Best Thread Capital Spreads

[Kitchen Sink]

Simon,

When you hit "Trade" on your platform, why cant you set a stop loss before you enter the trade? Intertrader lets you set a stoploss on the trade button but CS does not. Why is this?

I like to have a stoploss in place before I hit buy or sell. I know you can set it later when you're in the trade, but what if you lose connection or you have a stroke or someone clubs you over the head with a cricket bat? You are in a trade with no stop loss.

Please correct me if i'm wrong or change your platform!! Intertraders platform is much better, but I thought you were the guvnor? You should have the better platform!!

 

[capitalspreads]

kitchen sink

on the 'trade' ticket ... if you click on the 'order' button it opens up a stop and limit, guaranteed and trailing stop functionality. You can place orders as per your requirements before u trade

Simon

 

[Kitchen Sink]

Oh yes!!

You have to press the order button and then it pops up!! With intertrader it's just there, "In yer face". I prefer it in yer face.

I am a bit of a simpleton. Please forgive me.

Thank you for answering my stupid question, but it did have me baffled, all I had to do was click on a button right there "In me face".....what a dweeb I am!!

Keep up the good work Simon.

 

[wzero]

Simon,

When you hit "Trade" on your platform, why cant you set a stop loss before you enter the trade? Intertrader lets you set a stoploss on the trade button but CS does not. Why is this?

I like to have a stoploss in place before I hit buy or sell. I know you can set it later when you're in the trade, but what if you lose connection or you have a stroke or someone clubs you over the head with a cricket bat? You are in a trade with no stop loss.

Please correct me if i'm wrong or change your platform!! Intertraders platform is much better, but I thought you were the guvnor? You should have the better platform!!

Isn't Intertrader, CapitalSpread one company LCG?

 

[capitalspreads]

kitchen

no probs .. you ought to hear some of the 'bleeding obvious' mistakes i have made on trading platforms over the years.

wzero

different partners want different things. Capital Spreads wants to be able to show more trade tickets at one time and, if a client wants the order functionality, they can be opened up.

Intertrader decided that they wanted the full trade ticket every time

horses for courses

Simon

 

[instant]

must say that recent events around Worldspread, MF Global and now Marketspreads caused me to ask capitalspreads for a refund of my monies (which are substantially over any possible FCSC ceiling)

not even a blink.. sent the money back immediately .. and a nice girl called me later (after the refund had gone) asking if there was a problem. Assured her not but that I just wanted to check.

As mentioned in an earlier comment I have yet to have a single trade rejected and I have made quite a bit off them. Just thought that simon could do with a happy customer comment

 

[twinj]

Nice drop in spread on EURCHF. 3 to 2. Would be nice to get notifications of spread reductions and I suppose possible increases.

Also would be nice to see when spreads change for instance on DAX.

 

[capitalspreads]

spreads get narrowed on quite a frequent basis. the market information pages get changed etc to take this into account. to be honest eur/chf is not a particularly big market for us .. (less than 0.5% of our FX turnover) but sending out 'self congratulatory' emails to our clients every time we make a change would make us look like burks!

DAX has a fixed spread of 1 from 07.00 to 21.00 and then overnight (21.01 - 06.59) when it has a 'generated price' from other market activity it is 6

cheers
Simon

 

[wzero]

Good to hear have reduced EUR/CHF spread. Is it possible to reduce some cross pairs spreads which are unreasonablly high now. The cross pairs spreads should not larger than the sum of both pairs spareds, probably + 1 for round up. The EUR/AUD spread is 8 but I can long EUR short AUD in your platform, the sum of spreads is only 2. More ridiculous spread is GBP/EUR which is 3, but EUR/GBP is only 1. I don't trade GBP/EUR however.

 

[ChocolateDigestive]

Hi Simon

I applaud you for coming on this forum and discussing your company. I have a question for you. Are you able to tell us what % of your account holders are profitable? I understand if you cant answer but I would be very interested to know.

Thanks

CHocD

 

[capitalspreads]

chocolate

already answered 5this many times

it is also one of the major points in our beginner seminars

79% of clients lose money... this sounds terrible until you realise that 81% lose money trading in futures, more lose trading FX etc etc

the point is that Capitalspreads does not impact this in any way. If you are good you win if not... you lose. all we provide is the platform. LCG provides a variety of dealer interfaces.MT4 , DMA currenex , hotspot and viking, DMA spreadbetting/cfds via Prospreads and our own SB/CFD platform.

Oddly enough clients actually do better on the Capitalspreads SB platform than they do on the various DMA interfaces (which is why i am generally a bit sceptic about the claims for the DMA trading)

Simon

 

[twinj]

Fascinating statistics Simon. Could you provide the percentages of winners or losers on the other platforms?

 

[ChocolateDigestive]

chocolate

already answered 5this many times

it is also one of the major points in our beginner seminars

79% of clients lose money... this sounds terrible until you realise that 81% lose money trading in futures, more lose trading FX etc etc

the point is that Capitalspreads does not impact this in any way. If you are good you win if not... you lose. all we provide is the platform. LCG provides a variety of dealer interfaces.MT4 , DMA currenex , hotspot and viking, DMA spreadbetting/cfds via Prospreads and our own SB/CFD platform.

Oddly enough clients actually do better on the Capitalspreads SB platform than they do on the various DMA interfaces (which is why i am generally a bit sceptic about the claims for the DMA trading)

Simon

thanks for replying, sorry if you answered in the thread before I didn't have patience to read it all. 80/20 is pretty much what figured.

