alot of comments since last night so I will try to get through them
sambar
I have commented quite extensively about winners and losers.... in reality we treat them no differently AND have only ever closed an account for either reasons of fraud or being excessively rude to my staff. I can assure all our clients that our proportion of winning clients is actually slightly higher than the latest percentage who win using ‘direct access’ platforms. This is probably because we force stops on all client positions and do not ring up trying to get further margin on losing bets.. thus tempting them to throw good money after bad!
Order fills are treated exactly the same no matter what the size in FX and indices. In equity markets they are treated differently as we must take into account the liquidity available in the shares in which the order has been placed.
cooltrader
we have an audit trail on every trade made by a client /every action made/time of order activation etc etc... if a client has placed a trade before an order is hit but we execute the order first (thus canceling the closing bet) then we will have an audit trial of that fact. If any client feels that he has had this happen he can call us and we can check this against the audit trail. It really is just a perception that we may delay order fills or trade acceptances. We are not interested in annoying clients or grabbing the odd pip here and there. In reality if there is any significant delay it is because a large number of clients wish to trade at the same time.
I sometimes feel that the real reason for the bad feeling over SB companies is because when somebody loses thay know that it was the SB company that won. When you lose on the exchange there is just yourself to blame for getting it wrong whilst with us there is actually somebody on the end of the phone. A real entity, and lets face it nobody likes to lose to their bookie.
Every platform in the world has trouble when volumes get excessive, I think I mentioned that the CBOT was down for fully 3 hours the other day, if you had an open position in a CBOT contract then ‘tough’ you could not get out. (Laptop please ring them up and try your kitchen sink legal stuff on them). We could just close the platform to all trading and clear up any backlogs but we (and I am sure our clients as well) prefer to keep it open.
Laptop
You appear not to know that SB companies currently have a best execution waiver and can ‘legally’ accept or reject trades at their discretion. All trades placed by clients on all of the SB platforms are at a particular price AND NO OTHER PRICE. This is different to the real market where a trader can place a ‘Market’ order and get filled at the best price available even if his eventual fill level is significantly away from the price at which he put it in.. If SB companies started to slip prices on trades, then yes you would always get filled, but we would never hear the end of it on threads such as this.
Farce
If the price never reached anywhere near the stop level then we would indeed be in error in filling a stop. If we filled an order at an incorrect price (it does happen on miss-ticks from our feeds) then a simple telephone call will be enough to confirm it. I have stated many times on this thread that we never bias our prices and we never force a stop. Our feeds are taken from five of the biggest quoting banks in the world and I am very sorry to say that I believe them before I would believe a charting company. I get generally get these comments from people who use charts like meta trader and e-signal…. You cannot trade on these prices, they are just charts, so why would you think them better than prices on which you can trade. I speak as someone who has an e-signal chart in front of him at all times. As an example over the past few minutes the market has been very stable and our bank feed has had a permanent bid/offer in cable at 1.9034-1.9037. The e-signal chart has printed between 1.9031 and 1.9038 !!
I am happy that you are doing much better with your new trading platform and wish you all the best perhaps you can mention the name here of the platform you use and some of our other clients can have a go on it.
In FX the real underlying liquidity is provided by the major banks who provide prices to all of the FX systems. They have systems which prevent them from trading with each other on these platforms. Does anybody think that they do this out of the goodness of their hearts? They happily give liquidity all over the world because they know that in the long run they will win and the clients will lose. Every in depth study made on every exchange gives the same result on private client trading. We have never, ever, ever closed a client who makes money and we never will. We have never made it difficult for someone to trade and never will. We only reject prices that are outside of the current spread by the time the dealer gets it. The problem with many FX dealers is that they only ever trade with us (and I mean only ever trade) when they can see that they have an edge when compared to a live feed (i.e our price may be delayed for a second or two). If a client continually does this then, of course, the dealers may take more notice of him/her and check the levels more closely.
I do wonder how many times I have to say that we are an SB company not an FX platform. In reality (and I can honestly say this) we really take virtually no notice of who is trading and do not intentionally discriminate against anyone. I almost wish we had never offered FX in the first place!
I am supposed to be taking a holiday after today (if I can get out of heathrow) but I will have a look occasionally to answer any questions.
Simon