You're off track. $2000 ES contract @ IB wins/loses $50 per pt. $500 contract at TransAct, Velocity or whomever, wins/loses $50 a point. Usually the $500 margins are limited to 50 contracts and good only for day trading, not overnight.
Sorry if I'm being extra-dense here but, that's precisely my point (I think). Trading a $2000 margin means you've got to burn through 40 points before you're out of business. Trading a $500 margin means 10 careless points and you're done. Aren't we saying the same thing? My 50-contract acquaintance, by comparison, trades one contract per $10,000. He likes a lot of headroom.
Don't think we're on the same wave length. If an undercapitalized trader begins with $5K and buys 2 contracts @ $2K you have $1,000 headroom. -10 pts and he's at 0. Buy 2@$500 you have $4K headroom.
if u trade es with ib, then u might as well throw your money out the office windows. ib's platform is unreliable. ppl drink java not use it.
I spent some time (a few weeks) in Bill's Hotcomm room 1yr ago (Oct 04). At that time he was still "polishing" his material, so maybe things have changed in the meantime. I have heard others say he is a very good teacher (i.e. able to transfer knowledge) but I have my reservations about 2 things: 1/ his martingale scale-in method, which creates assymetric risk/reward (i.e. one can get hit with a very big loss once in a while) 2/ he was receiving fills in TM's simulator, which may be very hard to reproduce in real life. In scalping ES, getting filled is the hardest part for me
well if you spend about 1 day in the room you will quickly see these are not any concerns at all --- all aspects of his trade method are working very well day after day.
How far does he take this approach before he calls Uncle? Sounds like Franz, the trader over at TIMES...