I am taking charge of my wife's IRA. I have recently transferred it to IB and need to manage it since she is not interested and too busy. I can not however sit by a computer all day so I am thinking in doing some options on futures trading for her. I like first to explore the viability of such strategies I read charts and quite savvy in futures prices/trends but never much used options. I know that premiums are very rich on futures but I like to trade markets with upward /downward bias, perhaps use debit spreads to ease the cost factor. The account size is rather small since she just started with her roth IRA. ($5000) In addition I may look into spreads on futures for electronic contracts but I have to see what's available and trade according to some seasonal trends.
The only futures you can really trade options on at IB are stock index futures, currency, and debt futures (american and german). And all have pretty low volatility and thus premium at the moment... but with IB that's all I trade