How many trades is alot?

I trade E-minis S&P 500s. I make about $1500/day and I usaully only have to do about 30 RTs a day. When I have a bad day though, My RTs can be like 200. I use interactive brokers. I may get shot down for this post, but my real objective is to make money everyday. My first month out of school, trading on my own has been good, but now I'm realising that there has been too much risk at times. I think as my trading gets better, I'd settle for about $500-$1000 a day in profits and only trade about 5 contracts at a time. and keep my RTs below 50 a day.

So I guess the answer to your question is that it depends on how much you pay your broker. At my current level of RTs, I've been offered some pretty good deals from clearing firms, even though I don't have a seat yet. I'm kind of at that point where getting a seat is a toss up. I think the best deal in seats right now may be with the mini-size Dow futures.

Another thing is that you should never do any trades that you are not mechanically able to take on. Like, if you have a good day, don't start swinging for the fences and trade 20 contracts at a time. It sounds like a good deal to scalp for .25 point but it can be disatrous when it the S$P moves a point against you.

My general rule of thumb is to keep trades to 10 minis at a time when you are confident and 5 minis for when you are not as sure, like during an 8:30 AM announcement and you can't find the proper supports to play on.

I hope that this helps. I it so hard to give a really good answer to your question. Perhaps they only way you will figure it out is going through a lot of pain before you can become truely confident about a proper size.

Good luck to you.
 
Originally posted by Reitberg
I trade E-minis S&P 500s. I make about $1500/day and I usaully only have to do about 30 RTs a day. When I have a bad day though, My RTs can be like 200. I use interactive brokers. I may get shot down for this post, but my real objective is to make money everyday. My first month out of school, trading on my own has been good, but now I'm realising that there has been too much risk at times. I think as my trading gets better, I'd settle for about $500-$1000 a day in profits and only trade about 5 contracts at a time. and keep my RTs below 50 a day.

So I guess the answer to your question is that it depends on how much you pay your broker. At my current level of RTs, I've been offered some pretty good deals from clearing firms, even though I don't have a seat yet. I'm kind of at that point where getting a seat is a toss up. I think the best deal in seats right now may be with the mini-size Dow futures.

Another thing is that you should never do any trades that you are not mechanically able to take on. Like, if you have a good day, don't start swinging for the fences and trade 20 contracts at a time. It sounds like a good deal to scalp for .25 point but it can be disatrous when it the S$P moves a point against you.

My general rule of thumb is to keep trades to 10 minis at a time when you are confident and 5 minis for when you are not as sure, like during an 8:30 AM announcement and you can't find the proper supports to play on.

I hope that this helps. I it so hard to give a really good answer to your question. Perhaps they only way you will figure it out is going through a lot of pain before you can become truely confident about a proper size.

Good luck to you.
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Thanks Reitberg,

I can only agree with almost everything of what you wrote above and, although the question was not about how good the system I'm trading is, but rather about improving the bottom line using a better deal commission wise. The system is purely technical and resilient enough to accomodate size of up to 100 lot per trade. Hence my interest in finding more cost efficient options.

I'm trading S&P emini futures exclusively and, as I mentioned in my original post, am ok with Interactive Brokers. I would like to learn more about getting a seat on the exchange, besides reading the CME Membership resource on their site.

If you or anyone else has any experience to share about obtaining the membership, please elaborate.
 
I just typed a huge reply detailing everything that I went through when trying to get a seat and explorer crashed on me. So I'm going to make this brief instead:

Takes six weeks to get a seat after you send in your application

You need a clearing firm to back you

Clearing firms have whopping front end costs ($600/month)

Currently you need an IOM seat for the e-mini index products.
This is about $3500/month, or $42Gs/year

It is hard to get a clearing firm that doesn't have a multi-million Dollar minimum account requirement.

I took a trip down to the NYMEX and spoke to clearing firms personally. Here is a link to a good clearing firm that you don't need a large minimum for:
http://www.pioneerfutures.com/

They use X-Trader as the front end:
http://www.tradingtechnologies.com/products/index.html

In the end, I didn't go for the seat because there was no guarantee in savings. I don't know if I'll ever do it because in order to make it worth your while, you have to trade large amounts, and that can make things very risky and inhibit any growth in your trading career if you have ONE mistake and get all depressed.

So that is what I know...I hope this helps. I wish that somebody had told me all of this because I spent entirely too much time trying to get information on a seat.
 
It sounds like what you were talking about is setting up your own server with a connection to GLOBEX and using a clearing firm just to clear trades.

I'd be interested in finding out how much would a clearing firm charge just to clear your emini trades (ex CME clearing house fees). I'm interested in getting an idea as to the minimum cost for an emini trade. (Naturally in your setup there would be hardware, network and server administration costs, but I just want to know the rock bottom minumum commish for clearing a side.)

There is another route which is less daunting. There are boutique brokers (who may also be self clearing) which offer trading platforms for electronic locals and high volume traders. The per side cost would be higher than a pure clearing firm but perhaps less than a straight retail broker.
 
I don't know how many constitutes a lot of trades. I suppose it would depend on your style, but I do know that "alot" isn't a real word.

-picky bastard


Quote from WQ41:

How frequently does everyone trade emini futures in general? I'm trying to figure out how active am I compared to average and whether I should look for better deals with brokers based on my activity.

I'm doing about 350-400 round trips a month (700-800 trades), around 3-5 contracts each and planning to up the size to 10 sometime mid 2003. This amounts to roughly 2000-4000 contracts a month today and possibly 7000-8000 cars in a year.

Currently using IB, it's pretty cheap at $2.40 per side, but if there are any other alternatives, I'm willing to look at them. Not very happy about IB reliability too, but if no other choice is available, I'll probably stay with them.

One important precondition is: the broker must have API to place orders automatically via external application.

Any ideas come to your mind?
More...
 
Puffy,

The Clearing fee for an e-mini index future is $0.88/RT. A clearing firm will charge something on top for that, such as $0.20, making your fee $1.08/RT. It all depends on how many RTs a day which determines what you can work out with a clearing firm.

Another thing is that clearing firms generally do not want you using the Globex Terminal, they prefer instead that you use one of the clearing firm's front ends. The reason for this is that if you use Globex Internet Trader, the clearing firm can not see what you are doing. They can't keep track of your trades. They have no idea if you lost all the money in your account, plus some!!!!!

So that is why clearing firms don't like it when you use a Globex terminal.

I hope that this helps you out.
 
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