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Hello,
I have several questions about margin, in the context of let's say s&p500.
1) I read on Ampfutures that S&P500 Micro emini requires $40.00 DayTrade margin.
I asked to Interactive brokers and they said for this contract they require $452.25 intraday margin.
I guess it is the same margin: you need that sum in your account to take a trade you will sell intraday.
Question is: why this HUGE x10 difference between brokers?
In my opinion this is not as important as it might sound. If you’re undercapitalized they’re actually doing you a huge disfavor by letting you “daytrade” for cheap. Which by the way, has very low odds of success. But that’s not the point, the point is that there are plenty of other considerations when choosing a broker as well. First you should research the system you’re planning on trading for questions like : Max drawdown, percent profitable, account size required , and then, based on the performance of your system and you being appropriately capitalized to trade it, you could perhaps “safely” pick a cheap margin choice if you think your intraday system has high odds of success and will be using the cheap leverage.
CME rules require you to have a funded brokerage account to get real-time futures data, other than for introductory trials. Brokers can and will offer short-term trials with real-time data without having an account, but these are limited to two weeks. You can often request and get a two-week extension, for a total of four weeks, but that will be it.
You can get 15-minute delayed data from many sources, which is good enough for paper trading to get some practice.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
