Best Thread Capital Spreads

[kwickwool]

You fall into the 95% of people on this site with your arrogance. Have edited the above post to read margin ratio instead of leverage, you happy now, arrogance of some people just beyond.

Only an idiot makes assumptions, not interested in talking to you, was addressed to Simon, goodbye.

 

[6am]

Could you please tell me why my margin required ratio has gone up from 50:1 on the Dow to 200:1 without any email or correspondence from Capital spreads at all? Also the same on currencies, care to explain?

Are you saying that they require more money to open/hold positions? And they did it without any notice? That is a bad practice. It may generate a couple of margin calls out of thin air.

 

[Jon41]

You fall into the 95% of people on this site with your arrogance. Have edited the above post to read margin ratio instead of leverage, you happy now, arrogance of some people just beyond.

Only an idiot makes assumptions, not interested in talking to you, was addressed to Simon, goodbye.

Only an idiot makes assumptions...well, let's see if we can hoist you by your own petard.

It would appear you have assumed that margin requirements have changed without actually bothering to think for a couple of seconds. I have checked my a/c and DOW margins are still at 50. Their auto margin function will take 200 by default if you have it in your account...and here I'm going to make a brave assumption that for the first time you've put more than £50 in your account (well done big boy) and so it's taking more margin. If you move your stop in tight then your margin will be reduced. I'm pretty sure that's been the story for years. If you don't know these things you should be careful with how you are managing your risk.

 

[capitalspreads]

please can we not insult each other

Capital Spreads has not increased margin requirements at all to any client and in fact for those of you who have been with us for a while many will remember that, contrary to almost all of our competitors, in the wild days of 2008/09 (aside from a few financial stocks) we did not increase our margin requirements at all even then.

jon41 maybe correct but, guys, no need to point score....margin with capital spreads is variable depending on the funds on your account. We will permit a £1 trade with just £50 on the account b ut if you have more than this our systems will take up to £200 per £1 bet. So if you have £1000 on your account our margin system would take £200 as margin and place a stop at 160 points away but if you had £50 on your account it would accept the trade and place the stop 40 points away. If you had £49 the trade would be rejected.

Not sure who you have been listening to but i can absolutely guarantee that Capital Spreads (LCG) has no problems at all with regulatory capital.. in fact we are rather over capitalised (which is where I, as the CEO, wish us to be).

We have absolutely no need for our clients to deposit more funds with us to take the same positions ... this would be useless anyway as all funds must be segregated so what would be the point?... We do want more client funds from the view point that this would mean more business .. so please roll up, roll up!

cheers
simon

 

[capitalspreads]

twinj

sorry about your query on 'hedging' and closing positions.

by hedging i assume you mean 'force open' trades where you can have a long and short in the same market. It is unlikely that we will do this in the short/medium term but most markets do have a similar product (usually rolling and quarterlies) or u could open a cfd account as well (using the same platform and margin pool) and then you could be lond a spread bet and short a cfd or vice versa. But you may have tax issues if you make/lose large sums in different accounts. If you want a dual account just call customer services and they will be able to sort it out.

A universal close button is rather more difficult as a client might have a problem if he tried to close 5 different products but perhaps one of the trades was rejected. ... the client thinking he had been filled .. goes away and.. hey presto . two days later big loss and we are in complaint land.

you can close all positions in a single market but that is probably all we will ever do.

Concerning moving all stops in a conglomerate position to a universal level. this is also difficult on several layers mainly to do with margin calculations . but we will try to address this issue at one of our future upgrades. This is one that our dealers want changed as well as clients with 40 positions in one market have a habit of ringing us up and asking for the dealer to change the levels for the client !

Simon

 

[twinj]

Thanks Simon for your detailed response. I think these changes would be most useful.

 

[montmorencyt2w]

pipstar



But it is true that all FX providers /SBs/CFDs/Brokers (in fact the entire retail financial industry) depends upon the accrual of money from clients. Either through commission or through book running. How else can they (in the end) make money?

Book running?
Showing my ignorance, I know, but what is this?
Thank you.

 

[montmorencyt2w]

A question for customers of CS:

What is your current opinion of the platform?
e.g. overall look and feel, response times, controllability, etc.

I was fairly familiar with it about 3-4 years ago, but drifted away for various reasons.
I know it has been upgraded at least once since I last used it.
I like the LCG model, and I've used their WLs as well, and will almost certainly be giving it another try in the not too distant future, but it would be nice to have a quick and unscientific survey of how people are liking it at the moment.

