Finspreads

Spread Betting Companies Do move there own Quote around during the day depending what positions there clients have.
Should many be long the quotes will be moved lower from the underling market and the oppersite if clients were short.
With companies manipulating quotes ( revising fair value ) using futures prices from the market and adusting them when it feels necercerry I wonder why anyone use's Spread Betting Companies ?

Direct Acces in the market must be the way to trade profitably

Spreadbetting is s sure way to go broke/have largers losses and less profits

TomTom said:

Spread Betting Companies Do move there own Quote around during the day depending what positions there clients have.
Should many be long the quotes will be moved lower from the underling market and the oppersite if clients were short.
With companies manipulating quotes ( revising fair value ) using futures prices from the market and adusting them when it feels necercerry I wonder why anyone use's Spread Betting Companies ?

Direct Acces in the market must be the way to trade profitably

Spreadbetting is s sure way to go broke/have largers losses and less profits

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This is a myth, I am afraid. SB companies can be pretty useless during news. A good trader would not go broke because he uses SB, and a bad trader will go broke trading direct access. Trading outcome is purely a matter of skill. You gotta trust me on this.

Hi TomTom
Im just wondering if you were particularly singling out finspreads, or any SB outfit for this, for example this morning I was observing the ftse rolling quote from IG Index, finspreads and capital Spreads demo and I didn't really notice either quote from fins or IG move out of sync with each other, I have to admit that the CS demo quote was strange to say the least but thats not relevant to this thread.

Apart from comparing between spreadbetters, outsiders can be compared, too.

http://www.dailyfx.com/charts/ChartStation.html

When I am interested in Forex, I have both Fins and this site on at the same time. They seem to work together, to me. They might vary by a point now and again but I'm not a scalper. Maybe that is the difference. On another thread, we just talked about that. Trading 50 times a day with a spreadbetter isn't possible, neither is it advisable for newcomers to try it.

Split

Splitlink said:

They might vary by a point now and again but I'm not a scalper. Maybe that is the difference. On another thread, we just talked about that.

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This is my thinking exactly. The spread for forward currency pairs is quite big with IG but because I don't scalp when trading on forwards the extra points in the spread is almost irrelevant compared to the potential movement gain over 2-3 days.

TomTom said:

Spreadbetting is s sure way to go broke/have largers losses and less profits

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I have to disagree.

I think that in many ways it is EASIER to make money through spreadbetting than it is in the direct market.

It just depends what type of trader you are.

I think that in many ways it is EASIER to make money through spreadbetting than it is in the direct market.

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Unless you are talking of the tax benefits or position trading then why do you think this ?


Paul

Trader333 said:

Unless you are talking of the tax benefits or position trading then why do you think this ?


Paul

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Of course there is the tax benefits. Then there is also the style of the trader. It's usually the very short term traders that constantly moan about bad fills and requotes.

I go as low as trading hourly bars and never had more than the very rare problem. I have been spreadbetting over three years now and have over ten accounts and have dealt with all the major names mentioned on here.

Some other advantages come from the fact that you are BETTING and not TRADING.

Can you get a guaranteed stop order when you trade the direct market?

Also, when you trade SB, you can't get LOCKED in a LIMIT move which is something that direct market commodities traders have to deal with.

Then you've got the fact that people complain all day about incorrect pricing and moves against them that don't mirror the underlying and yet don't realise that they should be using this to their advantage.

I used to make a huge deal of money from realising when prices were out and exploiting them. Either this was done through latency scalping on significant delays or finding examples of "untrue" volatility where the price spikes higher or lower than the spread.

At the end of the day, in my opinion, the odds are in the traders favour, not the SB company. There is the odd exception to this, for example an SB company that closes overnight on markets like FX that trade 24/7. I was burnt on this the other night. But a trader will know his SB company and should accomodate their rules/idiosyncrasies into their trading strategy.

Its so easy to fail to make money and then blame the SB company - like going direct market is going to make all the difference.

