For anyone interested, the "Forex document", is ready and downloadable from this page: http://www.buttontrader.com/content.asp?lang=en&page=8 Hope you like it, and that it has some educational value for you.
Yes, it is a MS-Word document zipped in a zip-file (just unzip it, and if you don't have Word, then I can help you with a free Word-viewer).
I'm not sure I understand tth IB $25k requirement. Does that mean if I have $25,000 in my IB account that I need to use it all in a single trade? Or does that mean that I have to trade enough in a single trade to equal a leveraged $25k figure? Thanks! Scott <><
25K is the minimum order size for IDEALPRO. IDEALPRO will not accept an order for 3K USD/EUR. The 25K limit has nothing to do with your account balance. If you have 25K in your account, you can enter orders for up to 50x that amount, or 1.25M (assuming the trade is in a currency with a 2% margin, i.e. 50:1 leverage factor).
For quite a while this was one of the primary IB IDEAL Pro FX threads - since then there have been a thousand splinters. Would like to see this come back as the #1 thread for IB Forex as there is a wealth of information on here already...
IB Account Market Value Real-time VaR and P&L are a paramount feedback to every investor/trader. P&L calculations are a n absolutely simple matter for a financial positions as long as price updates are there. Currently I see the Market Value in IB update approximately every few minutes or when a trade is executed. This is too slow. The last time I checked, inquiries about this were made over a year ago. The last time I checked, it is also the year 2006. I would like to hear what the difficulty is. Of course I have my own systems to calculate this, but the key is less to look at is more... Furthermore, the Market Value window should feature a separate P&L for each currency. When is this going to go real-time? For the amount of commissions that your active prop traders are paying on a daily basis, this is nothing short of a complete embarrassment for IB.
totally agree on the realtime p&l. Can't quite see the need for realtime VaR though, but i agree, if you're trading purely spot fx, nothing more than a simple var/covar approach is needed which will hardly put a strain on the cpu. It seems likely that the revenue generated from idealpro doesn't justify their time invested in developing this side of their business which is a shame
Anyone actively trading via IB IDEAL Pro FX notice that during quiet markets there is the mark of leaning on your position? I have an undisclosed amount of live and quote only sources (above 3) and it seems that when my position is on, and the music has fully stopped (i.e. market is consolidating) that there is a lean vs. my position. The most incredulous aspect of this is that I am not trading size... Yeah I know "big market" I understand that this could be the heat/market psychology causing me to "see" this... I have also seen the entire bid ask jump the second I enter a limit order. WTF is up with that? Also, does anyone have any information on what extent that Timber Hill, LLC - related to IB plays in IDEAL Pro FX? For now, I assume that the are the primary lean masters behind the scenes if this is occurring. Comments appreciated, thx.