Hahaha. This is LAUGHABLE. Would anyone expect Capital Spreads to say "Sure, we steal money from our clients by quickly moving our spread to hit their stops, which DIRECTLY benefits us".
The way to catch cheaters and thieves is using probabilities. The number of times a bar on the CS chart has quickly flicked up to EXACTLY my stop level, before immediately retreating, when my feed from other exchanges had done no such thing is amazing. They can deny stealing, but statistics prove them wrong. If you and I bet on the toss of a coin, using your coin, and you call "heads" every time, and it comes up heads 20 times on the spin, the odds are just over 2 million to one against that being an honest run of bad luck. The odds say you have a 2 headed coin and are a cheater. You can deny it and say it's just random luck, but 2 million to one shots VERY seldom happen. CS can deny stealing all they like, but the odds against what happens on their in-house spreads being "random" are about the same as you having been the unlucky loser of 20 coin tosses on the spin. The best explanation, statistically speaking, is that you are dealing with a liar and a thief.....as a matter of simple percentages.
I once put on an FX sell stop in on the Canadian Dollar at Capital Spreads very late at night . I happened to be awake and watching their chart. The stop was about 30 points below the market when I put the stop in. The market was virtually dead, with almost no activity. Almost as soon as the stop order was placed to sell at a price below the market, CS's price started inching down.
This was to initiate a short position, so I was out of the market at that moment. I put a contingent stop in at 40 points above the entry. So in order to get IN, the price would have to drop 30 points...and then once in, I would be stopped out if it rose 40 points. Guess what? After about 10 minutes the CS price reached EXACTLY my entry stop. Not even ONE tick lower. It then immediately reversed, and crept up EXACTLY 40 points, and I am not exagerating, not ONE point higher, hit my stop...then returned to EXACTLY where it had been before I put the stop in.
It was late at night and I happened to be watching, so I rang the trading desk, and a very surly Australian answered. I said I wanted to complain about a trade and before I even told him which one I was talking about he KNEW who it was and said very belligerently "These markets are very volatile". I guess late at night they don't have many people working so the guy may well have been the one who "executed" my trade. It's like throwing meat into a pool of sharks if you put stops in with Capital Spreads. They are after your money, and will cheat to get it from you.
Anyway, this is one small example. The odds of that happening randomly are tiny...at least by honest chance......but the times it's happened in gold are absurd.
I've never had these problems with City Index, for example. In fact City have even "let me off the hook" on stops a few times, when a stop was just briefly touched, by leaving me in the market after it made a comeback. This would be INCONCEIVABLE with Capital Spreads who are after your money with a vengeance.
another accusation of stop hunting.
we have five deal desks taking over 40000 individual trades a day (over 8000 for each desk), 35000 clients, tens of thousands of positions and over 3000 markets. If you really think we have the time or inclination to adjust a single 'spread', to 'bias' prices or anything along these lines then I am afraid you are sadly mistaken.
Our prices are taken straight from the underlying market bid/offer quote we NEVER, EVER adjust them to affect a client by one pip. Certainly not Gold which comes straight from the Futures exchanges. To trigger a stop we would have to actually force the exchange price up (or down) to the clients stop price which would in most cases take far more than 30/40 contracts and anyway might fail which would leave us with twice the sized position going the wrong way!
Most of the time we are not even aware of stop levels or activation until after it has happened.
I am not going to claim that we do not make mistakes because we do..but we NEVER make deliberate attempts to take out a client position.
Simon
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