Didn't find anything in search, so I have to start another threat....SORRY!

I reviewed ALL my trades, and guess what? The currency, meat, and grain spreads cumulatively were ahead 10's of thousands!! And the simple one position naked positions showed the huge overwhelming losses. And anything dealing with the softs were a disaster.

Right now I use Gain/ DT Daniels/Reliance which charge about $8/rt. with insignificant data charges. Is there a better deal out there?

After +4 years of trying to get this $4000 lickedly quick day trading strategy to work, I'm giving up despite the introducing broker's slick trading room.

Sure wish I listened to that Jack Carl broker that said, "hey you were doing great with those spreads" back in 1991!!!

I clicked on your post due to the title "Spreads brokers?" which I assumed was about futures spread trades. Unfortunately after reading your post I'm not sure what this is about or what you are asking. Sorry.

snicker!!

So what's a good broker (cheap that gives good fills) for spreads?

I was shocked at my analysis that the spread trades were so profitable, while the simple one position either long or short trades were so overwhelmingly disastrous. And that it took me this long to get around at sorting the trades out.

And that my 4 3 lean hog trade strategy was a totally abysmal.

Most the spread trades were from books on spread trading. Gartman's and MRCI's spread rec's were mediocre. The broker's rec's (MF Global, Lind Waldock, Futures Flight, Ira Epstein, and Mann) totally sucked.

Did you look at Interactive Brokers and using CQG or eSignal to construct your spreads?

There are two types of futures spreads, exchange listed spreads and non-exchange listed spreads.

An exchange listed spread is where the exchange will execute the spread as a single trade, with no leg risk. The most common exchange listed spreads are calendar rolls. For example ESM9-ESU9 or CLM9-CLN9. There are also 'some' exchange listed inter-commodity spreads. Examples of these include CLM9-HOM9 (ie the heating oil crack spread), CLM9-BZM9 (Brent-WTI). I'm sure there are others in the meats and fixed income markets but I'm an energy trader so used energy examples. There are also exchange listed Butterflies in some products (eg NG, CL, GE) which will execute all 4 legs as one traded. Eurodollars even has double butterflies which executes 8 contracts in 4 different contract months all as one trade! If your trading exchange listed spreads, the bid-ask is often tighter than the bid-ask in the individual contracts and there is no slippage risk. So your criteria becomes finding a broker that allows access to exchange traded spreads and then assessing their cost. For example Tradestation DO NOT have access to exchange traded spreads, but Interactive Brokers do.

Non-exchange traded spreads are spreads you define yourself and as such can have any configuration you want. For example you might want to trade a Gold-Crude spread. Or you may want to roll an ES position, but at the same time execute an offseting roll in the NQ (yes you can spread spreads!). There are two ways you can execute orders like that. This first is to manually enter orders into both contracts. This tends to have very high slippage and can result in many bad fills. The second is to use specialized software, called autospreader's to do it for you. The most common autospreader's are from Trading Technologies (which I use) and CQG. Unfortunately these products are not cheap and very rarely (if ever) free. Depending upon what your setup is, and what products you are trading, slippage can range from poor to almost non-existent. Now your criteria is software and location driven and less broker specific. Of course good brokers will probably be helping you with your software as well so that is something you may want to consider. For clarification when I say setup/location I'm talking about where the software is in relation to the order gateway/matching engine. For excellent fills you need to be running software on a machine very close to the matching engine. Again there are brokers that specialize in offering that service. If your running the software on a machine at home, and sending orders across the internet, or if the orders have to be routed to a order gateway that is on the other side of the country, the latency in that communication path will cause you to get worse fills.

While the content does not correspond to the title of the thread, I will asume that you are looking for good spread brokers with low spreads and good trading conditions. I think ETX Capital is a good choice to consider. They are well recognised in the industry.

I started my journey into spreads and Lo behold been playing with the devil in a different realm but if u want broker advice PM me since I “think” I have done the research


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SMCJB 

There are two types of futures spreads, exchange listed spreads and non-exchange listed spreads. An exchange listed spread is where the exchange will execute the spread as a single trade, with no leg risk.

@SMCJB, thank you for the very insightful post. I use TWS on Interactive Brokers. How do I find which exchange listed spreads are available? Are there separate symbols for these?

Sorry but its been several years since I had an Interactive Account and used TWS. I do not remember. I think @myrrdin uses IB so maybe he knows.