No. I am a customer of IB. I believe that traders benefit by sharing information on how to minimize their trading costs and risks.
"sure, i was about to close my position at that moment i saw the zero spread on the eur/usd, and been lucky to catch it.... no big deal about it actually, eventually i was concerned about my exit price and gladly i got it!! but please know, that a zero spread is TRADABLE!!" With MB I end up trading at 0 spread during high volume ... especially between 6 and 9:30am. Just the $5 commis to beat.
IB is not an ECN!!! Do you know what an ECN is? IB does ECN style order matching ONLY among its own customers' orders. Against its liquidity providers it is a pass through request-for-fill system. If you put in an market or marketable limit sell order for example, IB will use a version of its "smart" routing to send it to the liquidity provider with the best bid showing at the time. Then the liquidity provider has the option of filling it or not. Most of the time, maybe 99.9% of the time in normal market conditions, you will get the fill. But when you need it the most, you may not. If IB were a true ECN and your order hit before a the market maker's cancel hit, you would be filled automatically. IB's smart routing is not unbiased. For options orders, when more than one exchange is on the inside, they seem to preferentially route to the exchanges where Timber Hill has a big presence. I wonder if they do the same for Forex? We can't tell because they don't identify which liquidity provider is behind a given quote.
No way. I am watching the MB feed right now. Spread for EURUSD is 2, for cable 3, yen and swiss 2. There is no time of day during which MB is quoting choice for the majors most of the time. You are dreaming. However those commissions are very negotiable. If you are doing any size at all you should not be paying even half the figure you quote.
so how do fills work with IB then? i mean in terms of filling notification, system-wise. Do u always assume that u are not filled until u get a notification? Or do u always assume it's a fill until u get a "Rejected" message?? And if ur order is rejected for whatever reason, is this notification near-instant?
If you're looking at MB at 3:42 am (and not the hours I stated or in your haste to argue overlooked) you might see those eur @ 2 ... I really don't care, I was sleeping. Right now at 8:45amest the euro is @ 1, the yen is @1 and the cable at @2. I caught a few trades at 0 withing the past hour. If you don't trade at 0 - 1 too f bad for you. And where would one go to pay less than $5 commis per 100k @1 pip? Seriously. Or are you just talking out your butt? 01-13-06 03:42 AM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from bigmrfrank: With MB I end up trading at 0 spread during high volume ... especially between 6 and 9:30am. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No way. I am watching the MB feed right now. Spread for EURUSD is 2, for cable 3, yen and swiss 2. There is no time of day during which MB is quoting choice for the majors most of the time. You are dreaming. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quote from bigmrfrank: Just the $5 commis to beat. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- However those commissions are very negotiable. If you are doing any size at all you should not be paying even half the figure you quote.
zero spread? screw that, mbt seem to be able to quote -ve spreads for a fraction of a second. However, of course ... there's no way you can trade those quotes. I've tried to arb this and failed (via the api so there'll be no comments about speed). Even when the spread is tight market orders never seem to get filled at the current quote. I will not use them until this changes
I saw, on another thread, the exchange between Kevin Schmit and IBSoft, regarding whether or not IB's forex market-makers can dishonor their quotes. I learned, for the first time, that the IB system does not require the market-makers to honor their quotes, and that they can back away from their quotes, if they choose to do so. This makes me agree with Kevin Schmit that the IB system is not an ECN, though it is, in many respects, "ECN-like". I still think IB has the best forex offering, even though firm quotes, like in an ECN, would be better.
Is COESFX a fair ECN then? Can market makers choose not to fill orders as with IB? And if not COESFX..then who?