@kotika, if I leave the money at my bank I cannot use it for trading. The money I have at IB must be used entirely for trading. Obviously I don't have all my money in IB's account.
If account is under personal name, a problem is it´s much harder to move large sums of money from a bank account than from one´s IB account, especially if one intends to do it online, besides the fact Ciccio stated several times already he needs all those funds in his IB account to fulfill margin requirements
@ciccio, do you only trade in european futures? I gave up on trading EUREX futures after I realized that IB charged very high fees relative to exchange fees... anybody here know who might be able to give better rates than IB on EUREX? Newedge maybe?
@kotika, I trade futures all over the world, including Asia and Australia. The only big problem IB has (from my point of view) is its bad customer service.
Hi Kotika, could you please elaborate on this matter? IB isn’t always cheap (BVME is quite expensive, for example) but as far as I know, you can trade the “big” DAX futures (over 300K Euro of value) with 2 Eur of commission, all inclusive (and that’s apply to all EUREX futures other than MINI DAX). And I’m talking about the “fixed” approach, which doesnt’ require any minimum quantity, you have the option to pay less if you trade more with the “tiered” price structure. So, if you know something better on cost but with similar service (with the option to retain the base currency in EUR), please let me know.
@Angelo_60, I dont remember exactly but I wanted to trade VDAX, the DAX volatility futures, and the value on it is ~15K euro and commissions around 2E. The exchange fee is only 40cents. I asked IB if they can lower their commission but they said no.
I'm not sure I understand. If you trade say in say Korea, your margin will need korean won. Do you convert Korean won in such case or do you just pay IB interest charges for borrowing korean won?