Search results

Exactly. Most traders don't consider being in the same boat with lots of traders margined to the hilt at a super low margin for futures contracts, during a market meltdown. I do. As far as the trading interface, they should have purchased Buttontrader when it went out of business. TWS does do a...

Are you going to look at the Samsung S20?

Total agreement. IB was a much scarier boat to be in with the past lower margins.

Never saw anything like that. Are you sure that wasn't the shut-down time?

The M2K might not be a bad way to go with those practice runs. Less cash at risk and the movement on it is good enough during volatility to create some quick profits. A bit wider spreads but not bad.

One of the ironies of active trading is that you are often likely to do better if you initiate a position and then “forget” about it for a while. This fact makes scalping truly difficult if that is one’s definition of trading and scalping is definitely hard work because it involves a lot of...

Yep. You can avoid a lot of the stop outs (that take hard dollars out of your capital) with the NQ by using MNQ with minimal contracts and a very wide stop. Treat it like a retail inventory system that you are buying some when cheaper and selling some when more expensive. Do this with scaling...

These are trading "cleanly" this morning at IB. The volatility today is a nice test ....

Clearly not good for scalping. Then again, I think that scalping is a counterproductive technique, in the long run, relative to even buy/hold. Excellent though for people (even those with larger amounts of capital than 20K) who are scaling in and out with a rational timeframe strategy.

MES on IB TWS is currently in test mode and unavailable to us, so that volume is misleading. Even in test mode, the spread is pretty tight - there are supposed to be 10 market makers associated with these products. Volume/liquidity/spreads aren't going to be a problem with these, for most people.

thanks. Can't access on IB. Just talked to them; they're doing some testing with it ....

Quite a nice dip off of the latest trump tariff twittering tweets and the middle east flare. Too bad the new MNQ and MES contracts aren't trading at this Sunday open

A good chance to try the micro emini futures later, on the opening dip.

The maintenance margin shows as 2848 for the IRA

Looks like the IRA margin at IB is about $2800 per contract or, 1/10th of the regular emini. Commission is about .45 per .....

That can be true Steve but I think it depends on your trading style. Since I like to account for those rare black swan market shutdowns/crashes that can wipe me out, I’m not comfortable scaling into (I almost always scale, rather than go all-in with stops) say, 5 NQ contracts, because I don’t...

Fortunately for me Newbies (or not) with wider stops who take more conservative position sizing for risk control could also easily outperform -- in the long run -- people trading the NQ and constantly getting stopped out of positions that usually end up profitable. We'll see.

Looks like it's .45 total per contract, one way

Yep. I like the fact that IB doesn't offer the lowest margin requirements on futures contracts (I do have my IRA there and look forward to trading the micro mini) since I don't want to be in the same boat with a lot of people who are going to get crushed by a major sell-off.

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/?f=43700 Not clear to me what the margin number will be for IRA's or non. Emini IRA margin 28K per contract so these, 2800-3000?