the best futures broker

Hey Scalper,

What kind of volume do you think you'd have to do with Advantage in order to get 25 cents per side with a $16,000 progressive cap?
 
eachnge and clearing fee's ar $2.32 r/t so even at 25 cent per sid eyou're talking $2.83 r/t which is a great rate and the best i've ever seen . but who's advantage? it's very important to be with a big company with massive servers and a big customer service. what is advantage for no vol requirments per r/t? 80 cents or so?
 
Advantage Futures (www.advantagefutures.com) is pretty big and very well capitalized. Not quite as well as Man or Rosenthal, but if you look at this list from 2004 (I'm sure a more recent one exists, but I just did a quick search), www.futuresmag.com/reprints/218866.pdf, you can see that they're just a few slots lower than Interactive Brokers. Plus, they're clearing members of 4 different exchanges....which in my mind makes then pretty credible.

As far as the commissions go, I'm not certain what their rate is without volume. I don't think its anything special, plus you get zapped with X_TRADER pro to the tune of $1250/month. However, if you do volume, or you keep a ton of cash in your futures account and want the peace of mind of feeling as though its pretty safe, I personally think Advantage is the best and would probably not trade anywhere else (although, as I said, I do trade with TransAct and think they're a great operation as well).

As far as their technology goes, I have a buddy who runs a trading arcade. He told me this story about this time that Advantage called him up one day out of the clear blue to let him know that it looked to them that there was a bunch of noise on their connection, and that it had been gradually getting worse throughout the day. He told all of his traders to think about closing out any big positions, and 20 minutes later their connection went down all together. He said that he never would have expected his FCM to notice something like that, but claims that they saved him and his traders a ton of money just from being proactive. I know for a fact that Advantage has a lot of traders who love trading with them for all sorts of reasons like this.
 
Quote from joeyata1:

eachnge and clearing fee's ar $2.32 r/t so even at 25 cent per sid eyou're talking $2.83 r/t which is a great rate and the best i've ever seen . but who's advantage? it's very important to be with a big company with massive servers and a big customer service. what is advantage for no vol requirments per r/t? 80 cents or so?
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This is assuming that you haven't purchased or leased any kind of exchange membership, which, if you did enough volume to make you commission rate sensitive, you obviously would do. If you like CME products you can do the 106.R and get your exchange fees down to $0.44 per side...If you trade mini dow you can lease a CBOT IDEM membership for cheap these days and get your fees down to about $0.40 per side...And if you trade DAX on Eurex your exchange fee is only $0.50 per side. Tack on an extra $0.25 - $0.55 per side and now you've got yourself a competetive rate.

Of course, if you're a swing trader and/or don't do a lot of volume, then you're most likely not commission rate sensitive. In that case, the best thing I think you can do for yourself is to get setup with free X_TRADER over at Velocity Futures. You'll pay more in commissions, but you'll get the stability of an institutional trading platform without having to pay for it up front.
 
I'm pretty sure you have to pay self-employment tax if you're self-employed, regardless as to whether or not you own or lease an exchange membership.
 
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