Best Thread Capital Spreads

[capitalspreads]

pippin

no....

with no guaranteed stop you would have lost £13,610

with the guaranteed stop you would lose £10,530 (10 x 1053 pips) as this is the closest you could place your stop.

So the saving using the guaranteed stop would have been £3,080.

You have to remember that not many top companies fall over 10% in one go. And even if they do you have to have a position in that particular company. Even when Party Gaming and Sporting Bet dropped 50% in one go we only had one client with a position big enough to require a margin call. (our first margin call of the year!).

Simon

 

[rjay]

I've just decided to close my Capital Spreads account, precisely because of not meeting stops .... indeed, if I am long, they always manage to close me out at the low for the day !! For example, I was long on British Energy today, had a stop at 460, CS closed me at 444.5, thereby doubling my intended maximum loss. Thanks a lot ....

 

[capitalspreads]

rjay

well i am sorry this happened but in our defense it was not us who gave out pre market opening news announcement about 3.5% falling output figures which meant the shares opened at 445. Down 20 pence.

If you had the open position in 'real' shares and instructed your broker to place a stop at 460 where do you think you would have been filled? I can tell you for free... at 445 (or thereabouts, as well). I know because that is where we sold out of our hedges in the stock on the open.

On every single page of our site it says "stops are not guaranteed". Spread Betting with Capital Spreads is a mirror of the real market. Sometimes, as in this case, it hurts. As it does in the 'real' financial world when a share you have bought falls

The market then spent the next 10 minutes down at this price before reversing and actually traded up BUT we are not to know this.. When the stop gets hit we just fill it.. the market could have just continued down.

Again, I am sorry that the bet you made went wrong but the price movement had nothing to do with our company.

Simon

 

[rjay]

Simon - British Energy is just one example. It has happened a few times this month alone and I only place about 20 trades per month. Anyway, according to your own tick chart, the price only hit 444.5 for a couple of minutes and then immediately started to "recover" - certainly nothing like the 10 minutes you claim.

My point is that, if it is in your interests, you seem to fill an order with incredible speed. If it is in my interest, then you frequently don't. It's as simple as that.

 

[capitalspreads]

rjay

as I say we do not influence markets.... if a stop is subsequently shown to be a low or near a low (or high as the case may be) it really is not our fault that this happens.

If we make a mistake (and we do make them) then we are always willing to go through actual market bid/offer history to check that nothing has gone wrong.

If you have particular trade queries then our customer services department (rightly praised many times in this thread) will look into them.

I have to say that when I used to trade myself I often found that I was also being stopped out at highs or lows. And this is not surprising when you stop and think about it because in general the majority of traders are thinking the same things at the same time. So stops get placed by loads of traders at the same point and then the markets in their usual fashion go hunting for them ... and then when they have got them the market just reverses because the 'weak' longs (or shorts) have now been chased out.

Simon

 

[laptop1]

Do you hedge, traders who know what they are doing.

 

[Pippppin]

Simon.........you said "when I used to trade"

I take it running a spreadbetting company is much more lucrative for you than trading used to be

 

[capitalspreads]

Pippin

you would hardly expect us to be running at a loss..... not very secure for client money if we were...I was a propriatary trader for a series of Banks from 1983 to 2000 trading in positions of many hundreds of millions (if not Billions) of pounds. You can be assured that I would not have survived for that length of time if I was bad at it.

Mind you I find it much more difficult to trade my own money... I think that is a very different skill.

Laptop

Our hedging policy has been done to death on this thread... but if we identify winning clients who trade in size then we tend to add them to what we call 'marked risk' clients and do indeed go with them. We have a growing band of major winners who it would be foolish of us to ignore. But if someone was winning a grand a week we probably would not even notice them.

But most of the trades we take counter act other trades (as many buyers as sellers). A good example of this is Wall Street at the moment, we have some 450 seperate positions ranging from £1 to £200 a point and yet the total net position at the moment is £35. The larger we get the more this tends to be the case especially in Indices and FX

if the client is just pipping around in £10 a point we probably would not notice him/her unless we felt they were scalping. In which case we may then turn them from auto accept to trader accept. Again we have a few people who are designated this way.

