Professional firms which require licensing and provide 10:1 margin should also offer various trading features to achieve elusive success, like bullets, conversions, 25:1 margin/100:1 margin, high share trading volumes and most importantly low fees. Pseudo professional firms require licensing and provide 10:1 margin, but treat you like secondary client accounts and hold your principal in an omnibus account. Other detrators to this include their business strategy which essential hinges upon their ticket charges and frequency of cajoling its traders/LLC members into excessive trades. Through high ticket charges, they make it whether you personally succeed or not, and certainly aren't setup to offer advantages like bullets, opening only trades/margin, conversions or the like. which firms can you classify and where do they stack up in the equation?
This isn't the answer you are probably looking for but there is an interesting article in the October issue of "Active Trader" magazine that answers your question and more. If I could figure out a way of posting it here w/o getting an extended stay in the slammer and big fine, I would. The article seems to verify the various degrees of "professional" firms and was written by a CPA. Best regards, Jim BTW, I have no financial or other interest in "Active Trader" except for the yearly subscription fee.
airspeed, simply ask permission for the posting, I'm sure that they are aware of the frustration of these complicated legal contracts with the wooden handcuffs (they certainly aren't golden, unless you have all the other features of the professional firms, and making hundreds/thousands in this market). I'm glad someone replied to this post, and I hope to keep it in the most active list on the home page of www.elitetrader.com. I have seen other members get permission from the writers of their articles, so that more dispersion of their magazines could occur. Lemme'no