I wrote a program for forex trading and only noticed recently that the spreads on the different exchanges vary substantially. What is the minimum size for IDEAL PRO and their great spreads? IDEAL PRO has the best Ask/Bid spreads by far, but unless you're trading the minimum size, you can only trade on an exchange with poor spreads. Bad spreads are bad news for a programs which have a one day time frame, like mine. thanks
The IDEAL PRO minimum is 25,000 units of whatever the base currency for a given trade is: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/forex.php?ib_entity=llc Note also that at or near the minimum trade size, commissions ($5.00 for a round trip) will effectively add another 2 pips to the (tight indeed) spread. See the commissions link there. That extra impact will, of coure, diminish linearly with greater size, bottoming out at 0.4 pips per round trip at 125,000 units. BTW, when you refer to (non-existent) "exchanges", I assume you really mean "market makers"?
thank apex, but my trads were over 25K and were not accepted by IDEAL PRO; they went directly through IDEAL and USBX(sp?),with terrible spreads.
Interesting switch... if the minimum trade size constraint was met, don't know why that would be, since I don't have any first-hand experience with IDEAL. I assume you are using the correct instrument designation, incl. the "Exch" field set to "IDEALPRO". Why don't you run this by IB Customer Service and see what they say?