In their defense, you haven't offered anything believable yet. Saying you are making 30% a month after slightly less than a month of paper trading doesn't exactly inspire confidence...
THIS! Don't expect to get everyone here all rah rah when you talk about making 30% a month when you are clearly a beginner trader and are referring to papertrading.... Most of your questions in the past are about how options work and now you are an expert ready to make 30% a year. 1 month is not a track record and anyone can go balls deep when it is paper and just reset and try again. No matter what you achieve on paper it is not transferable to actual trading when real money is draining out of your $25,000 account versus your $1 million paper.
I wish I had better news for you, but at least you've been given a lot of great pointers from many who responded. So I'm throwing in a few more in my wording: The IB papertrading account is for learning how to use their tools. It is not sufficient for testing a trading system (data and fills are NOT the same as what happens live). You need to read up on what IB paper trading 'realtime' data is. Hint: it's different from the datafeed provided to live accounts. (and what papertrading fills are...) You need to read up on what the IB live account datafeed is. That may or may not be sufficient for your trading system. That you're seeing "30%" with papertrading is good. Now you need to move on to "Forward Testing" with your real data feed. Note that it's not a papertrading account mechanism providing simulated fills now, but your forward testing software that is simulating fills. Before proceeding further, you'll want to know that your software can handle all of the disconnection events and any other events that can occur while trading (live). And if your Forward Testing software is a component of your platform/custom-platform, it had better be blocked from submitting live orders, because your next step is to Forward Test while connected to your live account. Once you have profitable Forward Testing with real/live data, and again from forward testing in a live account (scary I know), then in a live account you'll need to do some very careful and limited test trades. Expect some loses getting this data; this will cost/lose real $. This will give you some data of actual fills, so you can then better simulate more realistic Forward Testing fills and redo all your Forward Testing. The quality is limited by: how much data you got, how you simulate fills from the data, and from what the market was doing when you acquired that live fill data. If the market is doing different from when you got your test fills, you can't count on getting the simulated Forward Testing fill behaviour in live fills once trading live. Read again: you can't count on getting the simulated Forward Testing fill behaviour in live fills once trading live. Your code/strategy needs to already know what to do when the fill just aren't there and/or market is behaving differently and you're not getting the fills you anticipated... Assuming the live account forward testing is showing good profitability, and good risk management, then you need to plan how you're going to allow/limit your strategy to run live while you gain live performance data and confidence in what it is doing. You have some research to do, and some strategy testing/development steps to take (and custom platform?), then you'll have the start of some credible LIVE results. Otherwise all your strategy is worth is akin to the value of a data compression method of only storing the non-zero binary bits.
I am not going to read all this drivel but Marsman you need to see a psychologist ... unless you have some REAL edge like market making used to be making consistantly 30% a month is just a dream from someone that needs to grow up ... and I am understating this trying to be gentle about it ...
It's Rare...that someone in trading Truly has an edge or Skill...but give him the benefit of the doubt...let him prove himself ,
This made me laugh... but not really in a funny way So true about the fetal position... especially for newbies. Once you have some years/decades of experience, you know better what to expect. Static hedge is definately a good idea. But I don't think it will help in selling tinies in individual highly volatile stocks...
@marsman ... Look, to be honest.... it's possible. But most people don't want to be sitting ducks and wait for that freight train that runs through a bunch of deep OTM strikes because of a black swan event or +90% takeover bidding war... What will be important is your VAR. What's your total risk exposure? On individual stocks, what's your gap risk of 20%, 50%, 80%? Both down and up? Maybe you'll get away with having enough margin when you do the trade... but IB doesn't look at those individual high % moves. I can tell you, that any clearing firm (and IB isn't a really a clearing institution) will look at overall exposures of: 'what if the market moves +x %'... and they look at the big risks. They will always get in touch with trading firms, MM's/Prop firms, if they are in a red zone. I think you will be in that zone...