KOSPI options

man, fimat , abn etc probably wont look at you unless your trading serious volume not a $5k retail account.
The GL winway screen would cost the broker $12,000 alone.
I guess IB might be my best bet to start off with .
 
IB is by far the best deal I am aware of in this part of the world if you are not doing volume. Man/Refco SG will take retail but try and stuff people for USD20 RT on futures so I doubt that options are much better, plus they want USD200/month for clunky platform unless you want browser based. Obviously they will deal if there is volume.

Don't know about Korean houses but there is one mentioned on one of the Kospi threads. This one or another. Korea may be OK but personally I am leery as hell of regional brokers as they seem to place great emphasis on cost control at the expense of performance. With a 300ms latency I have no complaints with IB HKFE fills (NB using marketable limits) even though I am bidding against others who have 20Ms latency.
 
There are several brokers in Singapore and Hong Kong who offer GL, including Refco/Man. I guess the US may be a different game.
GL via brokernet is quite suitable for trading Kospi. Whatever you use, it better have good bandwidth because when Kospi jumps you have serious activity in about 8 strikes plus the future.

The commission quotes are *very* competitive in Asia, but you are right, they are not talking about a $5K retail account.

A $5K account will not be able to trade any Kospi futures because margins are higher than that, and you will not be able to sell any options unless you are already long those options because of the high margins. (Kospi margins working sell orders without considering the resulting portfolio balance)

I dont know where IB get their margining from, but the KSE runs live margining of all positions, including working orders.

I think the absolute minimum to trade Kospi realistically would be about $50K, but thats a bit like microsoft saying you can run XP in 256MB. $100K is more sensible just like 512MB is.

I think the only thing you could do with $5K is scalp the long side of the options, and there are lots of people who do that.

We have been very interested too in IB because they are very competitive in other markets. But with .2% comm on options I think a lot of people will hang back until it comes down. A bit chicken and egg I suppose, but I dont think anyone will want to trade even moderate retail size at that rate.
 
does anyone know where i can get 30-60 day historical + imp vol charts on the Kospi - esignal do a data feed but they dont carry any historical vol data in their options analysis package , or non that i can find anyway .
thanks .
 
You can do 21 day historical volatility of the kospi in metastock with the data from Reuters datalink. You may have to program it yourself to get anything but 21 day as there is no way to change the parementer in the option volatility function.
 

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I have noticed a possible issue with the IB/TWS data feed for K200 futures:

When calculating the bar volume from the TWS API cumulative VOLUME events the bar volume appears to be about twice that given in the backfill data for the same bar length. This is done in my own charting code so it may well be a bug, but I have not observed it on any other instrument, and a quick check of SGXNK does not show the same anomaly. I'll post a couple of charts to illustrate. If anybody is using IB/TWS data feed with other charting software, could you check and confirm or deny that there is an issue. Thanks.

Chart 1 - Generated from TWS streaming data. Bar volume calculated from TWS API cumulative volume events -
 

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