At this point, I believe they have at least 5 major banks providing liquidity not to mention the many hedge funds, companies, and individuals trading on their ECN. I think their liquidity is quite good. I haven't heard of any complaints in regards to getting orders filled in extreme or any other conditions. There are a lot of people on elite trader that trade forex with IB. If any one of our members were having difficulty getting their orders filled we would certainly here about it.
Although he got my name wrong , there is a lot of truth to what Linus wrote about, uh, not trading, and although gowron8 was technically "more accurate" in his assessment of the issue(s), the fact of the matter is that the active retail trader must be aware of the fact that these businesses exist to make money, and at least in part (I don't have th exact percentage breakdown, because I am not on that side of the industry), they are looking to make their money "off of" the small retail trader. This is done through: 1) Bad Fills 2) Bad Data 3) System Failure 4) Over charging on commissions 5) miscellaneous brokerage fees 6) illiquid (and frozen) markets (major server goes down, etc.) 7) etc., etc., etc. No Brokerage House is exempt from any (or all) of these practices (bucket shops been around for centuries, folks) AND to the point which Linus was alluding to and that was addressed in a separate thread about Paper Trading vs Live Trading, those items mentioned MUST be factored into your Trading Plan. The issue with FX (or currency, or forex, or whatever you want to call it) trading is that there is a HUGE grey area there which allows all sorts of chicanery to take place that you probably wouldn't see in the US based markets, because of at least minimal regulation (of the US markets), and the threats of government investigation of misstatement of the facts and misdeeds (we've seen some of that around here, now haven't we?). Best Regards, Jimmy
Thanks for your reply. I am in the process of switching from indexfutures to currency trading and am not very familliar with IB idealpro, but I can see the difference between them and ''the buckets'!
Why would the entity like hedge funds trade on retail ECN when they can trade with whole sale like currenex, hotspotfxi, and so on...? I think those retail ECN type model (IB, HotspotFXR, and MBT) is for undercaptialized individuals. Thus, there are only individual retail clients and big banks (as liquidity providers).
Wow, I'm learning a lot about the business (and like I said, I don't even trade'em). Hope you FX types are taking note, I just believe that where there's smoke, there's fire ... and in case you're wondering, yep I've been around the block and had my "learning experiences", so that's why, while I'm aware of the upside of trading, I also keep an eye on the downside. Best, Jimmy
I agree in the sense that a hedge fund trading a lot of currency is more likely to trade through a prime or second tier broker with the likes of currenex or hotspotfxi. Again though, my understanding is that liquidity on IB and hotspot is very good and more than enough for just about any individual trader (undercapitalized or well capitalized). I can't say the same about MBT simply because I don't know much about them.
Jimmy, I agree with you. Regulation in the retail forex industry is minimal and selecting a good, honest, reliable broker is critical to a forex traders success.
Just being curious but what are the minimums for Currenex and FXall at various brokers. My broker told me 500K minimum for Currenex and FXall. Although, don't quote me on this as I need to learn more, I believe they have some option where they are pumping the feeds from Currenex into their in house platform. However, you may need more that the ususal minimum for that. Considering my account size their multi liquidity source price aggregation engine on the in house platform is more that enough for me. But I'm still curious.
Currenex 160 mio 3 pips spread eur/usd/....bs...you obviously been looking at a demo..if thats the case please post a screen dump... Remember Currenex are the software not the broker...so nice liquidity at one broker does not equate to nice liquidity at another...and minimums can change depending on where you go..