questions about how futures work with IBKR and prt
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I think it is a good idea to post the content of such an email; I have never seen one or heard from it. I have worked with EUR as base currency and for years now work with USD as base currency. No emails. But there’s also no balance kept of / in any currency.
What you see in the 1st attachment could be useful to understand what is going on; this is about your portfolio in other than the base currency. It emerges when you make profit in the not-base currency. Thus, if you make 250 profit on your MES, then the form behind that button will show you 250 in foreign currency which is for you the USD. For me it would show nothing because the base currency *is* USD.
The 2nd attachment shows that I ever made a profit of 6254 in EUR, which is still there ready to be converted to my base currency, which I do or do not (I did not for a longer time in this account). And, as long as I do not, it is subject to the EUR/USD relation. The EUR rises against the USD and as long as it does, I think it is good to let it be. In fact it is a EUR/USD open position, which will unwind as a real trade when I balance it out (this form will do that for me per the button in the bottom right.
*When* I do that, nothing will change to my portfolio, because the net value always already contains the value in USD – just as if it would be an open position.
But no emails anywhere.
Also, no shortage can be possible because I can just have a base currency in USD, would I trade e.g. DAX (which is in EUR) only. But … I can imagine that by now there is a setting for those emails somewhere in PRT. Can that setting be in IBKR ? hard to image but ask GPT.
General advise, which is personal but you kind of ask : I have my base currency in USD because otherwise it is exactly as you feel it : you will get mad by movements which are not of your interest. Oh, it *will* change your net portfolio amount, but you want to see how your trades are doing and not how the relation EUR/USD is doing.
but
It gets more difficult when you also trade DAX (etc.) next to US futures (or stocks for that matter) because then the movement is unavoidable (when you have an open position in that other currency than your base currency).
Also : say that I moved my Base Currency from EUR to USD in the period the EUR/USD was 1:1, then now I have lost 20% with the USD at 1,20. But, I never look back and don’t intend to convert back (that’s my stance), so no worries. But true it is – I lost 20% because of that.
Reality : I put my base currency to USD when the USD was 1,30, so … 🙂 … So you just can’t influence this and just have to make a decision on it.
Last one on this : you can convert from the one to the other (base currency) in a second – it is just a setting in IIRC IBKR. It’s even done for free (unless things changed).
(with IG it costs something like a ridiculous 6% or something like that).
Your deposit from NOK to EUR (if I got that right) is unrelated (no NOK now anymore anywhere).
Next answer in the next post.
Rollover :
So you trade the 0626 already. This is a bit early but also it is fine (especially for autotrading it does not matter much).
About the picking up of the volume : yes, when the volume of the new contract gets higher than the old one, it is a good time to switch. However :
You don’t care a hoot once you know that with either profit can be made. It is only that at a certain point the old contract gets unreliable because of the low volume; especially on the last day (like Friday next week for the 0326) it starts to behave like a penny stock, and you can win 1% in a next bar of say 5 minutes. Lose just the same, but you aim for the win. So it is my experience that you can easily trade up to the last day, though it gets more dangerous – more of a gamble.
but
This was manual trading.
With Autotrading all is different and you need to decide when to go out. This hardly can be a decision based on any logic because the trades are not under your control (the program is running and a new Entry is not controlled by you). So all you can do is kill the Strategy (in ProOrder), with the sort of exception that you can leave the position open. And now suddenly the Manual Trading part (above) applies after all.
For a year or so I had built in a parameter which could be filled with the date the program should quit (with the Quit command). I did not like this, because obviously it went out at the moment I did not like it (could have made more profit etc.). However, it would make you not forget about it (but you would get annoying messages at the start of PRT each time – messages which NEVER are correct about the real occurring situation in your platform), so forgetting about it is hard anyway.
What happens if you really forget about it (without the built in quit) ? well, that the contract is delivered at expiration. Is that bad ? not really as it is the same as that Quit – only later (the very last minute). Oddly, that never turned out badly for me, because the price you receive is higher than what you last saw (don’t pin me down to this).
Don’t try this with cattle or oil, because it really will end up in your garden or on your balcony, including (huge) shipping costs.
Lastly on this subject : my feeling is not so much different than yours regarding the “f*ck it”. However, my situation might be different because of the length of my trades. Usually a trade does not run long enough to worry about it (see attachment for an example), so assumed it is not 100% of the time in the market, I kill the System in between jobs. However, the attachment is just an example of a “means” of which I have many and some times trades may last for a couple of days. Well, in that case you just need to watch out earlier, so you can still be in between jobs.
Otherwise it would not be allowed to have really long running trades because you’d need to kill them while On the job.
Of course this is easier said than done, but for me it would be a rule (and the discussed Quit really appeared not to be the solution for me).
One unsolicited hint : Never answer the messages from PRT with a “yes I like to see the new contract in a chart” (similar) because the chart with the old contract will disappear and be replaced with the new one, the new one will NOT reflect your open position and in fact you don’t see the old position any more. So if anything, THAT is dangerous and you won’t even receive the particular message about that any more.
Working with the XXXX versions in the chart(s) is in my experience also not the best thing to do (is another subject), BUT having the 0326 contract itself in the charts may take you a small day of work to move the charts al to the new contracts (0626 for today).
In any event, the end of contract time is usually super hectic, especially if you have positions or Systems in them. It is actually no fun. It *is* a sheer reason not to wait too long and start e.g. a week ahead of expiration with replacing all, because it takes so much time that you may not have at that moment.
The real culprit and stupidity in it all is that PRT requires you to make a new System. Thus, you cannot simply restart the old System under the new contract. It is one of the more ridiculous things of PRT (for IBKR) because you will lose the statistics and all *plus* it implies another pile of work for you, the user.
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Topic Details
| Forum: | General Trading: Market Analysis & Manual Trading |
| Language: | English |
| Started: | 03/12/2026 |
| Status: | Active |
| Attachments: | 3 files |
