Been with OPEN E CRY for trading ES, DAX and NIKKEI.. for over a yr now. Experience with them has been very positive. ES right now still $500 day margin and $2500 mainteance margin for those of you with lighter pockets. I trade 50-100 contracts per position. Their fills are very good from my experience with them. I do use MB TRADING for my forex trading( they do ES minis too) but their margin is like over $1500 per contract during the day.
IB's 4% Intraday Initial Margin Req. for Index Futures
- Thread starter Bitstream
- Start date
Why 4%? Why not 2% or 3%? I was just in the process of refunding my account today due to medical problems I've had that kept me from trading this last year and was startled when I looked up the intraday initial and maintenance margin on YM, ES, and QM, especially. These all seem to have doubled since last year. And to be honest I cancelled my deposit request for now until I research this more.
I strongly agree with your point here. Thanks for posting it.
This is the first of two threads (the other I started), whose specific intent is to get a comment from the IB reps on Elite Trader to inform us if IB intends to lower the margin requirments, as the original logic of raising them is no longer valid. So to avoid duplicitous calls to the IB customer service (where they don't know the answer anyways, as I've checked), hopefully, one of you reps can take some initaitive and find out this answer and get back us.
All specific comments I have read from IB appear not to have any timeframes, nor to hint at any intent to lower the margins. But it's worth the effort; perhaps there can be a modest (at least) decrease in intraday.
Thanks.