Best Thread Capital Spreads

A more logical way to resolve this would be to refuse to quote, or to massively widen the spread, at certain volatile periods. This is in line with real market practice.

If you're daft enough to commit to maintaining a tight spread it makes no sense to complain about others taking advantage.
Yes, I am not against widen the spread according to that of the underlaying market. Variable spread is practiced by ggmarkets to give an example that this method is possible. I do not believe in stop quoting, the real market do not stop feeding prices. They already practice this when the time is convenient, by not executing at all or by delaying an execution, the later could be a worst case scenario as you can get filled any time at any price, without being able to close a pending order. If their is a real network latency issue, it is of no traders concern, they have to give a re-quote, instead of blaming the trader for trading in a fast moving market.
 
Sometimes it does...
Ok I will, if you are referring to exchange feed problems, some markets closing down after a wild move up or on the downside, or a exchange system crash I am with you. These are exchange related decisions and problems, and not anything a SB can do anything about.
 
sometimes it's just market participants being cowardly custards... I've seen all bids or all offers pulled before... or just all sane bids and offers being pulled.
 
sometimes it's just market participants being cowardly custards... I've seen all bids or all offers pulled before... or just all sane bids and offers being pulled.
Yes, this kind of move by market participants, reflects what is happening in the real market if they are being pulled.
 
Thing is I tried out CS in the past & at times everything would just freeze, that's poor. Is that still the case?
 
After that veiled profits warning from Capital Spreads

(Lets face it churn in this industry must be very high , you can`t keep recruiting fodder every day to replace the churn rate ...lol)

I`m just wondering when to close out this sell position

lol

How many platforms have cap spreads got now ......4 ...5

Prospreads
Betfair
etc
etc
etc

Why ?

This market is at Saturation point

Casualties soon i reckon
 
gle

just because i repeat something over and over does not mean that i am wrong. Price latency is....we must get our prices from somewhere (I hope you can agree that at least) we cannot just 'make them up'. We pull in prices from price feed suppliers put them through our price engine (fixing the spreads etc) and then place them onto our web-site. Sometimes (especially when there is a very fast moving market) this will lead to a small latency issue (0.5s). half a second can be a lifetime in FX markets.

All prices on our platforms are taken from the real bid/offer in the underlying market concerned. We do not 'Stop Hunt', bias our price, widen spreads blah blah blah

WE JUST QUOTE FROM THE REAL MARKET BID AND OFFER.

yes we could just widen our spreads in times of volatility but you know what... the complaints we get now would be as nothing compared to those we would get then. Especially if a client was stopped out because we had 'widened the price'

Frankly all the adverse comment on the spread betting platforms comes from the same people bleating about FX. Never about the other markets. This is because these people believe that they have a 'right to scalp' and seem annoyed when SB companies do not agree with them. Everyone goes on about DMA and how much better it is. You cannot scalp on DMA either, not only that but I, personally, do have DMA access in FX (on one of the most liquid FX platforms in London) and several spread betting accounts. I fail to get my trade on the DMA platform far more frequently than on my SB account.

Simon
 
gle

just because i repeat something over and over does not mean that i am wrong. Price latency is....we must get our prices from somewhere (I hope you can agree that at least) we cannot just 'make them up'. We pull in prices from price feed suppliers put them through our price engine (fixing the spreads etc) and then place them onto our web-site. Sometimes (especially when there is a very fast moving market) this will lead to a small latency issue (0.5s). half a second can be a lifetime in FX markets.

All prices on our platforms are taken from the real bid/offer in the underlying market concerned. We do not 'Stop Hunt', bias our price, widen spreads blah blah blah

WE JUST QUOTE FROM THE REAL MARKET BID AND OFFER.

Frankly all the adverse comment on the spread betting platforms comes from the same people bleating about FX. Never about the other markets. This is because these people believe that they have a 'right to scalp' and seem annoyed when SB companies do not agree with them. Everyone goes on about DMA and how much better it is. You cannot scalp on DMA either not only that but I, personally, do have DMA access in FX (on one of the most liquid FX platforms in London) and several spread betting accounts. I fail to get my trade on the DMA platform far more frequently than on my SB account.

Simon
This I quite well understand Simon, but you, just cannot have network latency as an excuse for every scenario and trading style, that you don't approve of being maximum profitable. Some traders like trading on volatility, that is part of the game and CS must being able to cope with that. Overall traders, just like to trade on the prices you offer, and they take them being a valid offer from you. You are not allowed to discriminate clients, by putting them into special categories. If you don't approve of a trader taking repeatedly unfair advantage, close the account. This would be much more of a fair play and understandable from a traders perspective.

The real market do not freeze the orders coming through for 5 minutes, like I experienced the other day trading with DD. Yes, high volatility after a news release, but again, this is part of the game, and reflect a well functioning real market in action. Also, the real market do not manipulate clients, by flagging them into special undesired categories.
 
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Simon, what do you mean by this statement? 'You cannot scalp on DMA'. Scalping is a well defined trading style, trading the real market.
 
liquidity providers on ECNS do not appreciate scalpers, is what I suspect he means.

