Good spreadbetting experience? Post here!

I've read so many posts lately of people complaining about Spreadbetting companies and how awful they are, how they requote constantly, take their money, close their accounts, make errors in the SB companies favour, the list goes on...

I want to now hear from anyone who has had a POSITIVE experience with a spreadbetting company. I have been spread betting with easy2spreadbet (part of city index) for a few years, and now with IGIndex, and i have no complaints. Very happy indeed. Am i the only one?!

Again, POSITIVE experiences only please .

This is a good idea. It should at least counter negative posters who very often blame the SB companies for what they consider underhand tactics or manipulation, but which are just built-in characteristics of the spreabetting format.

SB is a very volatile marketplace, the quotes are not going to be on the market to the within a point, there will be spikes out of hours as the SB quotes track the futures, and if you don't have enough margin you will get a call.

What would be very positive would be if we could take some of these characteristics, which are not really inherently good or bad, and develop techniques that turn these things to our advantage.

Yep, IG is who I use. Had problems on their old Java system but not their new system. News trading doesn't look good, though because they widen the spreads like a speculum up the bum.

The people that know me on here and have met me personally know that I do this for a living and full time and draw a wage and have done for many years now from SB's, that says alot in its own right.

A few comments:

Problems always exist with SB as they can and do with DMA, margin call: You will get regardless of who you are with, simply dont over trade. Easy.

Spikes on charts: If you have these and they have effected you in a negative way, compare against the direct market and they are required (by FSA and governed under U.K Law) to put you back in.

Slow fills: this happens in direct market sometimes although maybe nowhere near as often(for whatever reason, slow internet, loss of connection your end or theirs), understand that if they cant get filed, they wont fill you, dont like it....GO DMA.

Out of hours trading: expect unusual behaviour, if the market is not open then you leave yourself open to abuse and made up prices by the SB, play within market hours as if you were playing DMA. If you hold positions, great, find a way to exploit huge price changes after hours and get back in in the morning when the market re-opens.


Other than that, I am generally pleased with SB companies and have no desire (or need) to go DMA and start paying taxes on my wages as well as on everything I purchase, hell, I even get taxed on the money I earn from interest from the money I have managed to save, then, due to compounding the interest, get taxed on the interest as well. Brilliant. Although not officially having a wage causes other considerations to take on board for which I'm sure most will understand. Pro's and Con's.

UKtradergirl said:

I've read so many posts lately of people complaining about Spreadbetting companies and how awful they are, how they requote constantly, take their money, close their accounts, make errors in the SB companies favour, the list goes on...

I want to now hear from anyone who has had a POSITIVE experience with a spreadbetting company. I have been spread betting with easy2spreadbet (part of city index) for a few years, and now with IGIndex, and i have no complaints. Very happy indeed. Am i the only one?!

Again, POSITIVE experiences only please .

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No, you are not. My general trading experience is good and I have been trading online since it started. I've had a lot of good trades but, to be honest, most of them are ordinary, bread and butter, ones. I have, always, taken the credit for my good ones and the blame for the bad ones.

Mind you, I believe that there has been a great improvement in quality of service in recent years. In the beginning there were all kinds of blips.

The long telephone conversations that some posters have with the company never happen to me.

Maybe, the satisfied clients are the ones who don't post about quality of service?

Good trading

Split

In my view if you use SB then IG are as good as it gets in the UK. I am also hearing very positive views of futuresbetting based in Gibralter.


Paul

A good spreadbetting experience would be when i was with CMC and sometimes they would lose their feed on an instrument like the SPX whilst the DOW was absolutely flying up so Id just buy the SPX (They'd still fill me despite their numbers not moving )and usually a few moment later the feed would come back and jump up to catch up with the DOW giving me instant, riskfree profits! This happened about 10 times in the 4 years I was with them. Wish I had have gone in for MUCH bigger stakes.

As far as a general positive experience, I really dont have a bad word to say about my new SB broker - ABNamro.

i wouldn't take the view of scalpers as representative of an s/b service. i've been to the free seminars they do and they are always up front about what they do and who they watch. to me a lot of the complaints seems to coming out of frustration with their strategy? if a 1pt difference is vital to a strategy it looks to me that is not a strategy? one also has to be a bit suspicious of people who complain for months but don't just move to someone else?

s/bs allow people with small funds to play the markets. 80% of people lose.

Agree with the comment on scalping. I took it the informed verdict on this was that it was impractical using spreadbetting. It might be worth noting that scalping in its current and popular form came from US daytraders of the late 90's - where I think financial spreadbetting has never been available.

tomorton said:

Agree with the comment on scalping. I took it the informed verdict on this was that it was impractical using spreadbetting. It might be worth noting that scalping in its current and popular form came from US daytraders of the late 90's - where I think financial spreadbetting has never been available.

