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Myself and another trader are starting to have limit issues at DeCarley trading. I will suggest to others to hold off moving there until we see if these issues stop.
I keep getting rejected for trades (Crossland/CTS) because it says I don't have enough cash. That is because it uses future margin for each option. Carley worked on a fix but I still have been rejected. She immediately put the trade through herself.
The other person is having problems using Gain/Zaner360. They set the limit too low.
I can't speak for Crossland/CTS, but for Gain/Zaner360 I've been able to resolve the issue with Carley usually within a few hours (by having her bump up the limits with the broker). This is indeed a new account issue and once you have your full account up and allocated it shouldn't be an issue.
Overall the customer service + SPAN margins has trumped the minor temporary account limits issue for me.
I post this here because it is important to this methodology that we use accurate option analytics to decide on what to trade.
I am demoing multiple trading platforms: OptionsXpress, Zaner360 (DeCarley), IB (I am long time user of TWS) and eSignal. All except eSignal are stand-alone trading platforms, including real time data. eSignal is primarily a data provider, but they do include a decent trading platform.
One of the important numbers we use in picking futures options is the delta. I want a trading platform that makes it easy to search through multiple markets, expirations and strikes to find candidates to trade. Ideally, I would like to do it with an excel spreadsheet. But that is not the point of this post.
Of all these platforms, eSignal is the easiest to link to excel. The IB/TWS excel link sucks big time.
I was setting up my spreadsheet and noticed that the deltas that eSignal was showing varied significantly from IB and OptionXpress. In one example, eSignal was showing the delta of the ESZ3 1655 Put as -1 (eSignal shows deltas in %, not decimal) whereas IB and OptionsXpress showed it as -.07 or -7%. That is WAY OFF. This is the difference between trading it and not.
Has anyone else noticed wide variances like this between different trading platforms?
I usually use the Tradestation 4.0 platform for delta calculations, and I noticed that by itself sometimes delta are wrong. I'll see deltas that are obviously wrong (since deltas should be smooth across the price ladder, this is easy to see.). And that is just one platform by itself. So, what you are seeing doesn't surprise me at all.
What was concerning was that it was across the board different. eSignal was 2-7 percentage points different than OX and IB. When you're making buying decisions based on 1 percentage point, that is unacceptable. Looks like eSignal is not going to make the cut.
EMAIL FROM ONE OF MY AUSTRALIAN BROKERS
If you are looking at doing the NAT GAS CALL options best you do them with Options express, Both compliance and I too feel a little uncomfortable as a freak move like the ones in previous years will set you back 6 million dollars on a $10 move (x60 contracts as below)
While these events are few and far between they do happen and I would warn you to be very careful on the upside of this market.
THIS IS THE CHART THEY SENT ME WITH THE ABOVE EMAIL
