Hi
I trade near month FTSE futures on LIFFE via interactive brokers.
I would seriously suggest anyone with the capital (£2,500) and time to fill in the forms heads of to Direct Access from spreadbetting if they are looking for shorter time frames.
I know it seems a little daunting at first and everything isn't as easy to understand as spread bet with comms and fees but I went from struggling to break even with Cantor to making decent money using direct access mainly through smaller spread and less 'skew' on the price.
If anyone on this thread wants more info in to how to go about doing it then please feel free to email me at
[email protected] (PS I don't work for IB!) just saying I found it easier to make money intraday using direct access than spread bet.
Incedentally my style of trading is to use bollingers set around a 9 period exponential lag on the 5 min chart and look to buy dips to the lag when market is trending higher and sell rallies to the lag when the market is trending lower.
My win rate is doing well although profits might be as small as 2 points per time (£17.94) after commisions on one contract, if you can do this six or seven times a day net of losers it isn't a bad start.
I don't tend to trade longer views now but if you were to want my view the market reversed exactly at previous high yesterday and we are testing it again today (around 6450 on the cash I think?) if this holds again it's back on up, if it breaks I expect a lot of fast downside.
Stephen McCreedy