Looking for a good IB

Hi all:

I know usually it is IB's who are posting looking for clients. But, this is a different kind of post. I am actually a client looking for an IB.

I currently have an IB who is giving me 4 dollars per standard lot rebate. But, I feel that I am doing all the work (ie trading and taking risks) and he is just sitting and collecting a cut of my spread. I feel that I should be getting much more than $4 rebates per standard lots [at FXDD where I get 2 pip EURUSD and 3 pip USDJPY and 4 Pip GBPUSD spread.]

I trade with a fair deal of volume. I have already done 120 standard lots this month so far. I am looking at trading about 350 to 400 standards for the month. So, as you can see, this is no small potatoes in terms of volume.

So, if any IB's are out there who wants to compete with $4 rebate, (ie you need to offer me at least 7 dollars rebate) please let me know. But, before you contact me, here are my requirements:

1. You have to be a reputable IB. I will phone interview you and ask for references.

2. You have to be registered with the NFA.

3. You have to be willing to give me a $7 per lot rebate.


As you can see, I consider myself somewhat of a savvy consumer and I won't take any B.S. Please be serious if you are going to contact me. I am basically offering you a chance to make commission off of me. You treat me right and I will treat you right.

signed: Volume Trader.

Why not go with an ECN, 0-1 pip spreads, and forget "rebates" altogether?

I was very dissatisfied with EFX. I hated their slippage and their TTO orders. EFX is an exercise in frustration. Let me just talk about the TTO:

After weeks of testing EFX's live platform, here are my thoughts:
Their platform does not offer stop and limit orders. Instead, they have a TTO order. TTO orders are similar to stop and limit orders. So, Say you want a limit at 2.0600, then, when the market gets to 2.0600 , the EFX platform will place a MARKET order to sell at 2.0600. HOWEVER, since this is a MARKET order, you will often get slipped several pips. Out of the 22 trades I had, a majority of them had experienced slippage. [And the slippage is mostly against me! Just bad luck, I guess.].

Sure, you can say: This slippage represents real market conditions. Yes. This is true! However, This is unnecessary slippage. Let me explain why: If you watch their training webinar, they tell you explicitly that to avoid slippage, you should use limit orders to enter and exit the market! YET, on their TTO order, they force you to go with a market order. See, the TTO's are not real orders (ie they don't go on the level II quote book) until the market trades through the TTO price. Then, the TTO order is converted to a Market order. And since it is a market order, it comes at the end of the que for all the other orders already in the books. So, NO, wonder you get slipped with TTO's. [Because, By the time the TTO is converted to Market order, all the liquidity at that particular price has dried up.]

If they would just allow TTO orders to be true limit orders (that actually go into the level II order book at the time it is placed), then they could easily eliminate a huge portion of the slippage!

I hope you understand this point that I am making. Justtin understands this point, but he gave me the explanation that they hide TTO orders from the order books so that other people would not be able to hunt our stops. That seems pretty flimsy as a reason and I don't buy it. I think the real reason is that they just don't have to platform technology to actually have two orders (both the stop and the limit orders) in the book at the same time (ie they are afraid that if they really placed their limits and stops onto the order book, then there is a chance that both could be hit at the same time.) So, My thoughts are that they should come up with a way to address this issue and make TTO's true limits and stops that actually show up on the books! I mean, seriously: the reason I would go with an ECN is because I want to avoid slippage! Yet, I am getting slipped just about every trade! I really do hope EFX fixes this blemish.

Signed: volume trader.

Of course you can place real limit orders on the efx platform. Altho if you use a stop and a limit order for an exit-bracket, they dont cancel each other like a tto does.
As far as i am aware, a tto works like two stop-market orders, and stop orders dont show in the book in genereal.

Regarding TTO orders…actually, I have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. It would not work to place both sides of the trade as live orders into the system, and here is why. What if a customer is long EURUSD at 1.4660 and places a TTO with a 1.4656 stop and a 1.4663 limit (lower and upper triggers). That is only 7 pips apart. It wouldn’t take much of a news blip to create a scenario where both trades trigger simultaneously, and we can’t have a scenario where you end up selling and then shorting. Now, the only real solution for that would be the following. We could come up a minimum number of pips that you need to place between your limit and stop (triggers for the TTO) that we feel would comfortably never, or at least almost never, create a scenario where both trigger. How many pips is that? 10? 15? 20? I have no idea. It would also depend on the pair. Either way, to do that would be to place an arbitrary limitation on our customers, which is exactly what we are trying to avoid on a platform that is designed to let traders do anything. People don’t want to be told that their limit has to be so many pips away from the stop. That is what a deal desk does when they say that you can’t place any order except a market order within 5 pips of the current market. So yes, our system monitors the two prices of your order, and whenever either is hit, a market sell order (assuming you were long) is placed. Of course, in some cases, you might not get the exact price of your limit (upper trigger of the TTO) for exactly that reason.

However, I have to say that you can accomplish exactly what you want to accomplish because you have already addressed (as I just did) what the problem would be if both sides of the trade were live. We aren’t going to run the risk that both sides might trigger, and we aren’t going to force our customers into having a mandatory “safe distance” between the TTO triggers. But you can do it yourself. Let’s say that you are long EURUSD at 1.4660 and you want to either stop out at 1.4620 or sell at 1.4700. Place a stop market sell order at 1.4620 and place a limit sell order at 1.4700. Now you have a true limit in the system at 1.4700 and can’t get worse than that price. Of course, if that hits, you do still have the stop market at 1.4620, which you need to cancel yourself.

Either way, the issue remains the same. Are we going to take on the risk that both of your orders trigger (which is the exact possible problem) or force our customers into leaving a certain amount of distance there? No. The first option is completely unacceptable and the second option goes against the nature of what we have created for our customers. Can you do it yourself if it is that important that you only get exactly your limit price? Sure.

One other note for explanation. If I was a deal desk, this would be much easier because I am executing against the customer. Therefore, I could have a true limit with a stop in the system, and my programming would simply be that if I bought the position back from the customer at either price, immediately, the other side is not available. However, in our case, that doesn’t work. If we put two live orders out to the street, even if one was sent a cancel order the minute that the other got filled, in a fast market with orders close together, we might not get a confirmation of the cancel before the second order gets filled too.

LongTang,

I think you are a daytrader and you dont like slippage. Well not every brokers dealers are perfect.

Currenex or EFX ECN models are in my opinion the same. You will get the slippage too!

Market Maker brokers are the worst and you should avoid it.

If the slippage is your real problem, then try the EBS model. The top tiers banks use them. Lots of liquidity, but you will get some slippage too. Minimal deposit: $50,000,000.