[Dcash]

ok so in the process of doing due diligance I find myself confused about some things (and yes I have spent lots of hours lurking here looking and using search)

for someone planning to scalp the CME FX market futures 1min to 60min bars:
1. what are the transaction costs per contract RT (assume IB and Serria charts I calculated about $8 per rt but am getting conflicting info)?
2. for a $30K account how many contracts could I eventualy trade at a time (not jumping in all at once).
3. what is a realistic ROI trading this size account and alternatly is a $10k account workable (the last part I have found answers to but would still like to see the answers i get here)
4. will i need additional data feeds to go with IB and if so what is the range I should budget to pay.

Thanks for helping a Noob out

[sevensa]

Originally Posted by Dcash

1. what are the transaction costs per contract RT (assume IB and Serria charts I calculated about $8 per rt but am getting conflicting info)?

Where did you get conflicting information from? The transaction costs are pretty clearly spelled out on IB's website. You don't pay commissions to Sierra Charts, just a monthly fee depending on the options you sign up for.

Originally Posted by Dcash

2. for a $30K account how many contracts could I eventualy trade at a time (not jumping in all at once).

What's your initial risk, drawdown, risk tolerance, expectancy?

Originally Posted by Dcash

3. what is a realistic ROI trading this size account and alternatly is a $10k account workable (the last part I have found answers to but would still like to see the answers i get here)

If you can answer the questions above at #2, you would be able to calculate this yourself. As a beginner, any positive ROI would be huge.

Originally Posted by Dcash

4. will i need additional data feeds to go with IB and if so what is the range I should budget to pay.

It depends on your requirements and if you need true bid:ask. IQ-feed and e-signal are popular datafeeds. You can look up their fees. Zen-Fire is also popular and free via certain brokers.

Frankly, you are putting the cart in front of the horse. Start with 1 contract and see if you are profitable. By the time you are (if ever), you will be able to answer the questions above yourself.

[Dcash]

Originally Posted by sevensa »

Where did you get conflicting information from? The transaction costs are pretty clearly spelled out on IB's website. You don't pay commissions to Sierra Charts, just a monthly fee depending on the options you sign up for. from this forum with people throwing numbers like $4 per RT where I calculated closer to $8 with the fee for CME, is $8 close to the mark?


What's your initial risk, drawdown, risk tolerance, expectancy? $30k, $2k, med to high, that was the question. and the question was intended to help me further define these also there is a huge diff between calculated and actual.



If you can answer the questions above at #2, you would be able to calculate this yourself. As a beginner, any positive ROI would be huge. please expound on this comment


It depends on your requirements and if you need true bid:ask. IQ-feed and e-signal are popular datafeeds. You can look up their fees. Zen-Fire is also popular and free via certain brokers. yes I can look up the costs and have but what is the diff. between the data feed that IB provides for free with an account and one with true bid:ask. I'm currently paying for SC with its feed that includes bid:ask on eurusd (not futures) and was trying to find out if i need to budget for other feeds after I get the IB feeds for free

Frankly, you are putting the cart in front of the horse. Start with 1 contract and see if you are profitable. By the time you are (if ever), you will be able to answer the questions above yourself. you are not really into the spirit of all of this are you the plan is to start with one contract and when I'm making a profit you are right i will know all the answers so maybe we should all stay away from the forum untill we have all of the questions answered. I feel that I have put in a good amount of time and research and I'm asking the right questions (correct me if i'm missing the important points) in the beginer forum no less, but I think that we all agree that there is a lot of miss-information on the internet in general and on all of the original ?s I have recieved enough confliction answers that I thought I would ask specific to the point questions and maybe be able to discern a reasonable answer.

thank you for responding to my post but I think the most that I can pull out of your responce is that I irritated you by posting and the same old 95% go broke (I think I have gotten that clearly before now) but I also got the flip side of that mind set is that the 5% are the ones searching for the answers (not that there is any one answer), which leads me to check the information that I am gleaning from reading threads that are often in contridiction to other threads and with themselfs ( and no I'm not looking for the HG).

Thanks

[Dcash]

ok after rereading Sevensa's post several times I may have taken his comments the wrong way if so I apolagize.

Thanks

[Dcash]

wow whats the deal around here I write a long and detailed responce and it gets lost but a short one right after it gets posted right away lol

[sevensa]

Originally Posted by Dcash »

thank you for responding to my post but I think the most that I can pull out of your responce is that I irritated you by posting and the same old 95% go broke (I think I have gotten that clearly before now) but I also got the flip side of that mind set is that the 5% are the ones searching for the answers (not that there is any one answer), which leads me to check the information that I am gleaning from reading threads that are often in contridiction to other threads and with themselfs ( and no I'm not looking for the HG).

Thanks

No, you didn't irritate me. But you will find that not many people here are into spoon feeding and answering questions that have readily available answers or require you to put a little effort in, or questions that simply cannot be answered, even though you might think they are perfectly logical questions. The lack of responses to your questions should give you a hint.

If you want to know what IB's commissions are, why don't you look on their website, pick up the phone and call them, or send them an e-mail? Their commissions are clearly spelled out on their website. Why would you not go to the source, but instead ask on a forum and then complain that you are getting contradicting information? Questions like that, should always go to the source. Do you think IB is going to give you certain commission structure because some person on the internet told you that is what they should?

If you want to know how many contracts you can trade with a $30K account, divide $30K by the margin of the market you want to trade to get the number of contracts. Should you be trading that many? I wouldn't. You are the only one who can answer that question based on your risk, drawdown, risk tolerance, expectancy, etc. If you don't know what those are, then trade one contract until you do.

