US stocks with D4F

[temporarilylight]

US sotcks with D4f

Anyone here ever attempt to trade US stocks with D4f??

i've always been an index kinda guy myself, although have been inspired my the likes of Mr Charts to trade US stocks.

tried to long QLGC today at 51.80. I was left for about a minute looking at the 'waiting for a dealer to respond' screen. By the time i got a 'requote' it was already up about 40c.

Thought "%$#^ this!!" and went back to the old US30. Took 45 points out of that instead .

still....annoying none the less.

 

[Vislikke]

Yes and there spreads are ridiculous at times (especially on ERTS). Waited for the price to hit a 89.85 for a short and as it appeared I hit the market order button, the order took 3 seconds to get filled and by that time the sell price was confirmed at 89.96 :-0 even though the price on the realtime monitor had only moved up 1 cent. The spread was as wide as 40 cents at one time and ended up taking a 20 point hit as the stock started to climb and they moved the buy price ridiculously and I didn't want to get caught.

Lesson learnt !

 

[temporarilylight]

grrrrr....know how ya feel. Guess i'll just have to stick to the indicies even though i wanna give stocks a try.

looks like i'll just have to wait for the day when Direct Access brokers can accomidate for poor people like me.....

temp

 

[wysinawyg]

Are you guys using spread bets or CFDs?

wysi

 

[temporarilylight]

spreadbets 4 me....

glad you kept this thread alive wysinawyg. After reading Vislikke's post, im sure it's a problem for alot of people trying o steal a few points out of US stocks 'on the move' using Deal4free. I dont know about other spreadbet companies as far as this is concerned

 

[Vislikke]

Spreadbet for me as well. Set the account quite up some time ago before I had even heard of CFD's.

Do you not need more than £1000 to operate a CFD account ?

 

[wysinawyg]

<i>Do you not need more than £1000 to operate a CFD account ?</i>

You need £2,000 and a bit of a trading history. I got a spreadbet a while ago but they were going to refuse me a CFD account based on my share dealing and only gave it to me as I had the spreadbet account, bizarre and I assume entirely because of the FSA as practically a CFD account should be safer than spreadbet.

I think the prices are meant to be different between the two platforms and as I've heard bad things about spread bet prices on US stocks before I'm hoping that CFDs will be a bit more accurate to the underlying. Unfortunately I'm not properly set up to check this out yet.

wysi

 

[JonnyT]

I thought the quotes were the same on both platforms...

JonnyT

 

[wysinawyg]

JonnyT,

Had you checked or are you just assuming they're the same?

wysi

 

[Henry]

In theory they are the same on the two platforms, but I posted charts on here a few months back proving this was not always the case.

 

[wysinawyg]

Thanks Henry. I did seem to remember it and have tracked it down now although it looks like you cleared out the graphs (or else my computer just doesn't want to show them). Guess I ought to have a look for myself sooner rather than later so I can switch my funds into the SB account if the differences aren't large in practice.

wysi

 

[candles]

any way around this problems guys?

Are there any brokers around who you can trade US stocks with, PROPERLY, (without D4F playing with the price, and taking an eternity to fill you). Any Direct access brokers who allow you to trade US stocks with a small account (e.g. 1k), with small spreads, low commisions and the ability to bet small...i.e the equivilent of 1 pound per point.

 

[wysinawyg]

Direct access brokers legally can't let you trade with less than £25k. There are people offering to put up the capital to let you open a direct access account, but the one I looked at charged some extortionate amount of interest.

wysi

 

[fazalv]

wysinawyg

Please respond to my pm when you get the chance.