I am thinking of opening future trading account with Interactive brokers but from what I have read and heard so far is that their order slippage is brutal. So my question is what is your experience (if any) regarding trading futures with Interactive brokers? Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks
I trade 1 to 5 lots. It all depends on how strong my signal is. I am scalper and I trade the Asian and part of the European session.
I don't know about other exchanges on IB, but why don't you just stick to limit orders buying at the ask or vice versa?
The only thing that I know about IB is its HIGH margin requirement for many of the futures contracts like Gold, Oil, Euro and GBP currency futures and etc. But slippages? I haven't heard any complaints about that.
Slippage brutal at IB?? Yeahhhh -- errrr, no. I once met a guy who *insisted* that IB traded its own book before it went to market, and that someone else cleared their trades. This person -- even after hearing that IB *started* as a clearing broker (Peterffy's Timber Hill, etc) -- has kept this up for 10+ years. No lie. People say stupid shit.
I were a developer at C2 trading emini. My clients from IB got worst executions, many time 4-6 ticks worse than market price, at the same time my clients from other broker's accounts got market price.
Lots of detail unavailable to us, but from my own experience, in a thin market, if you put in a buy-at-bid or sell-at-ask limit order, your order will be brought to market at the only valid price that IB has -- which would be the other side. Same thing with an "invalid" price (e.g., a negative price on a contract where that would not be marketable). Not IB's responsibility to check your limit price. It's the responsibility of the trader (or their coder). If you wish 1-click functionality, you just bypassed IB's default-to-you price/order checks.
IB is a good discount broker overall. I trade the dow mini during us session & kospi mini during korean session. and have experienced slippage, thankfully on my entries. so far 4 times. twice on each product over the past 3 months. here I need to clarify that these entries r where obvious SLs r. hence the high chance of slippage. in fairness, I occassionally get better fills on my buy/sell stop entries. one related issue to slippage is that u have to note the daily maintanence timing on the timezone server u r on.. us, eu or hk. it shuts down without warning n u wont want to be caught in a losing pos while the server boots up to an 1hr on us n eu servers. 15min for hk. of course there r better brokers out there. but in fairness, it is a value for money discount broker.