There is no account insurance other than the clearing firm for Commodity accounts. IB does sweep the excess funds each evening in the Universal accounts into the Securities accounts in order for them to be insured by SIPC and additional insurance. IB's problems with Globex are Globex's problems. The IB system has been reliable. Globex has not. There have been postings from the news wires on these boards talking about their problems.
If you are in the US then your futures broker must be registered with the CFTC and a member of the NFA. It's not optional. All the firms you are considering are probably NFA members, whether they prominently tell you so on their website or not. Look them up on BASIC (the member database) on the NFA website to be sure.
First, like a few others here have mentioned, you have the ability to look at the financials of every FCM and IB registered with the NFA and CFTC at the CFTC web site. Second, one of the features of futures enables you to maintain a minimum amount of cash in your account while still trading with large leverage. This is not to say that anyone should trade with enormous leverage IF they do NOT have the cash available to maintain the position or to re-fund the account back to its initial starting value. (i.e. you could keep the minimum balance required for your futures trading for say 3 ES and maintain the remaining in an SIPC insured account and then sweep this into your futures account as need be)...Or you could just open a Universal Account. I understand where you are coming from. There are just enough horror stories of Intro brokers going under once in awhile to keep all of us on our toes. If you read Pit Bull, you'd know that Marty Schwartz had the scare of his life when his clearing firm went bust and this guy had several million in his account when this happened. Compared to the rest of us, our concerns are pretty small in comparison.
I've been trying to access the cftc web site, but it seems to be down. Are you guys being able to access it? Regards Raphael
Hi Guys, Since I'm looking for a firm that will allow me to execute my trades by myself, and with no need for extra help with researches and stuff....I was told to pick a discount broker firm, which will provide me lower rates. But If the system goes down and I want to exit my trade, I must call the firm, right? But I heard some people saying that, in the case of IB, when they needed, they line was busy or took a long time for them to answer the phone.... have you guys been in this situation? So, how should I know that a firm will be able to answer my phone when the system goes down? What firm you guys trade that have a great backup support? regards Raphael
Suggestion is to talk to the broker about opening an account, tell them your concerns about support, get the support tel number, and call them sporadically and randomly throughout the day to get an idea of how quick they respond.
www.cftc.gov www.nfa.futures.org www.cme.com/about_cme/clearing_firms/aboutcme_cfirms.cfm hope this helps wild
GAtrader: Good idea! Wild, Look what I get when I try to access: "The page cannot be displayed" Are you able to open the web site? Regards Raphael