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Is There A Commission Free Forex Broker For Ninja?
Automated strategy? No I would never advise a beginner or most any retail trader to pursue automation as a means to be a profitable trader.
Now, if you are already an experienced and profitable discretionary trader, then you can look to automation... but if you are pursuing automation to get around shortcomings of your own trading psychology, greed, fear, etc, or because you are a tech guy and think you can outsmart everyone else, I strongly advise against it.
For a discretionary trader that is trading Micro CME FX because he wants to limit exposure, it is a good idea to not chart the micro's but instead chart the full sized, and then execute on the micro's. This is because the micros are not as fluid so if you are using any kind of tick-based chart (range, renko, volume, tick) it is going to look real nasty compared to the full sized contract. But there is enough liquidity to trade it for any retail trader that is interested in it.
There is no way to trade LMAX via NT that I know of. I really wish there was a way though. Avg spread EURUSD spread on LMAX is 0.3 compared to 0.8 on MB Trading Pay for Limits which is the only forex broker that NT support apart from IB.
1 lot is $10000 on both LMAX & MBT so $1 per pip per lot
LMAX roundtrip cost = Spread ($0.3 x 2) + Commission ($0.25 x 2) = $1.10 for market or limit order or combo
MB Trading roundtrip cost = Spread ($0.8 x 2) + Commission (0.29 x 2) = $2.2 for both market orders OR
Spread ($0.8 x 2) - Commission (0.19 x 2) = $1.20 for both limit orders OR
Spread ($0.8 x 2) + Commission (0.29) - Commission ($0.19) = $1.7 for 1 market and 1 limit order
So LMAX beats MBT in every scenario and as the lot size increases the savings scale up too and add to bottom line significantly.
I'm quite surprised that LMAX didn't make a larger impact when it launched. A forex exchange backed by the biggest investment banks in the world? I thought people would love to get access to an order book?
Seems like an excellent solution for people not having enough capital for EBS Prime? I only trade futures and options, so maybe I'm missing something fundamental?
I think it's just because of the minimum $10 000 deposit. People simply don't have enough capital to trade. They'd rather lose $1000 ten times at a bucket shop than to take a little longer to save up sufficient funds to give it a real go.
Thanks all for pitching your ideas in. I have a potentially profitable algo but the degree of profit hangs on the transaction costs. LMAX looks like the most cost effective fx broker, but that would mean another learning curve via Multicharts or the API and away from NT/MBT. Happy to do that - you've got love those curves! Or of course working through the futures scenario. Easier switch but I'd lose some impact from position sizing, depending on which contract to go for.
Looks like a raft of demo coming my way for the next week or two.
The transaction costs are impacting the degree of profitability not whether or not the strategy is profitable overall. So I'll persist. Point taken though.
A bit of context may be useful. My approach to trading the lower timeframes is not to identify a consistently profitable strategy, but rather use one with a minimum of parameters - and which trades frequently -and use a moving average of the equity return of that strategy as a reference to turn the strategy on / off. (As opposed to guessing what parameters should work via backtesting/WFO etc, I just wait until returns are above the equity MA and take that as evidence enough that the strategy is 'in sync' with the market and trade it until peformance drops below it).