Getting involved with a retail forex broker is one of the biggest mistakes a newbie trader can make. You should first learn about order execution and trading by practicing with odd lots of liquid ETFs like QQQQ. You wait until you are more knowledgeable before you take the greater risks involved with round lots of equities. You wait for greater knowledge before you even think of touching futures. You are almost guaranteed to lose everything if you get involved with retail forex before you have developed a great deal of experience. You might have a temporary run of profit in retail forex, as a newbie, which will deceive you into thinking that you know what you are doing, and will ultimately lead to your losing it all. The retail forex industry, with very few exceptions (like IB's forex trading), is nothing more than a scam targeted at robbing the newbie traders blind, and stealing candy from babies. Most newbie traders are blinded by greed and don't want to hear the type of advice I just gave, so let me just express, in advance, my condolescences for your future losses.
Oh, by the way, some more bad news for you. Learning to trade successfully is time consuming. If you aren't willing to put in the time, you are pre-destined to lose. My condolences, once again, for your future losses.
SSB, I'm not able to reproduce any problem regarding the RTH attribute changing value, even using build 864. If you continue to have this problem, please send me the specifics for a single order and we will look into it. To proceed, I would need username, date/time of order, symbol, quantity, and price.
John, The behavior you describe is not the default behavior of TWS. It only works this way if you have checked the "Auto-Save default size" checkbox on the Order/General section of the Global Configuration. If this box is unchecked, as it is by default, separate settings are not generated and saved per symbol. Furthermore, if this checkbox IS checked and you change one of the default settings (such as RTH), newer builds of TWS allow you to automatically propogate the new setting into all of the per-symbol settings.
Hi Jim, Very well said. I posted numerous messages describing exactly how retail forex works, and with few exceptions the best way to trade currencies is CME futures. But no one seems to be interested, so I stopped bothering. Regards, redduke
Thanks JimRockford. Here you go RedDuke: http://www.cme.com/ "CME FX Products: CME is the worldâs premiere provider of foreign exchange (FX) futures and options on futures products and the largest regulated market for FX trading. The CME FX market serves as an effective and efficient means of risk transfer for the global FX market, bringing together a broad array of client segments by offering investment as well as risk management opportunities. CME's customers benefit from dealing anonymously in a fully transparent market, where large and small customers have equal access to the same prices and same deep pool of liquidity. CME's customers also benefit from the central clearing mechanism that eliminates counterparty risk. CME FX products provide the tools and resources to hedge foreign currency risk, facilitating cross-border trade and commerce while mitigating the risks to profitability due to fluctuations in the FX market. The CME FX market attracts both buy- and sell-side investors, including commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, commodity trading advisors, proprietary trading firms, currency overlay managers and individual investors. Today, CME offers 41 individual FX futures and 31 options products, covering major currency pairs as well as an array of emerging market currencies, with a daily notional trading value surpassing $60 billion. Over 90 percent of CME FX products are traded electronically on the CME Globex platform, ensuring that business is transacted quickly and safely with maximum operational efficiency. Benefits of Trading CME FX Futures and Options: - Open, fair and anonymous trading - Equal access to the same FX markets and prices for all traders - All exchange fees are public and spreads are consistently tight - Global access to CME electronic markets virtually 24 hours a day - Access to in excess of $60 billion in liquidity each day - Guarantee of counterparty credit and central clearing by CME Clearing" ------------------------------------------------------------------- And for the others out there looking for an honest broker: http://www.forexbastards.com/ Tom
As a follow-up, John from IB (who had previously requested my logs) left me a voicemail today and emailed me about the issue. Kudos to John! I was able to re-create it at will with 864 but submitting the order, closing TWS, then re-opening TWS (upon re-open the RTH checkbox is now checked). However with 870.2 it does not happen. If IB treated a few more issues like this (and especially publicly) I think we'd all be a lot better off. IB please listen! Maybe some kind of ticket escalation system would be in order (web tickets are not the answer read the IB boards about them). I will also add my main automated trading system has had only two problems I attribute to IB since Nov 2004. One was when they somehow erased all my FA allocation profiles on the server (later traced to having too many). The other was TWS 845 which had a change so a GTD order required GTD in the time in force field (previously it was enough to specify a GTD date/time) -- it wasn't the change that got me -- it was the fact the change wasn't documented anywhere. On the whole I've been happy with IB, although losing money to weird *stuff* like the RTH thing is beyond frustrating....not to mention the market data thing.... SSB
870.2... Takes forever to load, adds 50MB overhead (over 864), did I say slow? I only tried the web launch, but that shouldn't matter, should it? Running on 3ghz/2gb machine... What are you thoughts on 870 so far, Bob? No overnight stops is bad, but I'm sticking to 864.7 for now... I'll use a stplmt.
Definitely takes longer to load. This weekend I'm going to set up a simulation on a backup PC and let it run and gather quotes all next week. If it runs for a week without losing quotes a single time I'll upgrade my "production" machine. SSB