting may balance the books, but it won't make a bad business into a good one. Other factors are needed to do that. I have to disagree with this when applied to trading. Of course, if you are not gross-profitable with reasonable confidence, the commission rate...

Unless you put up more money, right? $5K doesn't seem like much for a newbie to lose. I wish I had lost _just_ $5K learning.

Has this policy changed recently? Can I really not withdraw $20K from a $30K, previously day-traded account and just use it for backup hedges and small longer-term swing-trades? I thought that if a PDT account fell below $25K, you'd revert to non-PDT margin rules, where you could do 3...

FWIW, you can't just "install TWS for a different server". No matter which gateway you select at startup, your account is homed on a particular server group (US, HK, CH), and that's the group that TWS will get redirected to. The key may be to have another account that is homed on another...

Does anyone have a clue why settlement is still an issue to the regulators? I understand why, back in the dark ages, it was necessary to wait for settlement to avoid cascading failures if a firm failed to meet it's obligations. Does it still work that way? If the owner of...

ChrisM: As another poster, who wanted to contribute more than PDT-bashing, tried to say: please tell us exactly what happened. What orders did you enter, what happened, and when?

Dr. Z: Are Bear and Amro's products priced within the range of the average working trader (say $50K account, 500K shares/month), or are they targeted at bigger fish?

DT: www.interactivebrokers.com trades most European instruments, is price-competitive, and has an API and a community of independent developers that can code for it. Wyckoff said: I believe they charge under 10 bucks to execute traders Wow - that is a good deal. Used to be $10K to get...

I, too, thought it was a nice gesture, representing the best of IB's culture. It would have been easy to send out one of the common $30 best-sellers but, instead, they picked a title that probably isn't already on even a serious trader's shelf, and appears to go way beyond the usual...

nitro: What are you smoking? :) You know IB doesn't charge any ECN fees or credit any ECN rebates. They average it all out and charge 0.01/0.005 (plus 0.003, plus 0.12 per excess message if using non-SMART through the API). As a result, if you were sending orders manually via TWS, or used...

mk: How is that you can have been trading for several years, post to all these sites, and yet have no idea that your volume level is vastly greater than 95-99% of all working traders? Perhaps you only post, and never read? IB was the first broker to create a commission schedule that gave...

TM: I would agree that they're all within the same range, give or take $20. Only, for some broker comparisons, that might be give or take $20/month, while others might be give or take $20 per order. If you trade more than a few times a week, with something less than a 7-figure account...