Interesting thread and remarkably similar to a subject I raised back in October 2003 when IG Index refused an instruction of mine to close a very profitable short term trade. In my case there was a delay of around 40 seconds before I was informed that my instruction was being refused – guess what happened in that time – yes, you’ve got it, the market started to move back up. The initial reason given to me was that “the price was no longer valid”. I confronted them on the issue but they have refused to correct it. The Financial Ombudsman is looking into the matter. IG have stated that orders are not queued – if this is the case then why did it take 40 seconds to reject my order ? The fact is that delaying order fills is the oldest trick in the book, Jessie L Livermore suffered exactly the same thing at the hands of the Bucket Shops of NYC and Boston in the late 1880’s / early 1900’s. As I have pointed out previously, IG Index make several statements on their website about the service they are prepared to offer, one of those statements is “the price you see is the price you get” – I would suggest that refusing orders in the manner that is stated is not providing the service that they claim to offer.
Also, as peeps have already pointed out, punters are open to abuse as they can pick off orders which are going in the companies favour whilst rejecting any which favour the punter – this again is an old and well documented trick stemming from bucket shops and is in fact just a way of introducing an increase in spread without it becoming apparent to punters.
IG Index’s T&C state that IG’s right to refuse a bet at a quoted level is based on failure to meet criteria at the time an offer is made, however, IG like to bend the rules on this one and base rejection / acceptance on anything they fancy.
You need to be careful, regulation of these people is very weak in my opinion. The Ombudsman has been looking into my complaint since October 2003 and it is a slow process. The trick with certain companies seems to be to lull people into trading with them and then start mistreating the ones that win on a regular basis (talking about short timeframe traders here), from what is written here it seems that you guys are suffering just the same. The fact is that all these bets could be executed automatically, however, it would appear that companies know that introducing a slight delay in execution (hence give the price a chance to move) will financially benefit them on the basis that the spread on each index is effectively increased which is to the detriment of the punter. Of course they will deny this but then why do they put such trades through for manual dealing ?
Also, how can they go one being allowed to advertise that “all prices are truly live and tradable” and “the price you see is the price you get” when it is clear that their operating procedures don’t support this advertising.
Out of interest, has anyone complained to the Compliance Department ? I would make a complaint every time this happened as it is clearly a breach of contractual obligation (in my opinion).
The guy working on my case at the Ombudsman has said he will be sending me out a report on his findings which should arrive at the weekend. I’ll be interested to see what he says. I don’t thing the case will be resolved just yet as IG still claim that they can reject any order for any reason despite the T&C’s going to great lengths to lay out criteria for order rejection. The guy from the Ombudsman told me yesterday that IG have sent him a reply to line of questioning that states that they don’t use a queuing system for orders which, to be honest, I am very sceptical about.
In the meantime I have cut down my trading with IG Index to a minimum and removed more or less all my funds from my account as I consider them cheats.
Steve.
