It does help obfuscate your trading. Lets say you have margin for 500 minis and your desired position is 300. (and remember margin is only applying to what you carry overnight...intraday governed by the position limits agreed with your clearing firm)
You are long 500 in one account and short 200 in the other, net 300.
You are going to be running a loss in one account for 200 contracts and several points / hours.
That firm won't know your strategy or that you are actually net long, all they will see is the short position you hold with them, and the fact that you run losses. Which will likely make them think you are "getting away with it" and will blow up. Equally, it is harder to reverse engineer your system as they think your system has given sell signal when in reality it has given the buy signal.
Sure, both (or 3, 4, 5 etc) accounts will be net winners over time. But it will be less obvious how accurate your strategy is and how much you make, which is what MTrader was asking for.
And when you sell 300 to go flat (against the 500 you own in that account), it may be that you give back a big portion of your "unrealised gains" on the net long 200 and they do not know that you are offset elsewhere and the loss is reducing in the other account as the market falls. If you were reversing, you could even sell 300 in each account, changing from +500/-200 to +200/-500...and the first firm would see that you gave back a big portion of your gains on a partial position and the second firm would see that you let a position run big against you on 200 lots and then added to a big loser.
It is going to look more like gambling/getting lucky and less like following an accurate system.
There are a fair few wealthy people who gamble a few hundred (or more) contracts on the futures markets and quit after losing low 8 figures.
I think this multiple account idea is well worth doing.
You are long 500 in one account and short 200 in the other, net 300.
You are going to be running a loss in one account for 200 contracts and several points / hours.
That firm won't know your strategy or that you are actually net long, all they will see is the short position you hold with them, and the fact that you run losses. Which will likely make them think you are "getting away with it" and will blow up. Equally, it is harder to reverse engineer your system as they think your system has given sell signal when in reality it has given the buy signal.
Sure, both (or 3, 4, 5 etc) accounts will be net winners over time. But it will be less obvious how accurate your strategy is and how much you make, which is what MTrader was asking for.
And when you sell 300 to go flat (against the 500 you own in that account), it may be that you give back a big portion of your "unrealised gains" on the net long 200 and they do not know that you are offset elsewhere and the loss is reducing in the other account as the market falls. If you were reversing, you could even sell 300 in each account, changing from +500/-200 to +200/-500...and the first firm would see that you gave back a big portion of your gains on a partial position and the second firm would see that you let a position run big against you on 200 lots and then added to a big loser.
It is going to look more like gambling/getting lucky and less like following an accurate system.
There are a fair few wealthy people who gamble a few hundred (or more) contracts on the futures markets and quit after losing low 8 figures.
I think this multiple account idea is well worth doing.
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