Onboarding Friction with Smaller Energy Futures Brokers
Anyone else finding it an absolute nightmare to get set up with some of these smaller or specialized brokers when you're looking to trade energy futures, particularly $WTI and $BRN? It's not the usual KYC for an individual; it's the corporate accounts, the KYB for an LLC or even a small prop firm. The documentation requests are often excessive, unorganized, and then you get conflicting information from different reps.
I get the compliance necessity, truly. But when it takes weeks to get an account active, missing potential moves, it starts to eat into the thesis. And then, once you're in, the withdrawal process can be equally painful. Are there any outfits out there that have streamlined this for small to medium-sized trading operations without resorting to the mega-banks and their associated fees and often higher minimums? Or is this just the price of doing business outside the main FX/stock brokers for commodities?
It's not just energy futures; this seems to be a common theme with many niche brokers handling anything beyond standard equities. The overhead for them to onboard complex entities often outweighs the potential revenue from smaller accounts, leading to a bottleneck.