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Hey everyone,
I'm building a trading bot and running it from Germany and hitting some walls with EU-specific restrictions. Would love to hear from other EU-based algo traders about your setup and workarounds.
My project:
I built a Python bot that initiall I wanted to trade with 5 strategies, (bull put spreads, bear call spreads, iron condor, long call and long put, but because of the complexity and negative backtesting runs, I am focusing only in the credit spreads and removed the other 3), I am just running on US equities.
The architecture is a three-layer pipeline:
1. Quant Engine — scans for trade opportunities using IV rank, RSI, VIX regime, and delta targets
2. LLM Safety Filter — an AI layer (DeepSeek/Gemini for now, will escalated it) reviews candidates against news, earnings, insider activity before approving.
3. Rules Engine — hard-coded risk limits (max positions, daily loss limits, correlation checks, etc.)
Currently in paper trading mode on IBKR.
Tech stack:
\- IBKR (IB Gateway) for options chains, Greeks, and execution
\- FMP (Financial Modeling Prep, Starter Plan $19/mo) for real-time equity prices, VIX, daily OHLCV, earnings, dividends, news, insider trades
\- FRED for PCE inflation / macro data
\- OPRA subscription ($1.50/mo) on IBKR for options data
Watchlist: AAPL, NVDA, AMZN, JPM, XOM, AMD (6 symbols, credit spreads only, had to remove SPY and QQQ because of PRIIP)
Issues I'm running into:
1. PRIIPs regulation blocks SPY and QQQ options: IBKR account gets Error 10091 for all US ETF options. I can still get their equity prices from FMP, but can't trade options on them. This means no SPY or QQQ credit spreads, which are arguably the most liquid options out there.
2. IBKR connects to EU data farms from European VPS, IB Gateway auto-routes to eufarm/euhmds instead of US farms, so US equity prices return 0.0 without paid subscriptions. I worked around this by using FMP as the primary price source and IBKR only for options chains.
3. Delayed data on paper accounts: IBKR paper accounts don't inherit live account market data subscriptions. Even with OPRA subscription, option quote snapshots return empty data. I had to switch from snapshot mode to streaming mode for option quotes.
4. VIX data: VIX is a CBOE index product that requires a separate subscription ($3.50/mo CBOE Streaming Market Indexes). I get VIX from FMP instead.
Questions for EU-based traders:
\- What broker are you using from the EU? Is IBKR the best option despite PRIIPs, or are there alternatives?
\- How do you handle SPY/QQQ exposure? UCITS equivalents (CSPX.L, EQQQ.L)? Do those have liquid options?
\- Are you using FMP or another data provider for real-time prices? Any cheaper/better alternatives?
\- Has anyone successfully traded US ETF options from an EU IBKR account? Is there a way around PRIIPs for options specifically (e.g., professional account classification)?
\- What's your experience with IBKR from a European VPS? Did you have the same data farm routing issues?
Any insights appreciated. Happy to share more details about the architecture if anyone's interested.