Thank you.
Cheers,
Mike

 

[twinj]

I like the platform but I have suggested things to make better recently. Shame the trading layout including the charts cannot be saved. I trade clear of announcements and execution is great. Spreads are so so meaning one of the best but not the best. However, they are fixed and no slippage model. Not tried trades larger than 5ppp. Would like to once I get my money back. Email replies good.

Has anyone traded during news? I would like to know how good their execution is during volatile times. Generally I don't like trading the news because I have encountered strange behaviour (NOT on capitalspreads). For instance, you go in and the trade takes a long time to get through. Meanwhile missing a tidy profit. I have closed the platform and logged in again to find the trade has gone through and in loss. Please verify this Simon but I believe the capitalspreads model is that in such a hanging event, if you log out, the trade will not execute?

 

[capitalspreads]

twinj

actually i am not sure what happens if you get the circling "awaiting execution" message and then you log out. I assume that whatever happens is acceptable to our clients because i do not hear of complaints.

To be honest (if a bit brutal) if you have clicked to make a trade and it is not rejected in some form then you should really expect to get the trade. The trade message to servers was sent before the log out action and so the preceding event should hold precedence.

It is quite a while since i got a hanging message on the CS platform asupgraded systems have proved well capable of anything the markets have thrown at it recently ... we even survived the Aug/Sep chaos last year with few problems.

Simon

 

[Ross Spur]

I'd like to try the upgraded platform, but when do we get the 1pt spread Dow?

 

[top trader]

Simon,

When are you going to quote UK share prices to the second or third decimal points? It doesn't matter much on bigger s.p shares but with smaller share priced shares, like RBS, LLOYDS,ITV,EMG etc. it works out WIDER spreads than others.

Thanks.

Edit- e.g in RBS, your spread is 0.3p compared to 0.06 with others.

 

[capitalspreads]

top trader

good question !

i will ask the dealing desk to look at it. you would still be playing per penny move as otherwise clients might, very reasonably, claim to be confused

Simon

 

[capitalspreads]

Ross

one point on dow will still have to wait for the new pricing engine (which i thought would be online already but is proving problematic). eerrr soon ...!

other clients also had probs with our competitors site yesterday.. so probably not just u. Another reason to be with us!

simon

 

[Ross Spur]

Ross

one point on dow will still have to wait for the new pricing engine (which i thought would be online already but is proving problematic). eerrr soon ...!

other clients also had probs with our competitors site yesterday.. so probably not just u. Another reason to be with us!

simon

Yesterday would have been a good test for it, judging from the problems the opposition were having! First it was prices lagging by about 30pt and all trades rejected, then crash for an hour or three.

 

[capitalspreads]

ahhhh !!! we were looking at the prices and were trying to work out what was happening.

we were thinking that they must be quoting some weird version of the FTSE and DAX. but if they had that problem all day then i can understand. They must have been implementing some upgrade or other that caused a problem as the market could hardly be described as 'volatile' . Bad luck for them .. hopefully good for us and the others.

thanks

Simon

 

[Ross Spur]

ahhhh !!! we were looking at the prices and were trying to work out what was happening.

we were thinking that they must be quoting some weird version of the FTSE and DAX. but if they had that problem all day then i can understand. They must have been implementing some upgrade or other that caused a problem as the market could hardly be described as 'volatile' . Bad luck for them .. hopefully good for us and the others.

thanks

Simon

I was looking mainly at the Dow, which had prices that seemed to be a minute or two off the pace. Their platform was still having problems after 8am this morning. Luckily, I didn't lose anything, but I think I'll give them a miss for a while now.

 

[Eminenz]

Simon,

does CS has any plans to bring the spread of the oil front months WTI and Brent from 5 to 3 cents?

WTI front month future spread is hardly above 1 cent during daytime.

Best regards

 

[capitalspreads]

eminenz

as mentioned we might be looking at a wide array of the spreads in our major markets.

not sure about oil. oddly enough it used to be a big market for us but, over the last year or so, has drifted a bit, which is strange as it seems as interesting as ever. Many of our clients got badly burnt by the brent/wti reversal and subsequent widening to, i think at one point, to almost plus 22 bucks. For most of my time in the city it had basically oscillated around minus 1 dollar. Even our more cautious traders seemed to get caught up in it.

Since then it has proved a difficult one to call.

Simon

 

[e_dash]

For the most part I'm happy with them, it's my first platform and it's been put together well enough that I know what I'm doing.

My only issue is with the iOS app! It's functional but awkward to use. I would love to be able to keep track on my positions on the go but I'm not sure I would be comfortable being away from my desk for too long. Also the iPad app just seems broken, fails to load information more often then not.