Thursday, June 21, 2007

IBFX Live Trading synopsis

Well, we started up an account with IBFX of 500 dollars, we trade it like 5000 using the micro accounts. using 2 micro lots we treat this the same as a 5k account.

our results are mixed, it is quite good to do this testing during a choppy market, it allows all the "warts" to show up on the account and the broker.

It always seems that brokers have a tendency to slip and requote more during choppy times, and also quite obvious that it is always in their favor......

Here is our findings after 2 weeks.

Spreads - Spreads on Moderate news items (orange on forexfactory) averaged 10-20 pips within 1 minute to 30 seconds of the announcement, and lasted sometimes as much as 5 minutes afterwards. LARGER news items where as much as 30-40 pips on Majors.

Slippage - Several requotes both on good volume times and low volume, 9:30 am CDT time 3 requotes on the AUD/JPY close (bit much when no news at all).

Execution speed: 1-4 pips between my entry on the DT and theirs on the TS, slow times would be accurate, but any decent movement would slow this process down. what this does is in essence add 1-4 pips to your SL and lose from the overall move.

I have had 1 TP not honored resulting in a loss. and one SL skipped by 3 pips on best execution.

As this is a choppy market, all I can say is there is an EXTREME difference between the IBFX DEMO and IBFX Live account.

Account is close to the original amount, I have been up as much as 6% over 500 for 2 weeks and drawdown as been as low as 4.8% of account.

I am expecting to close this account out and start on FXDD (hopefully next week) with the same criteria on trading.

I will reserve all ratings on EACH of the TS till I am completed with all of them.

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