If your stop is so close that a small firm like IB can trigger it at will, then your position wasn't a good one in the first place.
GoC, That is one of my concerns, we only had one of the most "non-normal functioning" market moves in the history of the market, down 1,000 points up 700 give or take, and the brokerage where I have an account, was it seems, a major participant in that move- I just never thought of IB as a player in the market, and it seems like they are moving in that direction. You could have had an end of the world stop and it got executed during that move, which most of us can agree on was total bs, and it should be natural to question, what the heck was IB doing in the middle of this bizarre market move, (I expected to hear that GS was involved - but I was surprised that IB was even worth mentioning) and I am just asking some questions regarding whether I need to factor their market participation into what actions I take with my account and trades. Let`s just say one should never have to question whether their own brokerage has their best inherests at heart, and with some of the stuff that goes on in markets these days, it seems you almost have to anticipate that even your own brokerage is trying to purposely take advantage of you. I guess the takeaway is to try and minimize the chances that you could be vulnerable and taken advantage of by any trading strategy that you implement. You almost have to factor in the brokerage screw factor these days!!!
IB are a brokerage, so of course they will be involved in trading the ES. Imagine how many of their customers traded that contract during a 110 point intraday move. They also make options markets so may have had some hedging to do for their own account. Also, how was the move "BS" exactly? Trading was never halted, it traded serious size, the market was down at 1060-1080 for more a while. It was a perfectly legitimate move and no ES trades were busted. If you are a giant hedge fund then you might have to be concerned about broker front-running. But if you run less than $1 billion or even $100 million, you can pretty much forget about anyone caring what you do in the ES futures.
Is it a known certainty that the registered broker/dealers in that population were filling customer AND proprietary order flow, or is that data segregated with a footnote that identifies the data set as proprietary accounts only? All of those firms have extensive prime and institutional brokerage clientele. Just curious as the the veracity of the data cited. Nearly all of these financial news outlets are known to not be bothered with such frivolous details.
the biggest obstacle to successful trading is ego. your post reeks of it. (heavily levered- you must be joking) nobody cares what u do. ps are u switching brokers?
Here's a thought: when you execute a 10 lot ES trade thru your IB account, which name shows up as the executing party, yours or IB's? Unless you self-clear, can you guess the answer?
timber hill was one of the forerunneers in developing the computerized option models that would take all option trades that were pennies over or under valued and hedge everything back to 0,if IB is running a few 100 million or over a billion in traders sum positions,not to mention there own positions,they would be foolish not to have a hedging dept just to minimize there risk if shit hits the fan,if they didn't,you might find it hard to close your acct and collect your cash,should a black monday event wipe out several,maybe hundreds of accounts,first options corp had one trader blow out for 50 million in 87,50 million debit on a 3 million dollar llc accct, they had to eat it
I read some of these posts , and I wonder. Is it possible these people can be making ANY money at all and be asking these questions? The answer I come up with is.... PS Those are all the people that blew up on 5/6