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Hi, I'm looking for ways to mitigate my loss should Interactive Brokers default (it's a tail event, but still). I trade mostly futures over a few days horizon, so most of the time my account is pure cash. I know there's some sort of guarantee but would rather not test it. My idea was to buy...

I suggest you google and read: The Dynamics of Leveraged and Inverse Exchange-Traded Funds Minder Cheng and Ananth Madhavan Barclays Global Investors April 8, 2009

Leveraged / inverse ETFs effectively have to rebalance daily in a short gamma way (they buy high sell low) - it's a fine short term bet but you are losing a little every day, and it IS a rip-off vs. futures.

Thanks everyone for your replies - very clear now and will save me some money and aggravation!

Thanks a lot Robert, I toyed with TWS and found their spread screen which is exactly what I needed. Does anyone know whether it's tradeable through the API? Is there some sort of spread "contract" that one can buy/sell?

Hello everyone, apologies if this is a naive question, but is there a good way to roll futures contract as they get close to expiration on IB? I'm just manually selling one contract and buying the other at the moment, incurring 2 bid/offer costs and potential slippage if I'm not fast enough...

Since money is not an issue, but aftersales is - I would hire someone to develop something in Python for me, and learn Python at the same time. Python is simple and clear enough that with a bit of effort, one can easily understand what's going on if not develop from scratch. Then if you need new...

As southall said IB provide a paper trading account... You still need to fund your real account (I think USD 10k) but then you can program your software to trade the paper account, not the real one. You'd still be liable for exchange fees (10-50$ a month) to get live data. Also, I haven't...

1/Speak to compliance. Being in breach can lead to job termination or worse (your name in some sort of regulatory register where you're not allowed to work for a financial firm again) 2/The deal I have and I know others have: blanket approval to trade a pre-determined amount of instruments as...

Using a similar set-up but with the Java API. Would recommend the Yahoo TWS API group for help. Also, console only via IB Gateway is a bad idea IMHO. Servers are so cheap nowadays it's easy to add some extra RAM and have a VNC solution so you can see the TWS GUI in case there's a problem...

Hi, very interesting discussion. My understanding from the AlphaGo story is that the beauty of it was precisely that the computer had been fed next to nothing in terms of Go rules or strategies, but instead managed to learn from raw data (from real games as well as simulated games against...

I took that course. It's great. Also for anyone into systematic trading, the course might not help you create the next ground breaking trading neural network - but it will help a lot in understanding what you're doing and how to backtest strategies effectively.

Thank you all for your replies and rmorse in particular. I'll explore the T-bill option sounds like an easier option (if not as safe) than moving money in/out of the account. Does anyone here have had to deal with a blow-up - MF Global / Revco / Alpari come to mind? How quickly did you get paid...

Hi, I'm starting to have a decent balance on my account at IB (several hundred thousand USD) and I'm getting worried about the safety of these funds, say if IB went into trouble for instance. I'm wondering what do others have on account with IB, and if anyone has some idea re hedging. So far...

on 2/ You'd need to create your own IB code I'm afraid - there are various options and various support forums / groups, there definitely is an entry cost but it's worth it in the end as it opens up so many other possibilities.

This is easily done with for instance Python and the BeautifulSoup package - you can schedule a task from within Python or launch a Python script through a cron job on a Linux environment. HOWEVER - you get what you pay for. This is free and in practice you'll have massive headache with yahoo or...

+33.6% on my automated strategies, but with a difficult to live through 21% drawdown in fall, achieving a meagre 1.05 Sharpe ratio in the end. 8% loss in my discretionary trading trying to catch the top in USD...

Interactive Brokers. All others offer, as you say, half-baked languages. Check the Yahoo TWS API group for help.

globalarbtrader - I don't have a good answer for you. When I went live I expected similar vol as my backtesting and lower returns, but the opposite happened, mainly because of the November/December vol in markets with my system trading a lot (traded almost every day). It does worry me a bit, but...

ScottColeFTA, thanks for your link, was very useful! globalarbtrader, thank you, your results are extremely impressive! On the volatility point: my backtesting was indicating returns in the 20% range with vol in the 10% range. As it happened my vol was 2x as bad. The implementation looks OK, it...