 

[capitalspreads]

chocolate

no probs i merely mentioned answering before to demonstrate that it is not a state secret ! most of the questions i answer on this thread have been asked before. there is very little under the sun that is new.

to be honest I would not wade through the entire nine years of the thread either .

cheers

simon

 

[capitalspreads]

twinj

individual clients (as opposed to institutions) lose 82.7 pc on the ECN FX platform (admittedly this is not as massive a sample size as with the SB/cfd platforms). MT4 is still quite new for LCG and has a preponderence of Chinese/Far East/Australian White Label / Introducers who offer thier clients much worse spreads than capital spreads/cfds offers and this impacts their chances of making money. But the losses here are in the mid 80's.

Simon

 

[twinj]

Hi Simon,

thanks for your reply. About your platform (capitalspreads that is), is it possible to adjust stops on your charts?

Once you have multiple positions in one instrument, is it possible to attach a stop on the aggregated position? If not, would be most welcome.

Are you considering adding a hedging facility? This will be most welcome.

 

[PipStar]

79% of clients lose money... this sounds terrible until you realise that 81% lose money trading in futures, more lose trading FX etc etc
Simon

May be the high proportion of losers that you mention above applies to Capital Spreads/LCG and other spreadbet providers in the UK.

But your statement that more lose trading FX is way off the mark if you look at the U.S brokers profitability report issued by the CFTC in the below link:

US forex brokers profitability drops in Q1 2012, TradeStation gains most accounts, GFT most profitable | Forex Magnates

What do I see: GFT 40.6% profitable clients, Oanda 39.8% profitable clients, FXDD 32.0% profitable clients and the list goes on.

Forex Client Profitability with U.S brokers is between 40.6 % (Highest) to 27.3% (Lowest) and this has been steadily increasing since the CFTC/NFA have started cleaning up this industry. This is what happens when yo have a strong regulator with a hands on approach to the industry like in the USA.

What are the chances of this happening in the UK? Umm.....

 

[capitalspreads]

Pipstar

i realise you always believe that we influence the markets/client trading somehow but this is not the case

You are talking about a specific period in time (i.e Q1 2012) the FX markets have been very very quiet over this period of time allowing clients to take positions and sit on them until they come into profitability. There have been no trends in the major pairs (especially the Euro which is now easily the biggest traded pair) meaning that traders with bad positions have not been forced out and have been able to wait .. even double/triple up and then get out of jail free.

It is trends which cause the biggest upsets . if the euro goes to 1.22 or 1.40 then these stats provided by the FX companies will suddenly go into reverse.

i might also point out that these brokers actually operate the same models over here and we compete with them. so the numbers that you are quoting are probably INCLUDING the UK and the ROW

Simon

 

[PipStar]

Pipstar

i realise you always believe that we influence the markets/client trading somehow but this is not the case

You are talking about a specific period in time (i.e Q1 2012) the FX markets have been very very quiet over this period of time allowing clients to take positions and sit on them until they come into profitability. There have been no trends in the major pairs (especially the Euro which is now easily the biggest traded pair) meaning that traders with bad positions have not been forced out and have been able to wait .. even double/triple up and then get out of jail free.

It is trends which cause the biggest upsets . if the euro goes to 1.22 or 1.40 then these stats provided by the FX companies will suddenly go into reverse.

i might also point out that these brokers actually operate the same models over here and we compete with them. so the numbers that you are quoting are probably INCLUDING the UK and the ROW

Simon

I don't believe you influence the market but there is irrefutable proof that a broker can influence client trading by ways that have been discussed ad nauseum here and on other threads.

I can tell you that although the link above is for Q1 2012, this report has been issued every 3 months for nearly 18 months now. And there has not been any sudden increase in profitability, just a steady rise from the time this reporting started. Just a coincidence or luck? I doubt it. Part of it can be due to more favourable markets as you state but you can be sure that most of it is due to the fact that the regulators in the USA have been coming down hard on unethical practices. For example, some brokers in the USA were fined for using the virtual dealer plugin, some others were fined for only allowing negative slippage and not positive slippage and many more. I don't make these up, do a search on the NFA website for some of the most popular brokers and the cases and broker fines are there for all to see.

The numbers on the report do NOT include the UK or rest of the world as I understand it, it makes reference on the first line of the article to "US forex accounts" only. I wish such a report could come out of the UK just for comparison and I believe we would see a disparity. The profitability numbers you quoted further up in this thread for your outfit and which most likely are the same for other spreadbet companies, are way below those in the USA. That's a fact.

 

[Ross Spur]

May be the high proportion of losers that you mention above applies to Capital Spreads/LCG and other spreadbet providers in the UK.

But your statement that more lose trading FX is way off the mark if you look at the U.S brokers profitability report issued by the CFTC in the below link:

US forex brokers profitability drops in Q1 2012, TradeStation gains most accounts, GFT most profitable | Forex Magnates

What do I see: GFT 40.6% profitable clients, Oanda 39.8% profitable clients, FXDD 32.0% profitable clients and the list goes on.

Forex Client Profitability with U.S brokers is between 40.6 % (Highest) to 27.3% (Lowest) and this has been steadily increasing since the CFTC/NFA have started cleaning up this industry. This is what happens when yo have a strong regulator with a hands on approach to the industry like in the USA.

What are the chances of this happening in the UK? Umm.....

The percentage figure alone doesn't really mean much.