Mirus is an Introducing Broker, anyways. They don't have access to your funds, & your funds are not even deposited with them, but with Dorman or RCG (the clearing firms). I know nothing of Dorman, but RCG does not have a prop arm - or engage in prop trading. If Mirus went down (which is unlikely), it wouldn't matter at all. You'd get an email from RCG saying "ok, you're with us directly now - everything else is the same."
Because of MF Global, we have to really look into the whole business of the brokers. When i started doing a little research about mirus this is what i found and i started thinking about it and it scared me. Hard Eight is a major prop shop. Hard Eight owns at least 10% of both mirus and zenfire. See this ET thread for break down of Mirus/Zenfire ownership: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=231563 Since all customers orders are entered through zenfire, with a little programming, Hard Eight could see all of the customers positions and stops and either take the other side of our orders or push the market to run our stops. It could be a "market profile" of actual customer orders...that is scary
GOM CD and ladder is awesome, I agree.And you can record the data and store on your PC, since NT unfortunately does not do it for you. Nothing beats the amount of free 3rd party indicators available for Ninja trader. Nothing. As for AMP, that bucket shop will never get my business from the horror stories I read on Big Mike's forum by many pros. Mirrus, or if you want to cover all bases, it's still IB. By the way, the NT/Kinetick combo is the best. Zen fire has flaws.
For those more knowledgeable in the structure and segregation of funds for brokerages, wasn't MF an IB as well? I thought that AMP, Mirus, Global etc... were all IB's. So how did MF manage to dip into client funds in this case? Also, I'm not as worried about the prop arm frontrunning (which I suppose is a legitimate concern) but being utilized to make directional bets when all entities are interconnected. I may be wrong, but in the case of MF, they were holding the Euro debt as a form of long term repo financing and capturing the spread were they not?
Mother F****** Global was an FCM as is AMP Clearing - they are not IB's. I traded AMP/Dorman for over 4 years and never had a single issue - they wire funds fast when I would sweep acct twice a month. I was offered really good rates through a contact I know in the business and moved accts for lower comm's. I was very pleased with AMP so it seems odd that traders keep mentioning problems on big mike - maybe mirus has a good campaign on?
neither the CFTC, CME or NFA have any excuses for what occurred at MFG, They as much as Corzine are to blame - if not more so, for yet another costly fiasco excerpted from the Wiki article "Refco was a New York-based financial services company, primarily known as a broker of commodities and futures contracts. Prior to its collapse in October, 2005, the firm had over $4 billion in approximately 200,000 customer accounts, and it was the largest broker on the CME. The firm's balance sheet at the time of the collapse showed about $75 billion in assets and a roughly equal amount in liabilities. Refco, Inc. entered crisis on Monday, October 10, 2005, when it announced that its chief executive officer and chairman, Phillip R. Bennett had hidden $430 million in bad debts from the company's auditors and investors, anonymous sources cited by the Wall Street Journal and other publications have stated that the debt stemmed from losses in as many as 10 customer trading accounts, Refco held offshore accounts holding as much as $525 million in fake bonds. Refco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refco On July 3, 2008, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald sentenced Bennett to 16 years in federal prison" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillip_R._Bennett "Refcoâs forex brokerage arm, Refco FX, LLC, was holding over 17,000 retail customer brokerage accounts at the time that Refco declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter. In the bankruptcy proceedings, Bank of America and other large creditors managed to convince the bankruptcy court that Refcoâs customers were actually unsecured creditors because of Refcoâs failure to segregate its customer accounts from their own general funds, despite telling customers that it had done so. This legal maneuver resulted in the unsecured customer accounts being considered as creditors only after the secured customers in the distribution of whatever funds were left to be distributed. Although FXCM made a reasonable offer in late 2005 to purchase the RefcoFX accounts it was rejected and most of the brokerâs 17,000 customers eventually received little or no compensation for the balances in their brokerage accounts at the time they were frozen by the bankruptcy." http://www.forexfraud.com/forex-art...y-and-its-impact-on-retail-forex-trading.html 'When Refco went bankrupt in November 2005, Man Financial (as MF Global was then known) took over its accounts and business worldwide'