Best Thread Capital Spreads

ummmm

it is more the other way round ..we can hold a price for a few seconds and they cannot. A broker fills orders... if the broker misses the order in the market that is it ..no fill. When you hit an SB price you may very well get filled even though the price has moved against the SB.

We are talking here about exact words.... a broker may be given an order to sell at any price (a market order) ... an SB cannot do this although they may do their best over the phone.

Again I cannot comment on other SB's policy , but the mechanics of online direct trading generally mean that you can only trade on the price shown. I know that one SB does work on the market order principle, (but this sometimes causes as many arguements as fixed price trading)

Simon
 
Capital spreads... can I ask you- will you actually commit capital to a trade? or do you merely offset immediately in the market? So, say for example I wanted to deal in £100/point of French Connection - equivalent to 10,000 shares which is larger than the NMS- would you make me that price? or would you only make me a price in £5/point ( which is I think equivalent to the nms of 500 shares- don;t have my L2 screens up in front of me..)
Straight forward answer please. If it's the "commit capital" answer, I'll open an account his week.
 
no.... we would not do so in such size

you are asking for a firm quote 'permanently online' in 20 times NMS . The only way we could make money is if you lost it ! we might quote such markets in 3 to 4 times market size as our spread should protect us at least momentarily.

But you must realise that we cannot watch 2000 markets at once you could quite easily pick a moment of low volume on the level 2 and then hit us in a massive size. We do quote the major indices in nominally greater than market size. (if a client traded in £300 a point in the Dow we would have to get away over 100 dow contracts, far greater than that normally quoted)

I am sorry, of course we would love to have your business but not at the cost of making a loss on every trade.

Simon
 
Simon...

Couple of queries..

1. When will the online facility to deposit funds be available ?

2. Had a situation with IG where they "lost their price feed, resulting in erroneous prices". I opened a position, then a few minutes later, the prices 'corrected' themselves and my position came into profit, so I closed.
They however are not allowing this, due to 'price feed' problem.
However I have opened and closed a position based on the prices given.
So my query is ...would you do the same ??
(P.S We are not talking £thousands...profit I made was about £100 or so)...

Ta..
 
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Capitalspreads

Once again thank you for your frank answers. With reference to my previous question I would like to point out that when I use a direct access broker (Interactive Broker) my deals go through to buy or sell at best so I always get filled never re-quoted or refusal. Depending on how many contracts I may get part filled at price quoted (being best) followed by others at next best price. With futures on the FTSE there is very little difference in the price I get normally within 2 points of my requested price.

With reference to the 15 second window this applies every time I placed orders for shares with either TD Waterhouse or Halifax. I never had a different price given due to a price move. I used to monitor the real-time price while going through this process and as you would imagine the price could move by a point or so but the quote displayed was always granted provided you confirmed within the 15 second period, regardless of what the market was doing. I must admit that I have not traded shares for a couple of years now but that was how the deal was done EVERYTIME.

I maybe wrong but these companies may have been able to offer such services due to the number of shares they held on the books in the larger companies on the FTSE.

There was never a case that these companies refused a deal or re-quoted as you suggest in your last post to me unless I have misunderstood your reply.

Why for smaller deals (below NMS or contract equivalent on FTSE) that such a method of trading could be applied, it may put an end to disgruntled customers who have to rely on your good nature of giving them the price or like the other SB's companies probably taking the better price for themselves. If as you say a couple of points is not an issue then why does it appear to be for all the other SB's that offer narrow spreads like your own company.

Sorry to press on this issue but it would be nice to have the definitive answer and see it from your side of the fence especially as a couple of points for each order can work out to quite a lot for a session and only appears to happen when I trade above £25 a point with D4F. If they can do it for lower than this I cannot see why it cannot be provided up to a reasonable amount which I believe for the FTSE could be in the region of 5 - 10 contracts or £50 - £100.

On an entirely different mater how is your daily cash price for the FTSE worked out and if each SB company follows a set formula then I can assume that each price move will be represented in the same price move for your own prices, just a different quoted reading to the futures market.

Kevin
 
Jitasb

I assume you are talking about yesterday when most of the world was caught out by the CBOT changing the price feeds on the Dow and neglecting to actually tell anyone. To be honest we would look at each and every instance on its own merits. In yesterdays example we would also have disallowed the trade as even though £100 might seem a small amount to you there would have been other clients who traded in much larger size and in truth how could IG let you have the deal if they dissallowed the bigger ones. They have to be consistent or risk action from one client who knows that another has had prefferential treatment. IG presumably let other customers off who lost money (at least I hope that they would have done). We fortunately noticed the pricing error (actaully a kind client rang us) and took our dow prices offline

Kevin

in NMS trades on individual stocks we will 99 times out of 100 fill the deal without even thinking about it (to be honest we dont have time to check the price of each and every deal as it comes thru which is why we limit the size of trade in the equity bets). But I cannot say (legally if nothing else) that we will do so in every case.

The cash FTSE is basically calculated during each day as a fixed difference against the front month FTSE Future. So that today, for instance, for the whole day our difference on the cash will be 2 or 3 points under the futures. This is called the Fair Value (FV) and is calculated as a composite of cost of carry/dividends/corporate actions etc added/subtracted to the futures price.



Simon
 
Simon. I was afraid that was going to be the answer, but I do appreciate your honesty.
 
Capitalspreads

Once again thank you for your reply. As you previously said the 'proof is in the pudding'.

Kevin
 
Dr Lecter

Very interesting post I was thinking something similar.

Capitalspreads

Spreadbetting is said to be tax free, the only tax charged being met by the SB company, so no Capital Gains Tax charged on clients. However, at what stage does trading through SB fall into the category of an income and therefore subject to Income tax.

Kevin
 
Basically when the taxman thinks that he is loosing too much money and changes the rules!
 
ersatz99 has the correct thinking on this !

There is a fine point here. At what point does a trader using SB markets become a professional in the eyes of the IR and thus become liable for tax. As far as I know anybody trading using SB, no matter how 'professional', is exempt from tax. A few people have been checked out by the IR over the last few years to ensure that they are not claiming taxable profits as spread bets.

As with all taxation rules they can be changed at any time.

If we as a company 'funded' clients to trade using our own money this would almost certainly be viewed as professional trading and thus taxable.

although it could have been a good idea

Simon
 
CS - question - do you allow clients to alter market limits/stops outside trading hours online ???

Currently use IG and I CANT DO THIS .. really anoying.
 
capitalspreads said:
ersatz99 has the correct thinking on this !

. A few people have been checked out by the IR over the last few years to ensure that they are not claiming taxable profits as spread bets.




Is this an urban legend, or do you actually know the names of these individuals? I would be seriously appreciative if you could forward my name to them, or their names to me, as I'm about to go head:head with the revenue over this issue. And after all, it wouldn't be good for anyone if I ( or anyone else) has to pay tax of any sort of my SB profits... Needless to say, I would be very vocal about having been taxed...
 
No ones picking up the phone !! Tried support + dealing line. Ive been with them for 6months - generally speaking ive always managed to get someone but ive never tried on sunday evening.
 
They close from 11pm Friday? till 6am ( I think) Monday morning.

I'm very suprised their system doesn't allow you to change limits/stops out of market hours- NOT that I've ever tried.
 
Been trading with them for a long, long time, and the only thing b*llocking them does is give you short term satisfaction- nothing changes!
 
I know! Ive been asking them to add an orders function to the site for a while . thinking of moving over to CS - the only problem is they dont have a large selection of FTSE 250 companies..
 
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