I'll never understand why anyone trades at these incredible leverage factors and complains when they get wiped out. IMHO, its simply suicide.
very kludgy price action. comstock quotes on the eur/usdl, for example jumping around in a 6/7-pip range, while the Refco quote just sits there. It's not what I'm used to from the big exchanges. I don't like it. How is Refco deciding its bid/ask?
from the IB website -- knowledgeable folks, is this bullshit? "IB is the first broker to provide direct-access forex trading with interbank quality spreads, institutional size and no conflict of interest. Unlike other FX dealers that trade against the customer, IB evaluates multiple major bank dealers and routes its customers' orders straight to the dealer with the best price. "
thats one of the main reasons though, higher leverage. RBS. UBS etc won't allow less than 3% margin (33 times), i was getting better than 1% with ACM (180 times on gbpusd for instance), same deal with FXCMPro/Currenex today, almost same with HotspotFX (1%) which are ECNs by the way, i.e. you r not a prisoner of this or that particular dealer's quotes... also finalizing a prime brokerage relationship with? a securities firm actually, not a bank... why? costs me more per trade but again i get 3 times more leverage... now i am not advocating using high leverage but, to each his own... as for futures, what i've seen over the past couple of days in terms of CME curr. futures volume on the bid/ask doesn't excite me honestly... i'll keep watching but i am not getting a sense that i can do even 5 sterling 1-click without at least 3-4 execs and some slippage... thats not the case on spot FX...
I agree. On Oanda's play account I took on a 10 lot position and Oanda required $60k in margin, $25k for a 5 lot position vs only $10k / $5k for Refco at 100:1 leverage. Lets imagine one day that everyone had $100k to trade with. Using 5:1 leverage you would only need $5k on deposit with Refco and you could add an extra $10k to cover movement and then deposit the remaining $85k into and interest bearing account at ING. You could wire funds into and out of the account and in the event that the broker / FCM / MM went under you would only have minimal funds on deposit anyway. Important because futures / FX has no SIPC type insurance.
I understand the leverage argument - y'all are braver than I am! It'd be intellectualy interesting to me to see hwo they operate if a customer opned an a/c with say, US$250,000 and swung a 10-20 million position constantly. Great concept though. Probably not for me.
So, what is their net position in any one currency at a given time? Or is their argument that all their biz negates risk by being synthetically flat due to offsetting customer deals? IMHO, as the market moves, their mkt exposure can be significant
* $500.00 deposited into Refcofx account * Leverage 200:1 * Trade the EUR/USD * Trade only 10k lot at a time ($50.00) * Each pip movement - + $1.00 * $3.00 to open trade (3 pip spread) * Set LIMIT to catch spikes. * Set a STOP to match your maximum loss you can take, but not too tight. * 100 pips = $100.00 loss or gain. It will take a long time to drain your FOREX account if you follow the above. No more risk than stocks, less risk than options.