Its so easy to fail to make money and then blame the SB company - like going direct market is going to make all the difference.

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I agree that moving to DA will not improve a poor trader and I can see the advantages of price discrepancy etc. I have traditionally traded US Stocks and now trade forex and I know that many of the big hitters on forex prefer DA mainly because they get filled pretty much immediately where with SB companies they were referred to manual trading which delayed the trade. Also with SB companies they didn't offer the range of US stocks that I needed so it was never an option at the time.

One of my associates also had his account closed down when he made £40K by arbitrage trading one SB company against another and they found out about it.


Paul

TomTom said:

Spread Betting Companies Do move there own Quote around during the day depending what positions there clients have.
Should many be long the quotes will be moved lower from the underling market and the oppersite if clients were short.
With companies manipulating quotes ( revising fair value ) using futures prices from the market and adusting them when it feels necercerry I wonder why anyone use's Spread Betting Companies ?

Direct Acces in the market must be the way to trade profitably

Spreadbetting is s sure way to go broke/have largers losses and less profits

Click to expand...

Gosh there seems to be a glut of SB bashing going on right now.

YES, SBs will make life difficult for scalpers and traders who hold trades for seconds.

BUT

You can trade small £1pp - you can't do this DMA
They provide a simple to use interface with all markets on one screen
They offer guaranteed stops
There are no liquidity problems - i.e. you wont be stuck with a contract you can't sell

and the most important (for me)

It's tax free. I'm a 40% tax payer and I am well over the CGT allowance already this year. SB'ing has saved me thousands.

You can trade small £1pp - you can't do this DMA

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Err, yes you can. It depends on the instrument that you wish to trade. If you trade say the GBP / USD and bought 20000 then for every 1 pip movement you would get a $2 move which is just about £1 per pip.


Paul

Trader333 said:

Err, yes you can. It depends on the instrument that you wish to trade. If you trade say the GBP / USD and bought 20000 then for every 1 pip movement you would get a $2 move which is just about £1 per pip.


Paul

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I was thinking more of futures contracts.

These Spresd Betting Comapnies sat they not not manipulate Quotes.
However they do say they adjust there Quotes in relation to the underling Furtures Price.
Isnt THIS CALLED MANIPULATION ?

I do agree direct accsess if trading comodities are risky, but in genaral with smaller bid/ask quotes the trader is much better of not using the Spread Betting Firms.

When the paltform is down they say its working fine here.

When there is market action they freeze quotes and dont accept orders

When volitility is high they will not answer the phones.

With Direct Access the price you see is the price you pay, no Bull S@@T excusess simply trade buy/sell faster than SBs

If one dose trade £1 a point Yes indeed SB are good, any thing over £10 a point Direct Access has to be more profitable.

Comming from some one with ex spreadbetting contacts this is a fact.

TOMTOM

TomTom,

You said 'with direct access the price you see is the price you pay'. You couldn't be more wrong, my friend. You can have some serious slippage with DMA trying to trade market orders. This is a very old story, by the way.

When using DA then sometimes market orders can be an issue when markets are volatile so the way around it is to use limit orders. I have found this to be fine for trading forex on news announcements.


Paul

Yes Paul,
Using limmit orders is the way to go on Direct Access, easy buy and sell limmits/Stops

SB companies will fill you oon a limmit but if the market then reverses, one cab find it difficult to execute/reverse there postion.

There are good and bad point for SB but more bad than good.

Why would one go to a bookies and then the other bookiee down ( Direct Access ) the road is offering lowwer quotes with better service.

Its a no brainer.

Work out trading costs over a week using Direct Access then the SB , see the diff ?

Trader333 said:

One of my associates also had his account closed down when he made £40K by arbitrage trading one SB company against another and they found out about it. Paul

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How is it possible for SB firms to find out about it? Do they network (gossip)? I thought client information is supposed to be private and confidential.