Another futures market open, another "Currently Running On Back Up, Will Advise!" message from MBT and my positions are all screwed up (they have me short NQ and flat ES when I'm flat NQ and long ES) Oh yea, and my account balance is about $20k short right now. Same thing last Friday morning until 8:30am when I guess they show up to work and fix it. They just aren't geared for futures trading, they only seem to try to get things right for regular trading hours. Lame
I believe the back office problems are within MBTrading's clearing firm Pension. Pension does not seem to take their futures clearing serious. Pension has had the problems you described for over 2 years. There are also errors on their confirmations for futures transactions that have existed for more than a year. I have contacted MBTrading and Pension about these problems many times and still nothing gets fixed. Pension can best be described by their companies stock share price of only a dollar per share. What I like best about MBTrading is their client universal account (stocks, futures, and options all within a single account) with unlimited client check writing on the account.
GTS, don't you think its time to find another futures broker then?... or do you like to slowly torture yourself? IB, Velocity, AMP Global Clearing( my broker), Mirus, etc..... very good ones.
Catoosa, I agree, all of the problems appear to be related to Penson. Actually I already have an IB account and actively use both. For redundancy I like having two different brokers and to avoid monthly data fees I trade both. I also have a non-trivial amount of time invested in C++ code I've written against the MBT API, while I've done some work with the IB TWS API as well I prefer the approach of the MBT API. I must be an eternal optimist because I keep hoping that one day MBT will get its act together. Anyway to update my original post, it appears they fixed the positions overnight so now my account reflects reality again, albeit with the wrong account balance (short by $5k now) but that is almost never correct unless I go completely flat and wait a day.
How good is MB Trading's platform? They are suppose to be as highly rated as tos, tradestation and ib?
GTS..... Last week Penson went through a back office conversion which caused MBT to use our backup file. There should have only been a very short period where positions and balances needed to be updated past our normal time. Today (monday)Penson is using the standard file and all looks good. Please pvt msg me if your position or balance does not look correct and I will follow up. Again, everything is running normal for our file from Penson.
Hi Steve, I received notice about the Penson backoffice change on Dec 9th. My positions were wrong the morning of Friday Dec 16th so I don't think that was related. The standard alert went about running on backup, please don't trade out of erroneous positions so I know it wasn't just me with the problem. Later that morning my positions and balance were corrected and everything was fine the rest of that day. When I launched MBT Desktop Sunday night (18th) for the open of the futures market again my positions were completely wrong and my balance was wrong. I ignored that it and traded normally and this morning when I checked things seemed to be correct again with my positions however my balance is still off. To be honest I'm used to my MBT balance being off all the time, the only time it seems to be right is if I let my account sit flat, I assumed that it had something to do cash being managed between my MBT and Penson but frankly my IB account balance (net liquidation value) is always correct all the time so maybe I should set my expectations higher. If you want to look into the account balance issue that would be great, I'll PM you my account id shortly.
Another morning...another screwed up account Let's see, here is a message waiting for me from MBT: "Critical Currently Running on Backup, Will Advise. 03:59:01" That was 4am, its now 7:30am, I guess that's not enough time to fix it? My positions are wrong, again, MBT has me short ES when I am long. My account balance is short to the tune of about $5k again. Steve, why is it so difficult to maintain this information correctly?