SB company most likely to give price on the screen

Just wondering which SB company seems to be best at consistently giving you the price on the screen, and not changing it to suit themselves, especially if you are trading in bigger stakes?

I'm sick and tired of SB companies now... opening an account with IB - just to see how it goes!

Hi
Can anyone shoot ideas about Spreadbet company like(CMC,FINSPREAD,CAPTIALSPREAD,IGINDEX) & Forex Spottrading using OANDA,REFCO,IB...

I believe both are market makers and i read in few of posting in this forum that compared to spreadbet company its better to open account with IB/REFCO etc for trading....(Iam also aware that spreadbet companies bias their price, how about these spotrading brokers OANDA,REFCO,IB, do they also bias the price.........Iam not sure about how when the system is automated by trading firms they can bias the price and make to hit the stoploss ....in either case is it possible.....
Can any one help me answering this...........

Thanks ,
Cheers
Vp

Some info
http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/index.html
http://www.financial-spread-betting.com/Spread-betting-vs-futures.html

hi vishwamv
i have dealt with finspreads and would recommend them. I have found them to be all round open honest and friendly to deal with. They have a fair range of instruments to deal with, indices ,currencies ,commodities, interest rates and shares uk, european and us.they hold many open days to welcome new clients and demonstrate their system,also some free training for novices like myself. the charting system on their site is pretty poor.I have not had price slippage problems with them but i try not to trade in the middle of breaking news.I do know people who have had problems with other companies, and refco has been mentioned.
Capital spreads seems an ok company to me,i have a free demo account with them, the range of product seems smaller to me, but i suppose it depends on what you trade, anyway they have their own thread on this site so i,m sure thats worth a look.Oh and i like their charts.
I also have a demo with oanda i find them very good, brilliant charting package, tightest spreads, lots of further research, like currency correlation and open and short ratio.I will go live with them soon, but they are only currencies .
Rod

Think City Index are pretty accurate - it's a whysiwyg interface apparently - 'what you see is what you get'.
Heard spreads are sometimes better at deal4free but financing costs may not be as good.
Used finspreads briefly a while back and can't comment on spreads and accuracy of on-screen pricing, but as rodcar says above, have heard they're super helpful and always ready to answer queries and take the time to explain stuff.

HI

@Camelot

Thanks for the weblink , sounds great and has got good points and more information of both spot trading & spreadbetting.

Thanks to rodcar and songoku, only thing i was bit worries is both are market makers and got to have a strategy which is not affected in that stophits biased by these market makers.......

I will look into it.....

Thanks mate
cheers
viswa

I have been doing the rounds of seminars with the SB firms and I would say that they all (well, most) have unique advantages. Two firms seem to perform better than the rest in this area, Deal4free and Global Trader.

I have been told that Deal4free who are being renamed CMC are quite price transparent, in that they offer near market prices on most of their contracts. The fact that they offer such narrow spreads means they cannot afford to skew the bid or offer too far from the market price. At least I haven’t had much experience of changes in prices from CMC.

At Global Trader’s spreads seminar they spoke pretty much exclusively about the area of price transparency and how damaging dealer intervention is for the industry. They have bucked the trend of offering a fixed spread wrapped loosely around the market. Instead they have fixed their bid to the market bid (and their offer to the market offer) by a fixed amount, which they call a Flexispread (ie their price flexes in direct proportion with the underlying market). One key word that I learnt from this seminar was “price contractions with liquidity”. I noticed whilst testing GT’s system that even when the market had a wide spread I could still trade. This was in sharp contrast to other spread betting firms that simply do not quote a price, at the time I really want to get out. As a trader I find it frustrating to be dealing with established spread betting firms that simply have one dimensional pricing systems, either you trade with them at their price or you don’t.

Having said that i will always keep my accounts open with other spread betting firms......

Hope this helps

Haven't encounterd Global Trader but will def go and check them out after what you've said Hallto. Have noticed that spreads on City Index can be wide depending on liquidity of underlying, and it also seems that spreads can increase wildly in fast moving/volatile markets. The spread betting firms make money from their spread whether you win or lose, but have also noticed I've been stopped out by City Index's price being different and expanding. For example, their spread is 6 points on stock A, so bid and offer are each 3 points away from the mid - can take this into account when setting stops in line with support/resistance etc, but has happened that my stops are triggered by them expanding their spread. Assumed this was just one of the drawbacks of spreadbetting though.

Are they effectively fishing for stops?

i don't think that any of the firms, city especially, would think stop-fishing is a good idea, even if they had the ability/systems to do it. the point is that us spread betters are trading what i would call a double-derivative. First, the price of the future contract is a derivative of the cash market and the second layer is that the price of the spreadbet is a derivative of the futures contract. this second layer of 'randomness' that i wanted to remove, hence the seminar tour, just makes it more difficult and as i've read on this board several times leads to some anger/confusion. perhaps i am just spoilt, my day job is trading at an inv bank where i get perfect visibility of the market.......

good luck.

I usually go for rolling contracts and only use the forward months if I plan to stay in for more than say 3 weeks. Can see how your day job might adjust your outlook on things though!
Would it be true to say that the expanded spreads are just a basic feature of spreadbetting and that the way to get tigher spreads but still have extra leverage would be to use CFDs? I'm not making enough to worry about CGT just yet...

