IB is not a clearing firm they are retail brokers. I believe the original posted indicated that he was a money manager not a retial guy. He may be confused as to the difference. We clear Goldman and FIMAT and both of them will execute whatever risk parameters we agree on, subject to their approval of course.
First off, E-Minis offer 18-19x leverage. You can invest only half his money in futures, the rest in T-Bill, to reduce leverage. Perhaps you may set a different manteinance margin? But you'll have to manually reset the margin, as the index moves.
TimberHill is a clearing agent. Timberhill (clearing) email contact in addition to Timberhill web redirection results to the interactivebrokers domain. Maybe you are confused as to how IB works. I know this post has no value to the original OP. Carry on.
didn't mean to confuse, and THI is the parent company of IB and they may offer clearing services, I will take your word for it.
my clients are aware of the risk involved. however, my question was not how much risk i should use, i am well aware of that. the question was, does any broker provide the automatic risk controls i described.
For E-mini for example: Leverage = 50 x price x Number of contracts/current bankroll For T-Bonds for example: Leverage = 100,000 x Number of contracts /current bankroll In general: Leverage = Value of asset x Number /current bankroll It is easy to figure out how many contacts to sell to maintain a certain leverage and use the IB API with Excel to adjust positions automatically. Anyway, your 8x leverage sounds very high. I would not go above 2x given my risk/reward parameters. You are highly exposed. Ron