Hi All
Firstly, cards on the table: I work for a spreadbetting company.
Secondly: theme of this post. I noticed a few people discussing a new company, Capital Spreads, which was meant to take advantage of disatisfaction with deal4free et al in the short-term trading stakes. I joined up online, found them quick and efficient to get going, and started putting on some pretty random small trades just to see what their software was like.
The first point is that it is a pop-up based piece of software like FInancial spreads have, which means a quote window appearing. Slightly better is the fact that the price updates once popped up, and (probably because they have 4 users rather than FS's 4000), it is quick to load.
Secondly, the major drawback of Deal4Free, apart from the misleading name, is their known tendency for welshing on deals - waiting for a few seconds to confirm or deny the deal. So you place an order to buy at 11574, and a few seconds later it says "no you can't, how about 11576". Which means the effective spread is far worse. Now, CS were meant to do away with this. But they have not, at least for me. I have dealt about 25 times, and 4 times I was rejected on price. This is an incredibly high number of times, at 16%. Where I work, the rate is about from 800 completed forex deals (that do not fail credit), just 3 rejected. So price rejection has not gone away, unless they are picking on me only.
Thirdly, niggling errors. They stop you dealing on the Daily FTSE and stocks at 16.20. They stop dealing at 21.00 in the evening. And, possibly worse of all, they seem to use dealer intervention on all deals, so that they take 10-20 seconds to confirm, rather than the 3-5 seconds that you might expect from an automated system.
Finally, I thought their EURUSD price was meant to be 4 points wide, but now it seems to vary from 5 to 6.
I am posting all this as a spreadbetting customer, not a dealer. I user 5 or so accounts myself for various things. Each one promises to provide a revolution, but it never quite seems to happen. All that said, CS have some very nice software features, excellent account summaries, and so on, which I hope the other industry members copy. But revolution it is not.
Firstly, cards on the table: I work for a spreadbetting company.
Secondly: theme of this post. I noticed a few people discussing a new company, Capital Spreads, which was meant to take advantage of disatisfaction with deal4free et al in the short-term trading stakes. I joined up online, found them quick and efficient to get going, and started putting on some pretty random small trades just to see what their software was like.
The first point is that it is a pop-up based piece of software like FInancial spreads have, which means a quote window appearing. Slightly better is the fact that the price updates once popped up, and (probably because they have 4 users rather than FS's 4000), it is quick to load.
Secondly, the major drawback of Deal4Free, apart from the misleading name, is their known tendency for welshing on deals - waiting for a few seconds to confirm or deny the deal. So you place an order to buy at 11574, and a few seconds later it says "no you can't, how about 11576". Which means the effective spread is far worse. Now, CS were meant to do away with this. But they have not, at least for me. I have dealt about 25 times, and 4 times I was rejected on price. This is an incredibly high number of times, at 16%. Where I work, the rate is about from 800 completed forex deals (that do not fail credit), just 3 rejected. So price rejection has not gone away, unless they are picking on me only.
Thirdly, niggling errors. They stop you dealing on the Daily FTSE and stocks at 16.20. They stop dealing at 21.00 in the evening. And, possibly worse of all, they seem to use dealer intervention on all deals, so that they take 10-20 seconds to confirm, rather than the 3-5 seconds that you might expect from an automated system.
Finally, I thought their EURUSD price was meant to be 4 points wide, but now it seems to vary from 5 to 6.
I am posting all this as a spreadbetting customer, not a dealer. I user 5 or so accounts myself for various things. Each one promises to provide a revolution, but it never quite seems to happen. All that said, CS have some very nice software features, excellent account summaries, and so on, which I hope the other industry members copy. But revolution it is not.
