good one. sorry for being unclear. yes, the DIA trades millions a day. being on AMEX, i haven't ever traded it, so you got me there. i was referring to the sector-specific DIA's, ETF's, and to most options contracts. the last time i looked, which was a while ago, most of the sector-specific stuff did 50k or less per day. and options on any underlying equities which do less than 1mil shares a day tend to be pretty light, so i'd call them unpopular, too.
Most of the HOLDRs except the BBH and SMH trade lightly. The Broadband BDH traded all of 51k yesterday, not exactly the liquidity you'd want for daytrading. Even the Retail RTH was only 361k.
I am also hoping (not expecting) that the SSF's will eventually trade in a transparent manner like NAS stocks. In other words, I will be able to get instant fills at the NBBO on NYSE stocks without dealing with a specialist. I suspect that this will be the true downfall of SSF's. If they become popular enough to take away the specialists' ability to manipulate price, they will be modified or changed to restore the specialists' advantage (like the ETF's and ISLAND).
They have been transferring (not converting) all accounts to universal whether you request it or not, including IRA accounts. You get a new account number starting with U and a couple of statements to record the transactions (because it's a transfer to a new account). They did it on a week-end and there was no snafu with TWS during or after the transfer.
SSF = sec vs commodity account. A securities account may offer margining benefits that will not be afforded to commodities accounts. You do need to request to trade SSF's at IB. It is available now via the accounts menu.
I tried getting a quote for the Dec 02 MSFT SSF but tws says I need to subscribe to the market data. On the mkt data subscription page I don't see where I should subsribe to SSF anywhere. Can someone help out? TIA
Subscription of SSF data comes with the US Stock & Commodities package. The message will probably disappear tomorrow when data is available