Ready or not – mobile futures trading (and stock, and options, and baseball cards) has been going on for years now; with firms like E*Trade famously making it appear so easy to trade stocks on your iPad a baby could do it (in their crib) –  but the first attempts at it (and even a lot of the current offerings) have been rather clunky and not very easy to use.

Enter a new futures trading app called iBroker, which is easily the best trading app we’ve seen in terms of ease of use and functionality. See the app in action via the website here:  www.iBroker.com. [In full disclosure – Attain is involved with iBroker, doing the distribution for it in the U.S.].

iBroker has been live in Europe and through a single US Broker for years – but is ready for the big time in the US as of today – with the iBroker app now connected to the popular desktop platform CQG.  Meaning… any CQG user at any participating FCM can now access their balances, positions, orders, and place trades via their existing CQG login. Cool!

But our brains immediately jump to the next question…

 

 

“Are we ready for professional managers to be trading client accounts via their mobile devices?”

To tell you the truth, whether you’re excited for the tech advancement or worried by it, the move to mobile devices and unplugged trading seems pretty inevitable – just look at PC versus tablet shipments.  But will we start to see professional commodity trading advisors using their mobile devices to place their program’s trades on behalf of the client accounts they’re managing?  Will the guy on the train across from you or waiting for a flight next to you be entering 100’s of contracts for the millions he has under management. The overnight trading desks these CTA’s pay a few bucks per trade to execute orders sure don’t want that, and as a client, I’m not sure I want a manager rolling over in the middle of the night and slinging some DAX futures around for my account.

But who knows – maybe this becomes more common place, if nothing else, you could see such professionals using the app for checking quotes and getting fill notifications and essentially staying on top of the markets while at the kid’s soccer game or trying to raise money at a conference.  As Russell Crowe quips in his role as Captain Jack Aubrey in the Master & Commander Film: “What a fascinating modern time we live in”.