Simon

 

[EGO2]

Capitalspreads platform - 2 requests...

Hi Simon,
I've not asked you a question for a while, so I'm glad to see you're still making time for t2w.

I have 2 requests for your consideration.

First, like most of your customers I imagine, I use your service from work, and sometimes from home when I've got a week off for example. Recently I emailed customer services from home, to request a refund of funds, but wasn't allowed to proceed as my home email address wasn't my registered one - so I could only make this request from work... This causes an unnecessary delay, and so here is a simple solution. Can we have two registered email addreses - work and home, that customer services will accept? Taking this idea further, your platform doesn't have an 'Account details' tab, which would allow us to set personal details like these addresses, and perhaps even have a 'check box' to choose whether we are trading from home or work at any time!

Ok, secondly, and on the theme of using your platform from work. As many products, like FTSE 100, are only tradable monday to friday, during office hours, and most of your customers probably work for a living, it's inevitable that most are running your platform on their work computers. Your platform has a huge advantage over, say TDWaterhouse - which is blocked by our firewall, obviously because of the technology you have used - please don't change it!
So my only problem is to do with discretion. The Portfolio view etc are fantastically discreet, with just a few gray and white lines with numbers dotted over them. Fine. But your big "Capital Spreads" logo on the top left attracts the wrong kind of attention - people walk past my screens and notice it - and make comments about spread betting, which becomes a conversation about betting etc etc. Not ideal in an office environment. I like to keep my financial affairs very private, and although we have a relaxed attitude to internet usage in moderation, it makes me feel uncomfortable, and therefore likely to close it down more often than not.

Ok enough waffling - can you make this section collapsible, or have a button to blank it, or make it a setting per customer that can be requested, so it is never displayed? It's not good enough to simply make the window smaller and scroll down, as when any option is pressed the screen redisplays from the top - and up it pops again! Forget about the pride you take in your brand - we all know it's a good one - this feature would allow more customers to have your platform open more of the time - ie more trades - so good for you?

I hope some of this feedback interests you ( and I know programming changes take a long time to rollout! ), regards,
EGO2

 

[c6ackp]

But most of the trades we take counter act other trades (as many buyers as sellers). A good example of this is Wall Street at the moment, we have some 450 seperate positions ranging from £1 to £200 a point and yet the total net position at the moment is £35. The larger we get the more this tends to be the case especially in Indices and FX

Thanks again Simon, for your open approach.

Just out of interest, how many of those 450 positions would you expect, on average, to be stopped out (for a loss)? I would guess you have mostly new traders so around 350, perhaps?

 

[DDI]

I opened an account with CS last month but i found that my trades took ages to confirm and literally 90% of them were rejected.

I am a day trader (trading breaks) and do plently of binaries. Not big though my max size was £6 or £7 a pip. unfortunately the execution speed of CS and their rate of trade rejections made it impossible for me to trade with them.

 

[caro]

Has anybody tried Capital Spreads with a 3G card on a laptop? Often my connection is the GPRS not 3G. I can always get into the website but the java applets that display market and account data, open positions etc just come up with "there are no markets to display". Am not sure if it is the 3G card set up or if the applets need say a broadband connection to work at all.
Thanks in advance
Caro

 

[Jbat001]

Has anybody tried Capital Spreads with a 3G card on a laptop? Often my connection is the GPRS not 3G. I can always get into the website but the java applets that display market and account data, open positions etc just come up with "there are no markets to display". Am not sure if it is the 3G card set up or if the applets need say a broadband connection to work at all.
Thanks in advance
Caro

Almost certainly that's a website problem, not a modem problem. If the connection is good enough to tell you what's wrong, chances are the computre is just fine and CS is having a brief technical hiccup.

