Historical margins?

[TradeTigerShark]

Hello,

I"m relatively new to trading but downloaded some good historical commodity prices from premiumdata. Then I was making my own plots and charts with it, glueing it all together.. but now I'm realizing that it's kind of difficult to backtest accurately without some variety of historical margins and margin requirement data.

Does anyone know how to go about obtaining it? I'm particularly interested in intra-market spreads... and wonder how I could get historical margins on that for backtesting strategies. like March soybeans minus june soybeans or something

Thanks!

 

[Jos12]

This is a good question. I'm also wondering about the historical margin requirements, because I recall (if I'm correct) that the intraday margin's were disabled during the credit crunch, meaning you would have to post the bigger 'daily margins'. Besides that, perhaps it would make an contra indicator which measures speculative behavior?

Does someone know where historical margin data can be obtained?

 

[anley]

Margins aren't that relevant compared to price. Sure they will go up when markets get very volatile but that often doesn't mean anything, ie prices if they're falling will continue to fall. Yes, you can always point to something like the Hunt silver trade and margins but how often does that happen?

As for people getting busted out of positions due to a margin raise then I doubt many do because most people aren't stupid enough to trade if a doubling of margin will force them to cover. If anything they'll dump their trades because of losses, not margin increases.

But a doubling of margin might cut liquidity AFTER the event as short term traders cut back their position size for new trades.

As for it being a contra indicator it probably is of some sorts but the timing will be hard to predict, ie they raise margins today (in a falling market) and it bottoms that day. But next time they raise them it takes 4 days to bottom, the next time 2 days and the next time 9 days etc. Very hard to trade and get your timing correct.