MB Trading Futures - Introduction

That's a very subjective question.

Everyone has their opinions, as well as their own personal preferences as to what is most important to them. For some it's the spread. For others it's quick execution. Or, it may be low commissions, low carry charges, user-friendly platform, flexible lot sizes, Level 2, etc., etc.

In the end, which broker is "best" depends on who you're asking and what feature(s) they most prefer.

Actually, there are some professionals that use NeoTicker/EFX combo to autotrade.

Its not a perfect setup but improving all the time, so I hear.

You can autotrade using the API, the problem is that this API does nothing but start up the navigator in the background. The navigator is not fault tolerant, disconnections will crash the navigator. The other problem with the API is that you can only run one API client program per account, when you combine this with the less than ideal commissions the MT4 & MM combination starts to look quite attractive.

I haven't read this whole thread, but what is EFX's response to the whole NFA vs. MB Trading situation?

coscorp ~

Yes, the statement you quoted is still valid, but what address is on your Photo ID? You might want to inquiry with New Accounts at [email protected].

italy where I reside.

Craig ~

I posted this on another thread before the New Year...here you go;

Hi everyone ~

I’d like to walk you through the MBTF spreadsheet that was sent out to all of our customers and posted here.

Since the new requirement kicks in next week, we wanted to show our CURRENT (as of yesterday) numbers. The postings to the CFTC site are actually almost 45 days behind. In other words, the numbers that appeared there around December 12 were as of the end of October. Therefore, January 12, you will see the numbers from the end of November. Obviously, people want to know NOW what our numbers are NOW, so we decided to put up a financial statement for the 18th. Keep in mind that typically, we only file end of month, so this was done on the fly.

Now, I want to walk you through the spreadsheet, which is linked here:http://www.mbtrading.com/netcap121807.pdf

Let’s just get to the two things that matter. Let’s start with the Net Capital line, which is $7 million and change. It’s the difference between our Assets and Liabilities currently. THAT is the number that the NFA now measures. On the sheet, the next line is $268,598, which is a haircut that we have to take, which we took end of day December 18, based on a percentage of customer positions for that day. If you subtract that from the Net Capital, you get the Adjusted Net Capital, which is $6.7 million. Now, that haircut number can change a lot on any given day. In fact, for the end of October, we had a haircut of over $2 million, which meant that our Adjust Net Capital was just over $3 million. Here is the deal, though. If you keep going down the table, you’ll see the rest of the form shows the $1,000,000 requirement, which was the requirement as of yesterday, and then the Excess is the difference between the $1 million required and the $6.7 ANC, minus one other haircut. UNDER THE NEW RULES, the Net Capital requirement is now going to be $5 million, but no haircuts are required. In other words, the $7,001,420 number is our Net Capital against the $5 million that the NFA requires. Period. And it no longer is subject to fluctuation based on customer position sizes at the end of the month.

So that’s the first point, and the main point, and I hope it clears all of that up. The other question that someone raised has to do with the income/expense lines at the top of the sheet, implying that somehow we were losing money and that puts us at risk (I think they were assuming that the $5.4 ENC was our Net Cap and not the actually Net Cap, which gave them the concern that we could slip under $5 million easily if we lost money for a month or two). Since these numbers are not audited, we intentionally gave extremely light, conservative numbers, and let me explain exactly what I mean by that. The Est expenses of $300,000 may be accurate or close to it. However, our entire commissions for the month are realized on the last day of the month. In other words, the only income showing in the $75,000 income line is just random income (interest and such) that doesn’t relate to our business. Since this is a snapshot taken on the 18th of the month, and since all of our commissions are realized on the last day of the month, we showed none of it. Not even month to date numbers. And that’s a seven-figure number.

I love how boards work on the Internet. Two years ago, everyone said we couldn’t make a forex ECN (we did). Then they said we weren’t one because minis couldn’t work in the Interbank market (they do). Then they said that we were late with Omega because it didn’t come out in Q1 2007 (we said 2007). Then they said we would go out of business because we didn’t have the $5 million for the new NFA requirement (we said we were never worried and we were right). And now, we try to provide conservative numbers to show our net cap and people think we’re losing money (we aren’t).

Then contact New Accounts explaining that and you should be able to open a live account without any problems.

keep up the good work jleblang, just hope you guys can go to a flat commission of $10 round turn on 100k trade for all currency pairs. good job anyway.

btw justin you still can't talk about how many banks you guys have in the system.

NOTE: this is a re-post of #1527 - hoping for a response from Justin

Well about the liquidity providers in june 2006, John Floyd had indicated that they had 11 liquidity providers. It has been more than a year it might have changed. You can probably contact MBT or EFX and ask them how many liquidity providers they do have.

http://kreslik.com/forums/viewtopic....light=efxgroup

Hello

You just have to read post # 1039 and there are many others post that answers your questions.

Even the new version of MBT navigator has chart it was a beta and I think the beta phase is done.

Hi Justin. I'm giving this a bump, because my question isn't fully answered at this point.

I would like to know, as an ECN non-dealing desk, how is it possible that you have ANY PnL? Since you are not a dealing desk, you should not be maintaining any book of your own business from which to have profit or loss. Further, since customer funds are said to not be co-mingled with any other monies, I don't understand what this number could mean. Please explain. Thank you.

Pip Hunter E ~

That whole line relates to MTM (mark-to-market of customer positions), commission costs to the banks and brokers (3dfx commissions), and any positions generated by an error trade (minus PnL). In other words, if we have a trade error due to a system problem, we may have to give a customer a position to correct that and take a loss. Doesn’t happen much, but it could.

Hope this helps.

Hi Justin, Thanks for all your correspondence here.

One question. How do you compute the commission for GBP/JPY?

Thanks.

20pips ~

All commissions are based on the base currency - so in this example of the GBP/JPY we use the commission from GBP/USD ($5.00 * 1.9725 [GBP/USD exchange rate] = $9.87) based on trading 100,000 currency units.

Another example would be the EUR/JPY, so we use the EUR/USD; ($5.00 * 1.4712 [EUR/USD exchange rate] = $7.36) based on trading 100,000 currency units.

Does that make sense?

Thanks. I understand it's $9.87 for entry and $9.87 for exit (granting that the exchange remains the same)?

Makes sense, thank you.

Yes.

I think of it this way: that it's 5 x 1 unit of the currency on the left hand side of the pair @ 100,000 size lots.

i.e

it's ₤5 to trade 100,000 GBP/JPY (GBP/USD 1.9725 * 5 = $9.87USD)
it's €5 to trade 100,000 EUR/USD (EUR/USD 1.4712 * 5 = $7.36USD)
it's $5A to trade 100,000 AUD/CAD (AUD/USD 0.8809 * 5 = $4.41USD)

₤50 to trade 1,000,000 GBP/JPY ($98.70USD)
€50 to trade 1,000,000 EUR/USD ($73.60USD)
$50A to trade 1,000,000 AUD/CAD ($44.10USD)

etc.

Thanks