I'm interested to start spread trading on commodities. As recommended here (by Goldtrader, amongst others) I've been looking at the Moore Research site. Some of their latest spread trades include Unleaded Gasoline/Crude Oil and Australian dollar/Swiss Francs. I was surprised to find that I seem unable to place these spreads on Interactive Brokers - the place I was hoping to do my trading. Can anyone suggest how I CAN place these trades with IB, or suggest a suitable low-cost broker other than IB. Thanks, Steve
You can do currency spreads on IB, but you have to put each leg on manually, ie buy AUD/USD and then sell CHF/USD for example.
zentrader, Thanks for the reply. Your answer covers the currency 'problem', but the lack of trading in Unleaded Gasoline means I need to go elsewhere for a more full coverage commodities broker. Any suggestions? Steve
I don't mean to bash them, but a few years ago I was working for a group that was putting on some of these trades, and the results were less than stellar. One of the things that I found from doing my research on them and there "seasonal" trades is that although statistically certain things did hold true (an event happens 14 of the last 20 years), there performance record was severely overstated. I'm assuming that they still put out some kind of monthly update on there trades, and here's where you run into a problem if you do not track EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR TRADES -- a lot of losers end up disappearing in the next months update. For example there may be a soybean trade recommended in August, and in the October update, that trade (a loser) is mysteriously absent from the open trades. I probably made no fewer than 10 calls a month to Moore regarding these missing losers, and each time it seemed to be an "honest omission." Yeah right, just so happens that there was never a winning trade left out, only losers. Things may have changed (hopefully), and this was about five years ago, but if you're thinking of doing this get a few of the updates from the previous months and check to make sure that ALL trades are tracked from start to finish. Just my two cents, but I would be very leary of just accepting their data. Vega