AAA: currency RTH/Globex fully fungible. You will be 100% flat. Bonds: not sure. look at www.cbot.com / search for "fungible" regards, sascha
Most of the time brokers don't know squat about Exchange products and services - go right to the Exchanges for info. Call the clearinghouse or look on their web sites. From the CME site... CME introduced "side-by-side" electronic and open outcry trading of CME currency and cross-rate futures contracts on April 2. Electronic currency futures are completely fungible on a 1:1 basis with pit-traded currencies, as both have identical contract specifications. Customers may specify whether they prefer the orders to be executed in the pit or electronically, or let their broker decide which system to use for execution. Margining is handled by SPAN. If the products are in the same 'combined commodity' offsets will occur. If your broker doesn't offer exchange minimum requirements, find one who does. For more info on SPAN go to http://www.cme.com/risk_management/span/index.cfm Hope that helps.
CBOT Treasury contracts are fungible between the screen and the pit (or visa versa). They are the SAME contract. As far as the CBOT clearing corp. is concerned, screen vs. open outcry is transparent.
Unfortunately, IB doesn't handle fungible contracts well. Intraday, you will find that your account equity may vary widely, because it values the two "sides" of your flat position differently, based on the current bid/ask and or last price of each market. If one or both of the contracts are illiquid, these valuations can be quite different from one other, resulting in a significant change to your real-time equity display. This can be kind of scary, and generally requires you to keep some extra "breathing room" in your account to be safe. Nightly mark-to-markets on the statements are almost always correct, valuing them both at whatever the clearinghouse determined for that day (unless there is a problem with the feed, which happens rarely). Also, it doesn't exactly follow SPAN, in that it does take some margin (performance bond) for the position. For a +2xE7/-1x6E position, this is $200 initial/$150 maint. According to the CME website, there is supposed to be $0 requirement for this position. I've carried a GE/YE spread into final settlement, and it was correctly settled, closing both contracts at the same correct price. I'll note that I was charged commission on those contracts to settle them. With physically settled contracts (like 6E/E7 Euro FX), however, you basically need to unwind your positions before the first notification day (final-3 in this case) or risk IB liquidating you. Theoretically, this shouldn't be necessary, since the clearinghouse knows that your contracts are equivalent, and it has no affect on the firm's outstanding positions, but apparently IB's system wouldn't know that when it gets the net position from the clearinghouse and allocates them to the open contracts in customer accounts. I beat this subject to death some time ago, but couldn't get it resolved. Management cited more important matters as the reason. After this Euro run, I'm wishing that I didn't have the short side of my current flat position OT: Did anyone else see the blurb on the website scrolling news ticker "IB Cuts Euro Futures Commissions to 2.00 Euros"? I can't find any other mention of it. I wonder which futures it applies to. This is even cheaper than their Globex commish!
Thanks for info on fungible contracts. I left out a detail that I thought was implicit but now I see it was not. I use different brokers for the rth and globex trades. So if I am long an rth contract and sell the same contract on globex, will my statement from both brokers show me flat or will I be long and short? Only 13 more days to globex energy futures!!!
AAA: then of course you cannot be flat. the clearinghouse does not know whom a broker is holding a position for.
...Exchange rules also prohibit transfers for liquidation, which you could do under other circumstances.
Another new feature has been released - mobile trading. For more info: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/html/companyInfo/mobileIntro.html also a new release for stand alone users is available for download. (the browser version has been out for a few days).