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Hi,
I'm looking to potentially start trading futures contracts. I had a few questions and was hoping someone with experience trading this could help out:
- I'm assuming the only broker I can trade futures with through QuantConnect is IB, is that correct? Will it be possible to trade futures via paper trading at some point?
- What is your experience of trading contracts with zero open interest - is this possible to do? If so, how much worse are the trading costs? Of course there's no one correct answer to this, but I'm looking for pointers. How does volume and open interest generally affect trading costs?
- My impression of futures trading is that it requires quite a lot more initial capital compared to CFD trading (which is what I'm used to). Given I can't trade in anything less than 1 contract at a time, I will need anywhere between $500-$5'000 in initial margin (from looking at various different contracts). Am I correct in this assumption? Is there any way I can get away with posting less margin?
Jack Simonson
Hi Doug,
I can address your first question and confirm that, yes, Futures trading is only supported by Interactive Brokers and we currently don't support Futures or Options paper trading. We anticipate enabling that feature in the future but I can't give you a definite estimate.
Douglas Stridsberg
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