Greetings. I am happy with IB and TWS, but am ready to consider an alternate broker with low intraday margins (ES, NQ). Reliability and quick fills are important. One-click order also. Ironbeam? Ninja?
I will not comment on any futures broker. I will give you my 2 cents on part of the question, "Your thoughts about index-futures with low intraday margin." I find that SPAN margin provides great leverage. Currently, with ES close of 3,868.75 and a notional value of 193,437 and CME initial margin of $11,660, that represents only about 6%. I've seen it as low as 4.5%. 50% of SPAN is 3%. 25% of SPAN is about 1.5%. IMO, even 25% is too much leverage over time. A $500 initial requirement for day trading is only 0.258%. The current front month VX future is about 22.56 implying daily moves of about 1.41%. That means to me that anything below 25% can wipe you out with normalized index moves. Most traders do not do well with those numbers. It does not leave room to make mistakes. I hope my math was correct, it's early.
I have close to 12 years of experience in futures now. IF you do go down that higher leveraged road, here are my thoughts. I did have some problems with AMP, I will not go into details. I will not use them again. I also used Infinity, which is now a part of Ninja. I had excellent customer service there, very personalized as I had an assigned broker. Since they are basically Ninja that is the way I would go. That being said, how long have you traded futures and how well have you actually performed when using your max leverage? The vast majority of futures traders lose money as it is, and as Robert Morse stated above, using more than SPAN margin rarely works out. Highest Possible Leverage is a double-edged sword, and most impale themselves with it and then vanish forever from the brutal Futures Arena.
No broker will offer you low intraday margins, reliability and quick fills. IB charts are awful for day trading.
if you get lower margins than what it is printed on the CME group page then there is something there against your trade. I can't imagine brokers being good Samaritans and giving away margin requirements when exchanges are quite strict on the matter. Just think about how your broker is trying to profit on you, based on that margin discount.
1) use a stop loss on every trade. Preferably a stop loss held on the exchanges server. 2) Avoid holding over volatile economic numbers, FOMC, CPI, NFP etc. I recommend using leverage only when you have made profits. Start with 10:1 leverage, and as your profits grow use 20:1, 30:1, 40:1, 50:1.. etc. Effectively only using high leverage on your profits and not your base account. This way leverage wont wipeout your starting capital. These low intra day margin brokers let you do this kind of Money management approach. The other brokers do not. You cant use extra leverage on your profits.
Curious, nature of problems with AMP? I've traded with dozens of brokers over the years, but mostly with IB the past 10-15 years; mainly SP futures, but would consider another firm.
Using IBKR as main broker and AMP as alternative for futures since about a year. I love the additional functionalities IBKR has over AMPs metatrader, ie. Scaling orders, conditional orders (with the ability to combine conditions). IBKR and AMP both perform well imo, even during high volatility, small delays (max a few seconds) right after cpi or around market close have happened, but generally pretty solid. If using AMP make sure you dont go for the even lower intraday margins (i think 500 on nq instead of the already low 1500), because you pay higher commissions. For me marginwise IBKR is fine most of the time, i mostly use (the much smaller) AMP for cheap and only using small capital intraday hedging.