Assuming that you have all products at your finger tips and that price is everything to you (ie trading platform speed/functionality, customer service, getting the correct price on screen is secondary) and that you trade equities, then you need to look at 3 things. 1) how long is my average trade duration 2) which instrument with 3) which provider is going maximise my pnl.
Point 1 is easy. points 2 and 3 can only be found through a bit of research through all of the websites. with spreads the charge is built into the spread. with rolling cash spreads it looks like the charge is both in the spread as well as the funding spread they charge for holding overnight (ie libor + x%) and finally with CFDs the charge is a commission rate plus the funding spread.
if that seems like being too much like hard work, then you could take the view that the competition is so strong now that you can get market access at a very low cost pretty much regardless of which instrument and provider you choose. in which case, the factors other than who says they are tightest come into play. that and picking the right stock........

hallto

in reality the prices offered by the SB companies do give good visability to the current active price, the thing you cannot get is the market depth as obviously the SB company is in the position of being a market maker in every contract they quote. At Capital Spreads we make it a stated policy that we never 'bias' our prices and they always reflect either the underlying cash price (in the case of equities and FX) or the underlying futures price (in the case of Indices commodities and bonds) with our spread either as an absolute (as with the FTSE for instance) or as a spread around the market price as with equities.

As with all SB companies we have our supporters and detractors but dont be persuaded by what somebody says at a seminar, the best thing is to actually try them out for real (or at least on a demo account). In general we have a very (very) high client retention even though other companies may claim superiority in practise our trading platform compares more than favourably.

With my fairly high spec pc at work I find it difficult to get one of the SB companies you mention to load up (and stay loaded up) which might cause a great deal of frustration and on calling them up had to wait for over 3 minutes on a boring tuesday morning to get an answer having first been automatically transferred to South Africa. What would happen when things get hectic. I still cannot get their web site to stay open for long. So don't believe all the hard sell you hear.

In general CS will nearly always fill clients on the price displayed especially in indices commodities and equities. Although in FX we do reject a certain number of deals due to volatility and scalping. In total we reject under 1% of deals (really!)

simon

I cannot get their site to load at all never mind stay loaded.

There is only one SB company that is totally transparent and that is Futuresbetting.com. They show the price action and size of the underlying market itself and fix the spread around it. They don’t take positions against us, so there’s never any bias. They are also the only SB to show the underlying market depth. I’m a client and now making money because it’s a level playfield at last.

FinsxCapital

I've recently tried Capital spread coming from Fins and i will be going back to Fins after what i've experienced with Capital as they manipulate the price to the egde of every trade you make.
At least with Fins you are likely to get the spread either side of the market or sometimes in your favour.
Not that it matters that much but at the end of the year it can amount to a considerable amount of pips.Also what i've experienced is that you cannot catch the price that is on offer, whenever you trade the price has moved,with Fins you can.
The main thing is that the market could have moved a couple pips in your favour but this does not register, as the price stays the same very infuriating if your trying to get small points.

CJIA

As always, you need to do some research and work out what suits your trading style. I recently opened an SB a/c with IG Index and do use them but on on my my Dec Longs I noticed the spread had changed considerable (from 4 points to 8!) a short while after I'd placed it.

This week I attended a Seminar organised by E*Trade; if you opened an account the same night (which I was thinking of doing anyway) they credit your account with £75 after you make 2 x £1 per point trades.

What was immediately noticeable is the tighter spreads on the same stocks on E*Trade compared to IG Index; this, coupled with (so far) excellent customer service and decent charting functionailty makes it worthwhile for my current needs.

Bear in mind I'm quite new to trading so experience is limited but I can't emphasise strongly enough the need to shop around and see what suits your own requirements based on trading style/strategy as opposed to what others may view as the 'best' option.

HTH

ALI

Kimset110 said:

As always, you need to do some research and work out what suits your trading style. I recently opened an SB a/c with IG Index and do use them but on on my my Dec Longs I noticed the spread had changed considerable (from 4 points to 8!) a short while after I'd placed it.

This week I attended a Seminar organised by E*Trade; if you opened an account the same night (which I was thinking of doing anyway) they credit your account with £75 after you make 2 x £1 per point trades.

What was immediately noticeable is the tighter spreads on the same stocks on E*Trade compared to IG Index; this, coupled with (so far) excellent customer service and decent charting functionailty makes it worthwhile for my current needs.

Bear in mind I'm quite new to trading so experience is limited but I can't emphasise strongly enough the need to shop around and see what suits your own requirements based on trading style/strategy as opposed to what others may view as the 'best' option.

HTH

ALI

Click to expand...

I suspect your spread had widened because it was out of market hours?

With IG and Fins, you get credit which (if you use wide stops) brings them in to line more with Capital (hence probably Etrade?) on stocks.

I did a trade through CMC yesterday and paid 0.3% total spread on a stock, with 4.5% annual interest - bloody cheap. Today, I asked for a quote on a company with a market pread of less than 0.5%, and the total spread with CMC was 2.5%!

IG, Fins and CS offer a fixed % charge to their stock bets. With CMC, you can get both the tightest and widest spreads as (I believe) they base their spread on the amount of business they are doing in the stock, hence how much they can offset.

UTB

It was during trading hours (around 2.00pm on a UK FTSE 250 stock) so it did throw me a bit!

I've heard a mixture of views on CMC but I guess I should follow my own advice and investigate for myself as the what you say does make it sound quite appealing.

Regards

ALI

Kimset110 said:

It was during trading hours (around 2.00pm on a UK FTSE 250 stock) so it did throw me a bit!

I've heard a mixture of views on CMC but I guess I should follow my own advice and investigate for myself as the what you say does make it sound quite appealing.

Regards

ALI

Click to expand...

In fairnes to IG then, I suspect the market spread had widened.

With any deal I do, I insert the quotes into a spreadsheet and check (within the margin of error of the market spread info I have) that the SB firm apply the charge they say. In every case, they have.

Only CMC add a varying spread, based on their orderbook, I believe.

The upshot is to hold several accounts and trade with CMC when it suites - which isn't always.

IG will offer the largest number of stocks outside the 250.

UTB