Anyone else having problems logging into TOS? Do i need to switch to my TDA account to use them now or something?
I had an odd one happen to me. I once had a TD Ameritrade account, and when I went to open up the TOS platform this evening, I had a zero balance. After I picked myself up off the ground, I very quickly figured out what happened: I used the same username & password at TOS as I had at TD when I moved from the one to the other all those many years ago. So what they were displaying on TOS was my old TD account. Called 'em up, we went through everything, and figured out they'd put a "tos" at the end of my username for my TOS account. Put that one in and suddenly I was above zero. Whew!
It wasnât over the weekend it was actually last week. So far I see ES, CL, 6S, SI, GC, RB, 6B and a bunch others that are all higher than the CME. You probably wonât find any broker charging as high a margin as TDA/thinkorswim.
New client and site seems ok to me -- my positions are all there as they should be. I have no idea where they're posting the new futures margin rates, though.
I saw the ES as 5000 last Friday. Maybe I didn't notice since I was flat at the end of the day. You were right in your first comment. TDA doesn't want futures traders or naive in thinking they can keep them. They kept Penson as the clearing firm and they raised the marigin of the ES by 1500 and based on what you said accross the board. Did they even announce it? You are absolutely right, they don't want future traders. They may have announced it and I just missed it.
Can you blame them when we've had 80+ handle ranges in ES lately? I mean, do you really need 12-to-1 leverage in this kind of market? Seems like a recipe for disaster for a lot of retail accounts, especially with this collective race between firms for the lowest intra-day margins. Personally I think the GC margins should be twice what CME has them at right now. I use TOS/AMTD for my intermediate/long term accounts and some of the analytics, never considered using it for futures or options-on-futures. For the latter I use a firm that specializes in that area; better commissions, better execution, more knowledgable / responsive staff etc.
Rickf, you have to log into TDA website then click on Trade->Futures and the table is at the bottom. Jshinv, they never announce futures margin increases, they just do them. Joneog, 80 handles is $4000 which is more than covered by the CMEâs $5000, there was no need to raise it to $6500 and keep it there. It is not about using the max leverage it is about them arbitrarily raising margins and not telling anyone.
Did they make an announcement they raised them prior to last weekend's conversion? Even if they raised the ES margin to 10,000 it wouldn't effect my ability to trade what I want to trade - meaning I trade a small position size very few contracts. It's the way it was done, I have a problem with. Do I blame them? Blame of course not. But I don't think it was done just because of market volatility. Hell no, they aren't interested in marketing futures, they want less futures trades. Plus Penson doesn't have a lot of cushion - that had to be in the equation.
"Never..." When silver futures margin was increased in the last couple of months TOS announced it on the hour as I recall.