Search results

Indeed. Thanks.

OK, gotcha. Any explanation for why the major months don't have equal gaps? That is, Feb to June is 4 months, while June to Aug is 2, then 4 months from Aug to Dec, then 2 from Dec to Feb. Seems like odd cadence. Why not quarterly?

You can't eliminate it, but you might be able to minimize it, right? In particular, contango isn't linear. Or am I missing something? Maybe the amount you could save relative to slippage associated with rolling contracts more often is such that you're better off moving from Aug to Dec rather...

Thanks for the reply. Follow up: what’s the thought process behind your answer, just so I can understand and learn?

Right, I misspoke. The front month is still July. I currently own August contracts and don’t want to take delivery. I would assume that OI and liquidity are roughly correlated as those contracts move toward the front (I.e., more OI drives more volume). I’m long, so contango is working against...

I’ve started trading gold futures and I’ve got to roll my August contracts next week. The contract with the most open interest is the December contact, but that also has more contango than the next front month contract. I’m only trading a couple of contracts, so having huge amounts of liquidity...

Yes, that's about the only way to do it. But again, it's silly to have to jump through all these hoops to get around IB's nonsense. Frankly, it makes the system *LESS* secure.

It's not looking like the TD API will work for me. It only seems to have partial functionality. For instance, I can't seem to get quotes for indexes like SPX or VIX and I can't get options chains for either of these, too. Works great for equities, from what I can tell. Support also seems poor...

Sure, but that doesn't solve the problem of wanting to be logged in with the API and logged into the same account on, for instance, the mobile app. What I'm trying to do, is set up my trading system on a constantly-on system and then monitor it via either TWS on my laptop or the mobile app to...

Yes, apparently it's open to all. See the link earlier in this thread.

Are you specifically pointing me to the phrase which says "Equity chart in new format may be supported later on (Date TBD)," thus implying that they don't support it yet?

Excellent, thanks. I was starting to read through the API docs. Have you used it? I'm having trouble searching for options and futures instruments, for instance, using the Search Instruments API call. I can search for basic equities (e.g., "IBM") but nothing else seems to work. In particular...

You might be right. I hope not.

Yep, fair enough. My point was just that IB's limitation doesn't pass the sniff test if they're doing it for security reasons. There are ways to make it secure. Whether those ways would work for any individual is another question.

I think that they think that it's a security issue. Surely, knowing about multiple logins is a good thing. But there are ways to control that (e.g., you could have the user set a number of simultaneous logins via the interface and then subject that to multi-factor authentication and whatnot)...

Agreed. One never knows. I had very mixed feelings when the merger was announced. I like the commission price war that those two were having, frankly. Schwab was good and pushing prices down and TOS was a better trading platform. I have accounts at both. Schwab's web interface is, IMO, better...

Ah, gotcha. You might be right. That hasn't affected me thus far.

I was literally just exchanging emails with TDA support and they told me about this. I just created an account. I had previously inquired about a trading API a couple years ago and while they had one, they were not opening it up to their retail traders, just high account balance individuals and...

I think Schwab would be foolish to destroy it. TOS has kicked Street Smart's ass for years now. And I've given Schwab that feedback for a long time.

Yes, they say it it due to regulations, but if they would simply let a single user log in from multiple places, as every other brokerage does, there would be no need to create multiple users. The multiple users thing is just a workaround to a problem that IB created itself.