Spread betting slow/smoothed feeds on purpose??

[random12345]

Afternoon all,

I have defended spread betters many times in the past and have found them to be profitable for a number of years - recently I have found that I might be in a position to expand my position size so that after tax I outperform the max that IG will accept online.

I already have an IB account, but their lack of native tick charts bothered me slightly, though I understand Ninja trader etc can adequately fake a tick feed using their snapshot feed. Anyway, onto my actual point (!), I also opened an account with LMAX and I note that they use the same ProRealTime skin and data feed as IG do - i.e. IT-Finance.com.

Obviously IG's feed doesn't necessarily 100% represent the underlying market (hence the indicative disclaimer) and their system prices also tend to outpace the chart slightly, whereas LMAX is real time and I haven't seen any price discrepancies. However IG's also ticks a whole lot less than LMAX despite clearly using the same provider. I can't understand why they would do this except to potentially shaft users of short term moving averages and overall make short term entries more difficult... I cannot think of any user friendly reason for this except perhaps bandwidth... which might have been appropriate 10 years ago. It creates more of the 'big bar effect' than LMAX does on tick feeds, which is definitely a hindrance to scalpers or short term swings... this would also effect the perceived 'rapidity' of bars on minute+ feeds.

For some reason this has really bothered me today as I wasn't aware that IT-Finance provided superior feeds in terms of absolute data to others. Anyone care to correct me as to the reason why?

Thanks.

 

[Shakone]

I didn't know that ProRealTime put on their own feed to the charts.

I thought that the ProRealTime charts with IG, submit the midprice of IG. And that for LMAX they would do the same for the LMAX midprice.

 

[random12345]

I didn't know that ProRealTime put on their own feed to the charts.

I thought that the ProRealTime charts with IG, submit the midprice of IG. And that for LMAX they would do the same for the LMAX midprice.

Right, so yeah perhaps the 'broker' feeds their data to IT-Finance to display via the software, which I assume they lease (the software only) from ProRealTime. Perhaps the LMAX midprice is just updated to IT-Finance more often in that case - as in the IG price updates more times on the ticket than it does on the chart for some unknown reason. Often I find my IG charts a few subpoints behind my P&L, but not on LMAX. I still say it's a hindrance to tick charts to have a feed that ticks less in any given hour.

 

[Vasco da Banana]

I've always thought that IG's prices jumped around more than any others.

 

[Liquid validity]

Right, so yeah perhaps the 'broker' feeds their data to IT-Finance to display via the software, which I assume they lease (the software only) from ProRealTime. Perhaps the LMAX midprice is just updated to IT-Finance more often in that case - as in the IG price updates more times on the ticket than it does on the chart for some unknown reason. Often I find my IG charts a few subpoints behind my P&L, but not on LMAX. I still say it's a hindrance to tick charts to have a feed that ticks less in any given hour.

Well done for noticing that
Yes it is deliberate, its to discourage scalping.
Why anyone would want to scalp with a bookmaker on wide spreads escapes me...
Apart from that IG are probably the best SB around.
Just use them for the kind of trading they don't mind, and can hedge.

 

[random12345]

Well done for noticing that
Yes it is deliberate, its to discourage scalping.
Why anyone would want to scalp with a bookmaker on wide spreads escapes me...
Apart from that IG are probably the best SB around.
Just use them for the kind of trading they don't mind, and can hedge.

Ok thanks for the response.

I don't position scalp as such using IG, I trade short term swings mainly on the EURJPY and they have never had a problem with me, I would rarely enter a trade more than once an hour so easily hedged. I did attempt scalping on the dax and EURUSD a couple of years back, but thought it too sketchy and the spread too difficult to beat, especially since the supposed instant execution still seemed to be slipping me enough to notice on top of the spread. Having been getting into better feeds lately as above, I note it would be considerably easier with DMA and it is indeed made very difficult by IG, seemingly on purpose as you say. I still use IG even though I haven't been able to increase my position size with them for some time, because I have been stuck with the fact I need to gross up my profit target by 100% in order to pay income tax at top rate.

As I said earlier, think it's time to switch now. Now I wonder if they'll let me cash out everything I have on deposit with them in one go...

 

[ffsear]

Out of interest, why EUR/JPY ?

 

[random12345]

Out of interest, why EUR/JPY ?

My forex trading was almost 100% automated - there is much less resistance on a smaller timeframe in the direction of the current wave on the EURJPY meaning PA is much less likely to oscillate around a moving average, which was useful to the methods I was using. Take the 15:00-16:00 move today on 100 ticks with a 50 EMA as an example. EURUSD chops while EURJPY is almost flat.