Hi all. I'm considering opening an account with IB for day trading US index futures. I do however feel their margins is a tad too high. Particularly since I seem to recall that IB increases margins even higher during periods of increased volatility. Can anyone confirm if the latter is true? Current day trading margin for ES is just below $5000 which is okay, I suppose. But wouldn't be okay if the increase margins above that. I would probably want to trade with Ninjatrader as my front-end and also use data from IQ Feed. So, if anyone have experience with either in use with IB, I'd be happy to hear thoughts on that as well. Thanks in advance. Howard
Had an account with IB for about 10 years. Closed it because it was too "painful" using Ninjatrader with IB. Need to keep TWS platform running along with NT platform. Other partners of NT don't require additional platform. Other NT brokers have daytrading margins as low as $500/contract for ES, NQ, YM, TF. Also, if you have even a slight "blink" in power, TWS platform will disconnect. IB is a quality broker IMO, but if you're just interested in daytrading futures, I'd use others.
Daytrade margins at IB on ES is only $5K? Consider yourself lucky. Here's the current maintenance, which means initial is $6,930 per contract.
If commission/margin is your main concern, then go with AMP futures. They offer the lowest commission/margin and they also provide a variety of platforms to choose from. Commission: https://portal.ampclearing.com/account/commissionquote.aspx Margin: https://www.ampfutures.com/trading-info/margins/
Seconding - if you're going to only trade futures go to a futures broker. AMP, Cannon, etc are all good choices.
All brokers are a credit risks. Do higher margin requirements buy you reduced credit risk? If yes, is the price too high? If no, then do business with the broker with lower credit risk, all other things being equal.
Thank you, Bum. For me, I imagined the TWS platform in addition would mean increased security in case something happened with Ninja. Is this really a problem? Also - was it always like this? I actually used this set-up like 8 years ago or so and don't recall any issues. Mind me asking which broker you moved on to? Are there really any options other than IB for futures trading? Doesn't sound very encouraging. I don't find strong reasons to move to IB at this point and your post alone pretty much changed my mind. I currently use NT with NT Brokerage and it seems to be working fine. I have not had any issues yet. But I'd love to sign up with FundSeeder and they don't support NT Brokerage. Best regards.
Thanks. I wanted to use AMP, actually, but they don't support Ninjatrader. Currently set up with NT Brokerage which seems to work fine for day trading futures. I believe they have similar margins/commissions to AMP.
%% Mr Howard look @ it this way. IF you owned the brokerage , you sure would increase margins as contract increases in price. FOR the exact same reason, no money down houses have a much higher foreclosure rate.................................................................................Think/feel about that.You have to look @ both sides of the trade. Good question.
1-NT Brokerage is just an IB, not a broker. They have partner brokers that are allowed to use NT. They have direct relationship with 2 futures brokers. See website. No opinion about which is better. 2-My issue was just that I didn't like having 2 platforms (TWS & NT) running just to trade. TWS takes a couple minutes just to login & open platform then another minute to open & connect NT. The broker I use now takes less than a minute to start trading. Similar to MT4 with no login required. If technical issues while in a trade, keep broker's trading desk phone # handy. Call & close open trades. 3-IB is great for "one-stop shopping" as you can trade anything (futures, stocks, forex, options, etc...) on one platform (TWS). They're also financially more secure as they're a publicly traded company so their finances are watched by investors. 4-By having much smaller margins, the other brokers require much less of an investment if things go wrong.