Hi all
I read this thread with great interest as I have traded the markets for a considerable period of time, pre 1984. The history of spread betting is in my view anyway quite interesting as I understand it was simply a private gamble between professional traders just to spice up their lives. Somebody though had the idea to take this public and hence today we have the spread betting companies.
When spread betting initially hit the general public the companies involved at the time practiced some very dirty tricks indeed to rob their clients and indeed I fell foul of these myself to the point of vowing never to spread bet again.
The tricks employed included closing accounts of clients who were lucky enough to have a couple of winners. One of the most widely employed was filling orders way after the buy/sell button was pressed hence the trade took place just where you did not wish to trade ie support or resistance against your position.
Another trick was the widening of spreads by an extreme amount to trigger stops and limits, I once witnessed an entire bull market taken out and over a weekend!! The response of the company in question was basically "tough". I notice above an attachment showing a differnce of 6 pts, try a difference of 60pts as may have occured historically.
Now when we talk of delays in filling orders in terms of seconds well consider this, in the past the spread betting platforms would go down at crucial points in time ie fundemental announcements for perhaps three hours, once they had cleaned everybody out with wild swings which had not the slightest resemblance to true market activity then the platform would flash up again.
I could go on with this but really enough said, so lets consider today and GFT the original topic of this post.
As previously stated I vowed never to spread bet again, indeed someplace on this site perhaps that very thread still exists. However a friend suggested I try again as I was complaining about CGT, my inital reaction was some friend you are, I would rather make love to the tax man. He persisted and directed me to GFT.
I opened a small account so as to access their real time data, this I compared with my real time data feed from a seperate source and the differences are miniscle. Then I looked intentionally for wild spikes in the data and found none historically, still suspicious I tracked GFT forwards against the futures markets and once again no wild spikes. This left me with only the issue of fundemental announcements, and I must state that not once has the GFT platform gone down during announcements and volatile periods.
However still not 100% content I made a point of visiting GFT by attending one of their seminars and discussed my concerns directly with people there, the response was that GFT cannot afford the bad press as a result of underhand tactics, they are too big in the currency markets to risk the fallout that may ensue. Now of course they might well just be saying that but certainly I have had no reason since to doubt what they said.
So I am back spread betting with GFT and very happy indeed.
Their charting package is in my view is one of the best I have used this includes those on which I have spent a lot of money in the past. For me though it does have only one drawback as it's a web style platform the date axis stops at last data point. Not much use if you wish to project future points in time. This though is not a show stopper.
Gft's customer service I have found to be prompt, polite and effective. It has not been required that I tackle a serious point with them as none have occured.
So my overall my view is that if you wish to spreadbet then choose who you use with caution. The company that was once called Deal4Free and became known as Steal4Free is still out there.
Nut
