Typo here. Too late to edit it, unfortunately. See jeb's post. We've talked to Goldman. Just curious why you included them in that list while excluding JPM for example. Yep, thanks so much for your help. Have a great week.
Yes, you are correct a side is just one side of a trade and it takes 2 sides to make a round trip. With daily volume in ES and 10 year notes around 1.5 to 2 million contracts, you are also right about 5K RTs not being a lot. Advantage Futures states "Advantage Futures ranks among the highest volume clearing firms in the industry, processing over 2.6 billion contracts in the last ten years." So, while the OP might make up 5% of Advantage Futures customers equity, he would be less than 1% of their volume.
you were focusing on retail accessible, you can go via IB to GSET... but if your focus is full prime, then diff stories and I would assume you have talked to MS/JPM/ML/CS/Citi/UBS... but then, you did say you didn't wanted to tie up $50MM... honestly, ping garachen... he can more than likely point you in the right direction...
You appear to have a special set of requirements. Have you talked to the institutional side of Interactive Brokers? I doubt they would give you commission levels like Advantage Futures would, but they might fill many/most of your other needs. Otherwise you are going to have to go down the CFTC list of FCMs and rule them out one by one.
We've talked to a few, worked at others, so by one way or another, yes. I can confess I haven't talked to CS yet, though. I've connected with him before starting this thread. I think he'd agree that we have slightly different requirements. IB's rates will cannibalize our returns. I don't want to disclose which of the above firms I've talked to and their offered rates on a public forum as it's not appropriate, but they'll be cheaper - hope this makes sense. Also, I'm not familiar if they have clients that do what we're doing but the last I've heard (2012), they did not, so I did not feel they are adequately prepared. A fortiori, there's at least 1 firm we'd pick over IB, therefore eliminating IB.
have you checked into merlin for prime? i don't know how they've been since they were acquired by wfc but it'll give you a great multi prime solution. to just summarize what you already know, you're really limited given your requirements (which i would do myself) that you don't want to be a large % of customer assets of an fcm. your choices are either... go directly w/ a large clearing fcm such as GS, MS, etc go w/ a mini prime and just use one of the above for clearing/custody go w/ a larger retail firm like advantage although you can prob count the realistic possibilities on one hand.
Lowest I've seen flat on CME products is 2c but you have to do much more volume. Caps are possible. At your volume you should be able to get 5-7c flat as an unknown if you were running your own money and had a decent deposit. Probably 8-10 if running outside money. Everybody knows everyone else's pricing. There's only 3-4 real players in this space that have broad market access. They will all start out at some crazy high BS numbers. But these are the real ones.