I haven't gone through the whole thread, so maybe I am missing something in regards to your worry about Advantage liquidating, but they are a solid firm. I trust them to an infinite degree more than I ever trusted IB. If you are playing at the extremes of margin, you might be liquidated, and to me that is a good thing. Why should they risk the firm for guys who want to play with minimal margin? To me that is a bad business decision, and just waits for an extreme day where the markets move fast against the genius who puts on 10 + contracts at $500 margin per contract. All of the sudden they don't have the money to cover their losses, and the firm has to cover. I'd rather have a firm that understands this and avoids those situations. Those firms with $500 margin deals are the ones that will screw the rest of us and get the morons in Congress selling a story of the evil commodity trader and how they bankrupted the world. As a result all the benefits such as tax treatment will go away quick. If you can't afford to trade don't trade, get another job and save some money. Dump your cable, dump your cell phone and save some money. then when you have a cushion and have spent a lot of time learning, begin trading, make a good income and enjoy a pretty good lifestyle.
Anyone who lived through the fall of '08 and saw Merril within 24 hours of failure that is not considering that ANY and ALL firms could fail is simply living in a fantasy world. None of this is meant to imply Advantage is not sound. Firms are sound today and crippled tomorrow. History is replete with examples.
I wasn't implying it couldn't happen to Advantage, what I was saying is I'm glad they aren't going out of their way to put themselves in the position. Too many of the retail firms survive taking commissions from people who are losing regularly and soon to fail. They are also one trade away from a major blow out and taking the firms money with them. Again the point being, some firms strive to do it right, others just look to survive for tommorow, not necessarily the next day. Advantage is a good one in my experience.
There should be a member circular on the CME website with audit results for Clearing Members. I do know that Advantage has a pretty strong balance sheet, if you don't see Globalfutures or Velocity on the audit it could very well be that they have a give-up agreement with an FCM. I've had a couple of clients that used Velocity, I'm not familiar with Globalfutures.