 

[caro]

Thanks for the reply. Capitalspreads website is down this weekend for maintenance so hopefully they will fix the problem. Will be interesting tosee what happens after maintenance if their IT department is anything like others I have worked with

 

[capitalspreads]

c6ackp

a good question because, as we often comment on our seminars it is not the volume of losing trades that hurts traders/players it is the discipline (or rather lack of it) that hurts. In fact (almost unbelievably) our clients have more winning bets than losing ones... it is just that the size of the losing bets is invariably bigger than the winning ones. If all SB clients used the old 3 to 1 rule they may not win (as position taking can be a real bugger) but they would certainly cut back the losses.

ego2

sorry about the delay on the refunds.... we have tightened up our security on our payment/refund to quite a significant degree.... money laundering and fraud prevention etc mean that we have become a bit paranoid about it.

if you just send us a letter informing us about any changes or authorised e-mails we can add them on.

on the other problem i am afraid that there is not much we can do about this in the short term. We will be looking at platform development in the new year.

caro

if you continue to have problems give our in house IT guys a ring and they will try to find the solution. Up to now we have always found the problem and sorted it (touchwood).

the site was down because our platform ran into one of those unfathomable problems with the rolling charges. Because we designed the customer areas to be rigid (as we did not want audit problems or clients claiming that we changed something after the event) this means that when there is a error it has to be reversed and then re-input whilst leaving the original mess in place. This means that when we have subsequent queries on a problem the entire audit trail is still in place.

simon

 

[c6ackp]

c6ackp

a good question because, as we often comment on our seminars it is not the volume of losing trades that hurts traders/players it is the discipline (or rather lack of it) that hurts. In fact (almost unbelievably) our clients have more winning bets than losing ones... it is just that the size of the losing bets is invariably bigger than the winning ones. If all SB clients used the old 3 to 1 rule they may not win (as position taking can be a real bugger) but they would certainly cut back the losses.

Thanks Simon. Could you also please comment on this?...

When you hedge or overhedge/follow consistent swing traders are your systems configured to do this automatically (i.e. no intervention)?

If so, why don't you switch this on for consistent scalpers also, rather than switch them to dealer referral? (I'm not talking about 1-2 pip scalping, but 5-20 pip scalping).

c6

 

[caro]

caro

if you continue to have problems give our in house IT guys a ring and they will try to find the solution. Up to now we have always found the problem and sorted it (touchwood).

the site was down because our platform ran into one of those unfathomable problems with the rolling charges. Because we designed the customer areas to be rigid (as we did not want audit problems or clients claiming that we changed something after the event) this means that when there is a error it has to be reversed and then re-input whilst leaving the original mess in place. This means that when we have subsequent queries on a problem the entire audit trail is still in place.

simon

Thanks for your reply Simon. I will contact your IT people if I can't get in again on the 3G card next time I try it.
Caro

 

[capitalspreads]

c6ackp

no... the whole point about scalpers is that they only ever trade on slight delays in price. Not that they sometimes do so BUT that they always do. And then are immediately out when the price reverts. This means that we can never hedge them at anything other than a loss. This is not so much of a problem anymore because our price feeds are pretty good these days.

Most clients will get the odd v.good fill on an auto trade but that is no problem to us because that is the luck of the draw. There are one or two commentators on this thread who are known scalpers and they are generally whinging about fill times whilst the vast majority are very happy indeed.

Consitent winners do not get sent to traders for confirmation, their positions just always end up in the "to be hedged at all costs book" which is permanently monitored by dealers. We do not mind losing the odd pip here or there on hedge entry as these traders are not looking to 'grasp' the best posible price every time, they are usually just following their systems or whatever which give them entry and exit points. Sometimes we lose a pip or so on the hedge entry sometimes we gain (no problem).

DDI

binary markets are always trader confirmed...if the dealers feel that all you are doing is attempting to arb between us and another Binary provider they will check your deals against competitor prices before confirming. This generaly means slower confirm times. On other markets our trade confirmation times are pretty good.

Simon

 

[talkingcents]

No probs on 3g

Has anybody tried Capital Spreads with a 3G card on a laptop? Often my connection is the GPRS not 3G. I can always get into the website but the java applets that display market and account data, open positions etc just come up with "there are no markets to display". Am not sure if it is the 3G card set up or if the applets need say a broadband connection to work at all.
Thanks in advance
Caro

I use a voda 3g and usually have no problems accessing and using cap spreads so long as signal is strong However it can lose the link at a critical point just like a voice call so always be ready to call on phone if this happens so you can get in or out of your trade
I have not experienced the problem you mention so far as I can recall.

 

[Jbat001]

Simon,

Any chance you could please unleash your tech guys on this beastie?

Many thanks.....