I intend to trade typically maximum once a week and long term holding for hopefully about a month each time. No leverage; it’s addictive and it’s the principle - an Islamic account would be fine in that regard what’s the point of an Islamic account - what does no swaps mean in regards to that?
I also would like to trade a smaller amount autotrade; $7,000 and I think I will go with Zulutrade and AAAFx but I find the hiding of fees in the pips convienient with the sliding scale but disingenuous. I don’t like anything where it’s difficult to compare the price of things. It will be hard to be careful with such a low balance.
Regard FXCM for manual trades:
- I like the service. Spreads aren’t as low as AAAFx
- I like the spreadbetting tax optimization option… they say they operate no leverage but I’m still suspicious of it
- but they don’t offer many things to trade; no lean hogs etc
- I don’t like the platform. It’s just seems so clunky and overly complicated for my purposes. In particular I didn’t like that an error message told me “There is no trade available for that price” when actually the market was closed. I guess I could use exclusively the phone…
Stuff in [I]italics[/I] I don’t need as I prefer to hold directly. Stuff in [B]bold[/B] I’m particularly interested in. I found FXCM doesn’t cover a lot of this… I find myself trying to use a currencypair to trade on an index for example.
[I]AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR
BRITISH POUND
CANADIAN DOLLAR
EURO
JAPANESE YEN
SWISS FRANC[/I]
USD [B]INDEX[/B]
MEXICAN PESO
[I]NEW ZEALAND DOLLAR[/I]
[B]CRUDE[/B] OIL
RBOB GASOLINE
HEATING OIL
[B]NATURAL[/B] GAS
CORN
SOYBEANS
SOYBEAN OIL
SOYBEAN MEAL
WHEAT (CHICAGO)
WHEAT (KANSAS)
WHEAT (MINN.)
OATS
ROUGH RICE
LIVE CATTLE
FEEDER CATTLE
LEAN HOGS
[I]GOLD
SILVER
COPPER
PALLADIUM
PLATINUM[/I]
COCOA
COTTON
COFFEE
SUGAR
ORANGE JUICE
[B]LUMBER[/B]
[B]S&P-500[/B]
NASDAQ-100
DOW-JONES-30
RUSSELL-2000
S&P-400
FED FUNDS
EURODOLLARS
2-YEAR NOTE
5-YEAR NOTE
10-YEAR NOTE
30-YEAR BOND
Finally, it would be nice to set up something to trade according to a preset condition such as “Buy X when MACD crosses over”. I have a linux VPS that could do this but no idea on how to do that sort of thing on the commandline. My goal in this is not programmatic trading but more like assisted manual trading so I don’t have to keep checking to see what the market is doing.