Is this still in the cards? I know you are going to be rolling out software improvements for IdealPro. Are you guys going to do something abou the double margining for crosses? I know you treat the trade in EUR/JPY as two independant trades---but the double margining does not make sense to me. Maybe it is because no one else I have done business with does it like this.
I expect 17:15, maybe even 17:10 in 2 weeks plus/minus 1 week. In other words, in 1-3 weeks we hope to have I-PRO up at either 17:10 or 17:15. We actually tried last Monday for this early schedule but we exposed an unexpected timing dependency in our system that in fact did limit us. We are eliminating this but the full release will take the 1-3 weeks.
thanks for the fast response!! I asked another question as well. What about my second question? "Are you guys going to do something abou the double margining for crosses? "
> "Are you guys going to do something abou the double margining for crosses? " Oh is that what it is ? I thought I would give IB fx a try but its too much pain - not 100:1 levelrage for all the pairs - the spread is not competetive and you still pay commision andthe worst of all When you close the trade you end with foreign currency in your account and guess what if you want to convert it to $ you pay the commission again...what a rip off I hope IB fixes this and they become competetive in FX right now OANDA is still the king. Best, - Zero
Well for scalping the EUR/USD or majors --IdealPro is very competitive and cost effective. With the half pips and all. With that said ---they have some work to do. It seems like they adapted a currency switching interbank program (Ideal) into a forex trading platform. Which is fine --but the double margining is NOT efficient for traders and it is not competitive. Furthermore, some folks (like me) may not mind ---holding other currencies for periods of time. If I have Yen profits ---I may want to hold them. Others like to clean their account back into dollars or euros etc---and for them it is a pain with the double commissions and spreads. It really depends on what you want to do with it. For scalping say --EUR/USD it is great ---simply because all profits are in dollars. And u can work inbetween the bid/ask and get your price many times. IdealPro is straight by the interbank book ---you can leg in and everything. For accounting ---most traders are used to a little more refinement with position tracking etc (which is coming in the future). Not being able to track pairs and legs and trade profits on each trade ---is a drawback right now for many traders. For small traders it is cost prohibitive in everything but scalping the EUR/USD and or USD/JPY. An ECN can be an advantage in a fast market or on numbers ---I have received fills on numbers on IdealPro that I did not get on Oanda. But Oanda is a totally differant model. FWIW, I feel Oanda is all around a great deal for anyone. I have an account there. Everything is simple and how they pay interest is great. The spreads are ok --not as good as the ecn's for some things. However they are competitive and how they calculate interest is a great deal for all traders.
You can always connect a frontend (like ButtonTrader, etc) to TWS for all the features that you like to have but are not in TWS. Some frontends are even for free (or nearly), but can give additional features, when you take advantage of a combination: frontend + TWS.