hi, ib is the best broker in my opinion. unfortunately their new market data fees for some instruments are prohibitive. who is the cheapest futures broker (lower than 4 rt) providing a stable platform (no dotnet) and all market data for free?
I am an US equity day and swing-trader they tried to improve TWS charts within the last years, made many enhancements, but the charting still remains poor. F.e. daily candlesticks have often some unreadable candlesticks. Their quotes are slow and they don't give true ticks and gives erroneous readings all the time. The slippage on my fills are not reproducable, if you start simultaneously trading with another platform, you see the bad fills in TWS. If you hold positions over the weekend, you will be astonished how few you have on your account after liquidatino - there are always some $$ fewer which cannot been explained correctly.... After changed to professional platforms I know, I should switch much earlier ! IBW could be a starting point for your trading, but after you get more knowledge, you should upgrade to the professional camp.
There are none. Where do you think these brokers are suppose to make their money from? Any good futures broker is focused on the front end and connectivity/speed and not about giving you free data. If it is "free", then the cost has been packaged into another part of the business. The futures business is not for hand holding and the monthly fees can be worked into the commission easily. Also, any monthly fees you might have can be made or lost in a day. It is only really prohibitive if you decide to get the most expensive thing you can get your hands on when you don't need that option, such as a full CQG or TT license. You can use CTS' T4 charting with deepdiscounttrading or anyone else that provides it. Some things the charting can't do, but should work for most everybody and most the charting price is put into how many round turns you do.
PFG or the CTS T4 brokers (there are many) seem to include all quotes for free. PFG has the advantage of no platform fee if you can get by with Best Direct. However it is a minimal platform and is sluggish so it is probably not suitable for most people here.
first your are dead wrong. i use one and my com is very low. second you did not answer my initial question futures trading is a commodity. commodities are chosen over price @dieter: it never happened to me that any position was liquidated by ib. they set clear rules and you know in advance when your positions could be liquidated by the broker. it is your own fault when it happens. ib sets higher margins than most futures brokers. for me it is an advantage: they play it safer than their competitors. all in all i have never found a better fs service company than ib in the world even though i am using 25 different brokers and 9 banks. one exception is dkb in germany. as a world traveller living on three continents i appreciate the fact that everything is free with dkb and i can use a free visa card for free anywhere in the world. i am looking for a new futuresbroker because i had terminated two brokers as a result of my termination of the ninjatrader. those brokers were competitive with the nt(no fees, low coms) but they are not with any other platform. i never pay for software- SOFTWARE IS FREE. the ninjatrader was an exception. i loved some features of it. unfortunately it did not work out well. ib is extremely expensive when it comes to trading some instruments like the russel future tf. they charge 75 bucks for the data. that is insane. to be fair, this fee comes from the exchange. all futuresbrokers have those feeds included for free. hope that clarifies everything. now lets get back to the question that most people on this board will be interested in: what are the best brokerages with no fees, low coms and free software ?
did you use the cunningham t4 platform? any feedback? actually that was a helpful hint of you because i have never heard about this company and the t4 solution seems to be java based meaning that it will run on a modern operating system best direct has high fees. the coms that they quoted are a joke
Okay, well you can try zumo if you want. If your account is above 15k, you can use their platform for free, but I'm not so sure the charting good. You can't get everything for free. IB is only a good broker because of the wide range of securities and options they provide. Other than that, they are garbage as far as I'm concerned. Crappy software and horrible customer service. I trade futures only, so all their products is of little concern to me. In fact, IB's commission for futures isn't even close to the lowest that you can get. You want to know why? Because they put their software costs into the commission costs, which almost all of them do. Add to the fact that most brokers already have low commissions, and you don't actually save that much by going to the extreme low, so find a broker that you like. Just get a good broker and pay for an actual front-end or charts.
thanks for the zumo hint. i will look at what they offer. with regards to ib: i have a large portfolio and i like almost everything: customer service, the platform, charting, features. it takes a while to get used to but the new versions have a lot of excellent learning tools and help pages included. my reason to look for two other futures brokers is not to replace ib but to diversify and to get more data for free where i would have to pay at ib. and i would never pay for software. i found already a good trading software solution that runs on a modern operating software: QST. some brokers provide it for free with low coms. it is java based. other java based trading software is provided by generic broker. finally i have learned today that cunningham provides a java state of the art trading software. i am downloading it at this moment
fred1, how much time do you believe IB gives you to "know in advance" before positions get liquidated?
ib will not and does not need to give any advance before it liquidates positions. when it does so then it applies rules that were approved and signed by the customer: http://ibkb.interactivebrokers.com/taxonomy/term/134 as a customer i am very happy that ib applies risk management algorithms to liquidate positions of traders who should not hold those positions because they cannot afford it. it makes the company safer