I guess liquidity was the wrong phrase... Action may be the right term? I haven't done much (any) research, but the 6E futures seem to behave much differently than the eur.usd spot....atleast on the short time frames I like to trade. To the point where trading one is not like trading the other.
Not sure where you looked but they move very similar, with the exception of Forex bucket shops (aka brokers) having an ability to quote any price to you. Forex is decentralized and forex brokers can easily spike you out of a trade, they take the opposite side. Some even have/had audacity to put in their agreement clauses to quote different price to different customers at the same time. Your best fighting chance is CME currency futures.
You're right.... My TWS charting skills are still under development, and I was having issues with scaling multi-asset charts.
They are absolutely 100% connected and move in lockstep absent a change in interest rates of one of the currencies. There is a no-arbitrage formula between forex spot and futures and any deviation of even a pip will get arb'd away in microseconds.
isnt the margin requirements much greater say for the CAD futures contract VS the usd/cad forex pair? Maint margin of cad $1600 VS trading .01 lots usd/cad on forex?
No clue. Varies broker to broker....but I think many brokers offer $500 intraday margin on cme forex guys. IB has higher margins than most