Besides CME any ECN broker such as EFX is fine, I haven't had any problem at all; fast execution, no slippage, nice and convenient dash boards, just good platform all around. sg20
"EFX Group is an affiliated introducing firm for MB Trading Futures, Inc (MBTF) that receives a volume based referral fee for its services. MB Trading Futures, Inc. is registered with the CFTC and member of NFA as a Futures commission Merchant (FCM)." Don't know much about them, but I know MB Trading has about 8MM in capital. With the recent passing of the farm bill, they will have to bring that up to 20MM within a year to continue forex business.
If you trade long term with high leverage, in 99% you will fail. If you trade several mini lots to learn is Ok, but if you really want to make some serious money, you would need standard lots or the whole bunch of minis, which would be the same. DOM and T&S are of paramount importance in order to be be under water immediately after entry. Nothing to do with scalping. Let's say you want to go long, but there is a huge size on one or two ask levels. You better wait and see if the price can penetrate it before going long. Yes, a lot of people tend to blame anything but themselves, but in case of forex bucket shops, they could certainly help to reduce the odds of success. Regards, redduke
Trading with high leverage does cause the down fall of lots of traders. Not just Spot FX and it usually does not take lots of time. Since you appear to trade futures and current initial margin reuirements on a GBP contract are about 45:1...do you consider that high leverage? IMO anyone trying to make a killing trading anything has a greed monster out of control and should stop trading immediately. DOM and T&S may be what you need to trade, but you should not apply your needs to everyone.....everything in trading is probabilities not guarantees. There are lots of strategies to use, but the most impoortant thing in trading is money management. To prove this to myself I used a simple MA cross strategy on a minilot account and was able to achieve 80pips positive growth average per week with MM. Granted this was not huge growth, but if it could be maintained and use the growth to compound the return without increasing risk...that would make a nice yearly income for some It is amazing at the number of people (traders) that blame everyone but the real culprit. There are still lots of "bucketshops" but there are becoming less of them everyday. What is going to be left is a lot of decent regulated (FSA, CFTC, NFA, etc) brokerages but even that will still have the rotten apple like some of the futures brokers. I'm sure you could name a few futures brokers that are rotten apples FXCM does appear to be one of the survivors and they help traders as much as they can eg: free webinars and other training, not limiting the type of trading like news or scalping There is one thing that the Spot FX market does better than any other market I know of....that is they allow unlimited time demo trading to anyone so that they can learn themselves and prepare for live. The most time I've ever heard of in futures is 30 days...if you know of something different please correct me. BTW...I consider 10:1 leverage high.
Hi Da-net, To me having high leverage serves only one purpose- less money in my brokers account. I only day trade and always have enough funds in my account for my operations, if for some reason I need more, I just wire them. In futures world, there is a central price that everyone sees and acts upon, this is not the case in spot fx. With each bank providing its own feed some stop hunting and price spikes do take place. Even though some refuse to believe it. In essence one is trading in virtual world where MM takes the other side of your trades. And as you know, 90% of people fail, so this is why it is such a lucrative business for MM, and having full control of everything within their platform can certainly aid them. Whatever small expose MM has, he always hedges it with the banks. If you have wide stops, then there is nothing that can be done since these price spikes can only go so far. Also, spot fx account are having almost no protection at all, which is not the case with futures accounts. Refco futures customers were fine, where spot fx ones lost a lot. I recently learned that in UK spot fx customers also enjoy protection which is not available to US accounts. Obviously not everyone will use DOM or T&S, but they are very valuable tools, just talk to any professional day trader. As far as demo goes, Ninja Trader gives you unlimited access to their platform for charting and demo trading and MIrus futures will give you one of the best real time demo data feeds (zen-fire) for free for many months, and if you ask them, they will extend it. Regards, redduke P.S. By the way, are you Russian?
The only reason i dont trade on CME is that EUR/JPY isnt available/liquid. Other than that, it would be nearly perfect for me. Even small time traders can get super competitive commissions and professional order entry platforms.
FXCM now offering 400 to 1 leverage and micro accounts: www.fxcmmicro.com my opinion on the FX vs futures is it depends on your goals and capital. i have 6 feeds from 6 different FX dealers here and they rarely diverge more than 1-2 pips at a time. i find it incredulous that traders believe dealers manipulate price to any great degree, however, i do agree that one should never use hard stops when dealing with a dealer as it gives the dealer an advantage. the one time i had a true edge in retail FX was when a top 3 broker introduced mini contracts, the mini contracts lagged another top 3 broker durng news announcements and we were able to play this for several months before they caught on. without havign an edge like this, its a very difficult market. surf
I agree. I have a price feed from 240 banks and it's always within a 1-2 pips of my broker. I don't use stops. No issues on my end.