qwiktrade: â⦠with all the swiftness of a snail stuck in molassesâ¦â LOL! Isnât that the war cry of the customer service reps at IB.
Easy, ebner etal: Here is the definitive contingency. Have a stock(not futures) options account open with a firm other then IB. You need a non IB route as well as a non globex route, and in fact even a non CME route. Keep in mind Friday was not IB's problem but Globex(although IB will have outages as will anyone). Since you don't have a ton of margin money available, QQQ or SPY opts will give you the most hedge for your buck. Lets say your'e short 1 NQ=800QQQ and an outage occurs, you can buy calls(whether in the money or out depends on how much $ you have and time to expiration). You may still wind up short a couple a hundred deltas if you can't afford to buy an adequate amount of primo but at least you'll be pretty much protected. Generally $1500 is more then enough to buy enough calls to be OK.
Pabst Thats kind of what I was thinking. I could put enough money in my Datek account and cover with 8 QQQ options. But I know nothing about options. I thought I would want to get ATM options since they would move in sync with NQ and I would only be out the commissions. Maybe somebody with some option experience could tell me which would be the best ones to get. Dateks commissions on this would be about $25 so it would be a relatively cheap way to protect myself as long as I didnt lose much on the options.
I think one thing everyone should be aware of is that it isn't always that easy to offset a position when your broker goes down. When IB went down a few months back I finally got a backup broker but it doesn't help much in that IB is often unable to tell you the status of any orders you have in their system. So you may still be getting filled on resting orders or you may not. So you are sometimes unable to determine what is required to offset your position. Just something to be aware of, it took IB more than 24 hours last time they went down to report the actual fills back to me.
I entered a gold futures order just before the planes hit on 9/11. I did not know for a week and a half what my position was!!! Apparently firemen were wading through tickets left on the exchange floor. Managed to make a small profit in the end, luckily. But if I had a weak heart, I would probably have kicked the bucket!
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