garak

I'd rather say If you think FX futures can be used to manipulate FX cash then feel free to prove it. I switched to financial futures some time ago. Had accounts with Dukascopy and Oanda.

Well you are familiar with triangular arbitrage between FX pairs I guess. EUR/USD, EUR/GBP, GBP/USD are heavlily traded on the spot market. Now there is a decent market for 6E, there is a weak market for 6B and there is no market for RP (yeah, thats the ticker for CME's EUR/GBP future). And you are trying to tell me FX futures can lead the spot market whereas there is no inherent price action within FX futures? Now that sounds rubbish I'd say I really don't care what you trade or why but it seems to me you guys are a bit home-biased. But it's still London, Tokio, Zurich far in front of any futures exchange when it comes to FX.

I mentioned the broker issue already. Besides FX futures are depending on the spot market. It makes the pace. Therefore I like to trade the primary market whether it is only 35% of that 95% or not. Try this with the futures for EUR/GBP, EUR/JPY, Swissy...

As far as I know every non-member pays 2,90/RT for CL plus NFA. Taking into account additional fees for your broker, 3,5 USD sounds a bit too good

Take different trading accounts for different strategies/timeframes. Otherwise hedging makes no sense at all. There is only long, short or being flat as Cory said.

pros - about 95% of volume is spot traded, why not trade the primary market? - there are only few futures with good liquidity and tight spreads around the clock, mainly the majors - no roll-over when trading spot - some brokers offer WYSIWYG meaning no slippage up to certain position limits - some brokers offer variable position sizes, micro/mini lots etc. - free charting cons - you have to find a decent FX Broker, because in most cases he is also a market maker meaning loose regulation or try a ECN that pools liquidity from various providers Bottom line: If you can find a good Broker/ECN there is no need to trade FX futures. Why? See above

Didn't know that feature :hmmmm: I like to see the correlation of different instruments to get a better feeling for the market and wouldn't work with a single chart only. In your case I would set up a certain order of tabs to get used to. But color would be I nice add-on, you're right.

I understand what you 've described as tabs but where are tabs in the OEC software? Do you mean the color of the window frames or did I miss out on sth.?

I don't get this I use slightly different background colors on my charts. But usually I don't work with more than 5 charts simultaneously and every chart window has its permanent place on my screens.

Well, it is OEC but it is a different Order Tool. See http://www.traderslaboratory.com/forums/f218/bracket-order-newbie-7272.html#post83636

If this is the case, they did some changes to their demo which is very nice. Last time I used it is about 9 months ago. You could make money by simply trading the bid/ask spread.

Ok, from my experience of trading spot FX, in the case of inactivity the Open of a bar would be the Close of the last one and so on till there is a change in price. This seems to be common in a market making environment. To some extent I understand that this can't be done in futures trading because it would distort the true market activity. BUT time is not alterable when I chose a fixed time period. So any compression - like the one that is to be seen on my RLM chart - is not correct as well. Perhaps we can agree on that. When I want a flexible time scale I'd chose a tick chart or sth. akin.

If a 5-min chart is a function of price and time. There should be a bar every 5 minutes disregarding trading activity. If no trade happened during one period, an OHLC bar would be just flat with Open and Close being the same. This doesn't apply for a tick chart of course where trading activity is one of two components of the chart.

I know but does this cause time gaps when using a time based chart? As far as I know bars/candles don't vanish due to lower trading activity.

I guess what you are describing as partial fills is because their Demo takes into account market orders that hit a certain price level - and it gives you fills depending on volumes. But to be realistic it has to take into account the order queue. Depending on the market this makes a huge difference.