Further questions for Probookie......
I have, over the last 30 odd minutes, read back over some of your previous posts regarding goings on at your company. I have what I feel are some interesting questions. Firstly let me quote from a submission you made in the following thread....
http://www.trade2win.co.uk/boards/showthread.php?s=&postid=45052#post45052
The section I am particularly interested in is your reply in section 2 from which the following passage is quoted.....
"2. The most successful clients are arbitrageurs who, by definition, always win. These people open up spread betting accounts with 4-5 online bookmakers and then spend their time trading on arbs when daily prices get out of line. For example, at 7.15pm on the night of a chaotic FOMC announcement, you might see one company with a daily FTSE price of 4200-08, and another with a price of 4212-20. The arber buys the first, sells the second and locks in a certain profit.
Clients who do this are very obvious to the dealers on duty, as arb trades stick out like a sore thumb on a client's trading record (all trades are opened out-of-hours and are on daily products, all trades are left to expiry). After a brief honeymoon period they find that an unusual number of online trades are being rejected. Arbers hate this, as it typically leaves them with an exposed position on the non-rejected leg of the trade, which they then have to either take a chance on or close off, incurring spread."
I am very interested in the line where you say "After a brief honeymoon period they find that an unusual number of online trades are being rejected". I am interested for the following reasons, firstly and most importantly, the terms and conditions which are written in your customer agreement state that for IG to reserve the right to refuse a bet they must meet a criteria laid out in section 5(5) of the agreement. Suspecting that a customer may be an 'arber' is not in the criteria listed, furthermore, if a dealer were to reject an order on this basis then IG would have acted outside of the T&C and therefore would run the risk of being accountable if the customer suffered financial loss.
Secondly, it is clear from your comments that IG do (as I have suggested in my post of 8.16am) look for customers who maybe playing a winning formula. Arbing is in no way illegal and is a perfectly normal technique used by thousands of traders the world over at various times. It is therefore clear that you do in fact look for customers who maybe upsetting your system of odds which you feel are determined by the law of large numbers.
Thirdly, on the basis that you advertise that dealing is 'automated' how can you possibly stop arbers unless you detect them before they trade. Once detected all you can do is alter the way in which their trades are dealt with ie place them in a queue for manual dealing instead of confirming inside 2 or 3 seconds (which again is what I have suggested in my 8.16am post). Once 'selected' for manual dealing a period of time passes before the customer is dealt with. The customer has no control over this time period. Your dealer, as you have stated in your remarks, may then decide to reject the order if he/she thinks that the customer is a known 'arber'. Again this fails to take into consideration that IG Index makes certain claims in its advertising along the lines of “The price you see is the price you get” and “all prices are live and tradable” etc etc. As a consumer any customer could claim that IG have acted in a manner which infringes advertising laws as you have clearly not provided the service that you are advertising.
Fourthly, Your detection methods for ‘arbers’ are not as full proof as you might think. Let me give you an example. Personally I have accounts with most of the spreadbet companies which exist, this therefore gives me a huge choice of prices to choose from when trading certain products (I’m mainly talking about Dax / Dow / FTSE / MIB / IBEX etc). Lets talk about Dow as that seems to be the most popular market. The average spread on dow cash is about 5 or 6 points with any given company, however, if you were to compare 6 or 7 different companies then you can almost always reduce this spread down to 2 or 3 points without any problem whatsoever (what I mean by that is to review the best ask and the best bid). This can then lead to the following. Lets imagine that the market suddenly starts to move upwards (maybe news or data or something) so you buy the best ‘ask’ and get yourself net long. The market then rises 15 points or so and you decide to close out. You could of course just close you existing position with the company you opened it with but you would be forced to except their current ‘bid’ in order to close your position. This may not be the best ‘bid’ on the table from the several bids available to you. A different company could quite easily be making a ‘bid’ 4 or 5 points higher for a number of reasons. It therefore becomes prudent (providing of course that the margin is available with the second company) to ‘sell short’ an equal amount of dow with the second company in order to position yourself flat overall. Both positions will then obviously close out at exactly the same price once the settlement is known shortly after 9pm. This is a great way to extract maximum value from all the spreadbet companies available to you. The downside however is that you can loosely be called an ‘arber’ or at least be detected as such by certain companies purely on the grounds that you let bets run until expiry at 9pm.
I would therefore have to ask you if you feel that IG Index and its dealers are taking a rather big risk in simply refusing trades on the grounds that you feel that a particular punter maybe and ‘arber’. Any customer who has a trade refused is perfectly entitled to ask questions surround the refusal of their trade. Wouldn’t you agree that it would quickly become clear to an experienced customer that a dealer had refused a deal without meeting the criteria clearly laid out in the T&C ?
Steve.