Recent content by gc1

'Wire transfer' tends to be a U.S. term, it's just an abbreviation of 'fedwire transfer'. As others have said international transfer or swift transfer are more common terms used outside of the U.S. Expect high fees (£25 or £30 are typical) and be at the mercy of your bank on the exchange rate...

If you have an account with IB you can also request a paper trading account - then you can try all the different things on it without making real trades by mistake. Most users will only every use a small proportion of the available settings.

If you are 59 now then your state pension age will be 66 not 67.

Presumably, being classified as "professional" would give you less protection, e.g. if the firm went insolvent you would just be an unsecured creditor. Are the trading costs at one of these prime brokerage firms sufficiently less than retail outlets to make the extra risk worthwhile ?

Your need to know what time zone that date/time is in. If it's Chicago time (CMEgroup) add one hour to get EST (16:30), if it's UTC subtract four hours (11:30).

Using something like QuickFIX and it's API is fine if you need the full protocol functionality but if your needs are quite simple (submit, modify, cancel, orders) I find it easier to build the message strings from scratch and send/receive to/from a socket directly. Relatively easy to do in many...

It was a slightly better program than I was expecting. Interesting that the two people featured who had been in the business longest were also both looking to get out and do something else. I suppose we'll never know if the guy we see at the end setting up his 4 screens at home ever had success...

Well, if you are long the stock your are short the currency and if you are short the stock you are long the currency, so if you wanted to hedge it should to be for the net amount (-$1,000 or +$1,000). Daily swap rates at spot retail brokers are usually around 2% pa over the currencies interest...

If you're doing a spread trade on two U.S. stocks (long apple, short Microsoft) then you have little or no currency exposure, no ? Using spot forex for hedging is generally a poor idea as the daily swap rate or roll-over costs add up over time. Not too bad for a position lasting a week or two...

Drawdown is the difference between an account equity high and the subsequent low after a period of greater trade losses than gains. - So if the follower started at the worst possible time (at that equity high) the drawdown is what his account would lose. After the drawdown it hopefully goes back...

Before investing in any of those signals providers I would suggest going to the MQL5 site and reading the user reviews. Many reviews mention large draw downs (although this might mean followers trying to trade too high a size for their account). The problem, as always, is how to differentiate...

If you are planning mainly CME and associated exchanges they have the International Incentive program for prop firms and arcades. However you need pretty high volume to make it worthwhile. I don't know the break even point. You still need to clear through a broker or exchange member but the CME...

I don't understand it at all. Wikipedia has a good explanation of standard deviation calculation, but financial markets are much more chaotic than the sort of things it is generally used for. Traders in banks have much lower transaction costs and greater size limits than home traders so I doubt...

I don't see how such a calculation would be of much use. The number would be heavily dependent on the number of samples it is calculated over. Might be useful for identifying days or times when it is not worth trading because price isn't moving much, but that would be evident from the chart.

Returning to original subject ... nice to see a firm offering a platform that can work on multiple OSs (including non-Windows systems). On Forex pairs the bid size and ask size showing on their platform is mostly only 50K or 100K, so maybe they make their money by charging regular spreads for...