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You're asking for trouble trying to use Spreadbetting to scalp, in my opinion. No way can you get a half decent risk:reward ratio. I don't know why people try when its so much easier and more profitable just to hold onto a position, at least for an hour or so!

UKtradergirl said:

I've read so many posts lately of people complaining about Spreadbetting companies and how awful they are, how they requote constantly, take their money, close their accounts, make errors in the SB companies favour, the list goes on...

I want to now hear from anyone who has had a POSITIVE experience with a spreadbetting company. I have been spread betting with easy2spreadbet (part of city index) for a few years, and now with IGIndex, and i have no complaints. Very happy indeed. Am i the only one?!

Again, POSITIVE experiences only please .

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i have been using Futuresbetting.com for over 2 years now, DMA,instant fills,no re-quotes and a great service, even between Global taking them down for a couple of months,even then they returned my funds every penny within 3 days of ceasing trading.
great to be back up and running and trading..

UKtradergirl said:

You're asking for trouble trying to use Spreadbetting to scalp, in my opinion. No way can you get a half decent risk:reward ratio. I don't know why people try when its so much easier and more profitable just to hold onto a position, at least for an hour or so!

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I can't see how to recommend a thread but I agree with this and Oil Tanker's previous post.

I work for a SB firm - Spreadex (and shortsandlongs)

I have traded with other firms and I honestly can't see why anyone would be annoyed with us. We provide good customer service. Clients do occasionally get disgruntled and post negative comments all over sites like this. Is the reason they lost really because of the SB firm or can they not accept responsibility for their poor trades?

Generally scalpers are the clients that get annoyed the most as they moan after attempting to hit us on bad prices. We have no problem with winning clients, so long as the trading was fair.

Ian

i have been using IG index now for two years or so and have never had a problem with them.

Seems like the bigger you are the more people tend to hate.

and their platform is second to none!

I've used IG with no complaints for a long time. I never use guaranteed stops but always had them filled bang on the figure - even when the market's going mad after a news release. I once had my limit and my stop hit within seconds of each other (over 100 pips) and had the limit correctly honoured. Even better, I've manually closed for about 50 pips profit after a news release and then had my stop hit before my close was filled. I still got my 50 pips about a minute later.

Sadly, I've just today taken my money out of IG because their spread on Crude is twice that of Capital Spreads and it just doesn't make sense to use them any more.

I've found Cantor pretty good in the past and I'm happy with Capital Spreads, although I prefer the IG platform. CMC were perfect for years until I started closing trades manually (rather than waiting for the stop or limit) and found they were ridiculously slow.

Horses for courses...

Goose. Perhaps you could clarify your companies position as to regular winning clients and those that are put on dealer only etc,thanks

I'm on requote with one firm for options. Quite often I'll get a better quote than the trading platform originally said.

In general, I think requotes are to do with the liquidity of the underlying market - I don't get requoted on vanilla futures, for example.

Overall, a good experience for me, and I've been with one firm since it was all telephone based and a "stop" was ringing up to close your postion!

Joey

I agree that IGIndex are very good. Fills are very quick compared to some other companies. I like quick fills- because it's just scary waiting to see if the ticket is going to come back, wondering if you have been filled or not, etc. For this reason i can't use a platform that constantly leaves orders 'hanging'.

Futuresbetting also looks great and has some very happy customers. I've demoed their platform but not put any money in as of yet. Got too many accounts on my hands everywhere else at the moment, hehe.

Nice to see some good comments on here.. and also people taking responsibility for their bad trades rather than blaming the SB company.

Goose- you can rate the thread at the top of the page- give it 5 stars if you want :clap: It's good to have someone from 'the other side' on the boards please keep posting. (and congrats. on the comp!).

Spreadbetting recommendation

I've been using Tradefair Portal - Trade Hi Lo and Spread betting contracts on financial markets for several months now and am very happy with both the platform and the executions. I mostly trade the DAX and currencies, and the spread on the DAX is only 1 point which makes it ideal for scalping. The best part is the ability to keep the trade ticket open so you can close quickly if need be. I use several other spread betting firms and 2 brokers and tradefair is the best of the spread betters imo. They are part of the betfair group and as such have an excellent reputation, so well worth a shot.

TheGoose said:

We have no problem with winning clients, so long as the trading was fair. Ian

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I find this hard to believe :cheesy:

PipStar said:

I find this hard to believe :cheesy:

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Why?

Do you really think they would risk just leaving your positions without backing them in the markets? What if everyone happened to win that day- it would wipe them out clean! No- i believe they do trade the positions on the markets- what percentage of them i don't know- or perhaps they take a kind of 'overall' view of every client's positions then place their own market orders accordingly- perhaps you can enlighten us as to how this is done goose?