But that's different to almost every other market...
 
gle

the latency issue is the only reason we turn clients to dealer acceptance. . Other than this there would be no reason for a client to be placed on dealer acceptance. This is why I always mention latency when talking about dealer acceptance clients. We do not place winning clients in this category (otherwise some 20 to 30 pc of all trades would be taken by our dealers, the actual number is around 3pc ....and most of these are because the trade is of greater size than the auto acceptance will allow)

if there is a problem on the site then i can understand frustration... we try to give the best service we can but... we are quoting thousands of markets into a 'web based' retail based platform. The real markets do not do this. They quote a few hundreds into a downloaded platform where the loading issues are transferred to your pc. Not only this but you can only trade 'if there is somebody on the other side' willing to buy or sell at that price AND you get to them first (i.e before someone else gets it). CS stands as the market maker and you will get the trade the vast majority of the time, no matter what the underlying price, liquidity, spread etc.

As a case in point we quote the FTSE at 1 point wide all the time from 08.00 to a few seconds short of 21.00. In reality the market for FTSE futures spends a huge percentage of the time with spreads of between 1.5 and 3. You would not get the trade that you have just done with CS in the real world.

For all of the complaints the base fact is that for serious trading/investing ... spread betting is the best and cheapest route for nearly everyone (even professionals). Scalping (if you can get away with it) is also only possible on SB platforms (you cannot do it on a DMA platform as there is no such thing as a delayed price because they are the price) so to complain about not being allowed to do this is a bit odd.

'scalping' has different meanings but i believe that i have already defined it (in this thread) in terms of Spread Betting

free guranteed stops

there has been alot of comment on these recently

the question is not whether the guaranteed stop is free it is how close you can place it. a couple of our competitors give 'free guaranteed stops' but you cannot place a FTSE stop (for instanse) closer than 50 points away !! On Capital Spreads you can place a normal stop/order just 2 points away. Frankly, a Guaranteed stop 50 points away is worthless. CS has never slipped a client (in six years), in some of the most volatile markets ever seen, by 48 points (50 - 2) in fact I believe the biggest slip we ever did was about 30 on a Monday morning.

likewise in FX markets. FX markets are 24 hours a day. Minor Slippage is frequent but is never as much as the minimum distance required by the Guaranteed stop merchants. why on earth would you need a GS placed miles away in a 24hr market... a perfectly normal 'free' stop placable within a reasonable distance should be more than enough 99.99pc of the time?

And the other 0.01pc?

Yyou would have lost so much money relying on Guaranteed stops set miles away from your point of entry that they chances of you still having any money left to worry about the 0.01pc trade are minimal !

i dont normally comment on other companies offers but a bit of proportion needs to be added to this argument.

Simon
 
We do not place winning clients in this category (otherwise some 20 to 30 pc of all trades would be taken by our dealers....

So are you saying that, for your company, the number of profitable traders is between 20% and 30% and if so this bucks the generally accepted view that 95% lose by quite some margin ?


Paul
 
not sure where you get 95pc from (sounds like a disgruntled client of an SB company).

we have made many statements to our investors (and on this thread) stating that the average winning number of clients is 21pc. Slightly better than the 18pc of private clients trading on the CBOT/CME. not only this but winning clients (because they tend to last longer!) generally make more than 21pc of the trades.

in '08 i believe the number of winners fell a bit but i can assure you that this year the swing has gone the other way.

this is also confirmed in that during any given month of 21/22 trading days we (LCG) will have an average 4 to 5 losing days.

simon
 
You're opening a few cans of worms here!

<<As a case in point we quote the FTSE at 1 point wide all the time from 08.00 to a few seconds short of 21.00. In reality the market for FTSE futures spends a huge percentage of the time with spreads of between 1.5 and 3. >>

Is that really true?

You would not get the trade that you have just done with CS in the real world.

So you admit that CS isn't in the real world?!

For all of the complaints the base fact is that for serious trading/investing ... spread betting is the best and cheapest route for nearly everyone (even professionals).

Not for professionals, surely?

Scalping (if you can get away with it) is also only possible on SB platforms (you cannot do it on a DMA platform as there is no such thing as a delayed price because they are the price) so to complain about not being allowed to do this is a bit odd.

This just doesn't make sense.

'scalping' has different meanings but i believe that i have already defined it (in this thread) in terms of Spread Betting

Scalping in the SB dictionary is defined as making a consistent profit on trades less than about 5 minutes?

I agree with you about guaranteed stops, though.:)
 
You're opening a few cans of worms here!

[/I]

Is that really true?

You would not get the trade that you have just done with CS in the real world.

So you admit that CS isn't in the real world?!

For all of the complaints the base fact is that for serious trading/investing ... spread betting is the best and cheapest route for nearly everyone (even professionals).

Not for professionals, surely?

Scalping (if you can get away with it) is also only possible on SB platforms (you cannot do it on a DMA platform as there is no such thing as a delayed price because they are the price) so to complain about not being allowed to do this is a bit odd.

This just doesn't make sense.

'scalping' has different meanings but i believe that i have already defined it (in this thread) in terms of Spread Betting

Scalping in the SB dictionary is defined as making a consistent profit on trades less than about 5 minutes?

I agree with you about guaranteed stops, though.:)
Yes I have a few things myself to bring up with Simon tomorrow. His terminology for scalping is out of this world (quite funny really).

Yes, one can have a whole lot of things to say about Simon's posts. But really, I at least, have to give him a lot of credit for sticking around. He certainly don't need to, being a major share holder of LCG Ltd his pockets are quite full.:)
 
Is momentum trading also classed as unacceptable Simon? Scalping is taking profit +few ticks gain & doing so many many times during the day. So if I enter at an increased momentum & close within minutes, does it constitute scalping in your books? Do your T&C define what you consider to be scalping? Thanks.
 
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