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Do you understand the concept of "risk of ruin" ? The higher the leverage the greater the risk that an adverse move will wipe you out. The futures traders that survive over the long term are not the ones that seek to maximize their leverage. At 1170 the S&P emini is worth $58500. The...

It wasn't the worst financial crisis in 100 years. It wasn't even as bad as the early 1980's let alone the 1930's. The fact that no futures firms went under in the recent past means little. Historically the failure of futures firms has a very low correlation with general financial crises. The...

That is off by a factor of ten. From the CME website: An order for any quantity may be accepted for E-mini outright futures. However, orders exceeding a specified number of contracts as indicated below must be entered on the CME Globex system as multiple entries, each of which must not...

JSystemTrader is an open source Java ATS for IB. Go to http://code.google.com/p/jsystemtrader/ and download the code. After you unzip the code all the indicators are in the JSystemTrader/source/com/jsystemtrader/indicator folder. The are EMA, HMA, SMA AND WMA among the many indicators...

And what point is that? Please explain how in the Globex electonic market any broker or anyone else can target and take the opposite side of your particular order. And why do you even care? As long as your order is executed at the current market level what difference does it make who is on...

You can get MF Global (symbol MF) financial reports at the SEC Edgar site.

Where are you getting the extra 9 cents from? Over 1000 contracts is $1.14 CME fee, $0.01 NFA fee, $0.45 IB Execution fee and $0.20 IB Clearing fee for a total of $1.80. This is identical to the previous IB brokerage charge for over 1000 contracts. I don't know any futures broker with...

At that risk level you left out the month in which you lose 100% or more.

How does any market maker make money? On the spread and in IBKR's case on volatility. The subject of IBKR trading against their customers has been beated to death over and over again. No they don't, but they may be the counterparty to your trade by the nature of being a market maker. Why...

You need $5625 to take the postion. If the postion drops more than $1125 (22.5 points) to below $4500 you need to bring the margin back up to the original $5625 or have your position liquidated for violating maintenance margin. Automated futures brokers (such as IB) will just autoliquidate...

Risk and losses due to customer futures trading are minimized by IB risk control practices. Shorting options is a riskier business than the futures business and IB has no problem going after options business by offering very low commissions. IB clearly has the best risk controls of any...

Crazy or not, I never argue with the market as it is what it is. Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Attributed to John Maynard Keynes.

IB's pretax margin for the brokerage business was 51% in Q1 2010. Plenty of room for some real competitive cuts in futures commissions. Why doesn't IB want to kick around their futures competitors the way it kicks around their stock and option competitors?

The USD rate schedule for over 1000 contracts per month is unchanged (exactly as I said in my previous post). If you are trading well over 1000 contracts per month you should be using another much cheaper futures broker.

If you can program in Java and use IB then consider JSystemTrader http://code.google.com/p/jsystemtrader/ . JSystemTrader is a fully automated trading system (ATS) and is free and open source. You only need to program and add your own working strategy.

Listen to him as bakers know all about making lots of dough every day. :D

Please reread the information at the IB website. IB's benchmark for margin is 0.2%, the rate for under $100K is BM + 1.5% = 1.7%. Still way better than 9%. IB gives you your first wire or ACH/ETF withdrawal of the month for free, after that it is $10.00 for a wire and $1.00 for ACH/ETF.

For most traders the broker commission is still significant. At IB for the first 1000 sides for ES/NQ/YM 42.5% of the $2.00 total commission is going to IB. Even with the price cut IB's futures commissions are still too high. IB has plenty of room to cut futures commissions to competitor's...

Anyone who pays attention knows that even IB's new USD futures commissions are still too high and are undercut by many futures brokers. Next, the new USD commissions save $210 on 1000 contracts, not $10. USD Old plan First 300 contracts 360 301-1000 contracts 700 Total...

This is a perfect example of statistics being distorted to draw a conclusion that is the exact opposite of reality. First, the title of this thread "The bottom fifth of taxpayers (earning less than $18,000), paid 11.7% of income taxes" is outright false and is not what is claimed by the...