You are asking what is a realistic ROI on an account. This is like me asking you what would be a realistic score for me in my next round of golf. How would you answer that without knowing anything about me and my abilities? You said yourself that 95% go broke (this number is highly debatable, but irrelevant for now). You don't even know yet if you are profitable and part of that 5%, but already want to know how much money you can make. Based on the averages, you should expect to have a negative ROI.

With regard to datafeed, IB might be good enough for you. I don't know. It depend on what your requirements are and based on your reply, you don't know what your requirements are. If you don't know that, how would someone be able to answer your question then? The differences between the feeds has been discussed numerous times before. Asking this question contradict you saying that you have done hours of research. I've just typed in "difference between IB data feed and esignal" in Google and found numerous hits explaining that. That took me seconds, not hours.

With regard of being in the spirit of it.. you asked, I answered. It is just my opinion and you can just ignore it if you don't agree with me. I will however, give you one more unsolicited opinion that you are not going to like, but again, feel free to ignore... If you think you are asking the right questions, then IMHO, you are not nearly ready yet.

On that note, I will bowe out of this thread. Good luck in your trading and I hope you find answers to your questions that you find useful.

[Dcash]

well first off thank you for the responce second I have searched the web and came away with stuff like this eSignal vs. IB data feeds which indicates that the IB feed in many cases is better that Esignal, but in reading thru threads here i come away with a diffrent conclusion (most of that comes from posts that are somewhat criptic and tend to treat trading as a black art not a structured profession) I was hopeing that by asking the question directly i could get a direct answer (no such luck so far).

as to not looking up the info on IB as we all know there are always more than 1 way to do things and I agree with you never take the word of some one on the web but I often back up my findings by checking what other people are doing and when I see contridicting responces I start looking for things like a second rate structure. as I stated in my original post i calced it out at close to $8 per RT but see posts with about $4 per RT and was hoping that some one would point out what i'm missing such as "Duh Noob use the unbundled rates" which they have but i have not found that they are all that much better. and no I do not expect IB to give me a better rate because of some thing that someone here told them to but I often find that you do not always get the best rates unless you ask for it and know what to ask for. all in all this is the Beginer section and is it that hard for some one that uses IB for future trading on the CME to chime in with "yea that is about what i pay " or "no you Noob use this".

as to the margin I must confess I do not know anything about futures contracts (my limited experiance is with buy and hold) but they are worth $125000 and with a 4 to 1 margin it looks like I could trade 1 contract but then I get answers like 1 per every $5000 account (again the discrepency thing) and if you feel like this kind of stuff is spoon feeding me then maybe you are in the wrong section because this is the "Beginers section" and answers like "go away untill you know this stuff" are not very helpful. Where did i indicate that I wanted to jump in and trade max contracts? the answer is that i did not, i even stated "(not jumping in all at once)" but the answer sure gives me information on scalability.

ok so being a noob I know that the slick adds stating you can become a millionare over night are ploys to take my money and on the other side you can lose a lot of money in a hurry in the market. by following the 2009 and 2010 P/L thread i get the impression that 20% per month on a $10k account is realistic for some one that is reasonable good at trading. and my question about ROI was a general question about trading (specificly scalping the fx futures market) and the responce is "you will lose money if you get in right now" duh! why would i be in the beginers section asking questions if i believed otherwise and not out making kazillions of $ (overnight no less). I also believe that a discussion of this topic is of benifit to the beginners.

This all boils down to again this is the beginners section and it is not that i do not agree or dislike your opinion but that thre opinion you have chosen to experess has no berring on the task at hand and is not very informative to boot. My method of learning is that I read all I can I experiment with what I learn and I ask questions about the parts that I do not understand, which I always thought was the way to learn so when i get responces like "With regard of being in the spirit of it.. you asked, I answered. It is just my opinion and you can just ignore it if you don't agree with me. I will however, give you one more unsolicited opinion that you are not going to like, but again, feel free to ignore... If you think you are asking the right questions, then IMHO, you are not nearly ready yet." I find myself checking to see if I posted in the right section of the forum. I guess that I find myself ready to take ridicule when asking noob questions in a beginers section but am totaly confused by the Zen "your not ready grasshopper" responce. Maybe your point is to discourge beginers on this forum and your hope is that by telling me basicly to go do my homework i will just srink from your omnipitent presence, sorry I do not work that way (and never did understand why some people like to do that, if you do not want to help just don't respond) I have done my home work (and feel that asking questions in the beginners forum is part of my homework). If you do not have or know relevent answers to my questions or if you are unable to express them in a manor that is understandable by some one with my limited level of understanding then so be it, hopefuly someone else can help me out.

so I guess that if you want to bow out of this thread it will be ok with me since your help is not really help and could have been summed up with "yes you are a noob" to which my responce would have been "yes you are right", so thank you for confirming what i already know but at least we increased the post count in the beginers forum (I wonder why it is so low?). (edit and woo hoo i now do not get the delayed post thing

to end this rant I have followed many of your posts (sevensa) and feel that all in all you are a great asset to this comunity but just disagree with your method in this case.

[Tams]

Originally Posted by Dcash »

...

so I guess that if you want to bow out of this thread it will be ok with me since your help is not really help and could have been summed up with "yes you are a noob" to which my responce would have been "yes you are right", so thank you for confirming what i already know but at least we increased the post count in the beginers forum (I wonder why it is so low?). (edit and woo hoo i now do not get the delayed post thing

to end this rant I have followed many of your posts (sevensa) and feel that all in all you are a great asset to this comunity but just disagree with your method in this case.

I think many people have bowed out before they begun...
read sevensa again... you might find some wisdom in it.