Hallo,
I have the demo of DealBook 360 (GFTUK) installed since a few days. The demo seems to work fine for spread betting. Today, during the last 15 minutes of the US markets (heavy activity I suppose) I did several operations on the S&P500 index with a reasonably fast execution (around 3 seconds in the worst case, but this is acceptable considering the volume of activity). They were all market orders, spread betting.
Before opening an account, I would like to know if the real trading is as fast as with the demo (most transactions reported in around 1 second) or if the demo is fast and the real trading is not. So anybody using GFTUK please report on execution speed during congestion times, it will be appreciated.
Also a representative (who wanted my phone numbers, did not manage to have it, and redirected me to the technical office and the trade desk for some questions I asked him) told me that $2500 are necessary to open an account. A person on the "chat" of their web site, Alicia, yesterday "said" $500 (normally would not make a big difference but these days almost all my liquidity is invested in shares and some margin as well, I am a "true believer", but I don't want to increase my margin to open an account, 'cos you know the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent :smart
.
Is there a cost to withdraw money? If I change my mind after trying the real working for a while, will it cost me? Their site is not very transparent on many such details.
In general, good and bad feedback on GFTUK is appreciated. There are not many on this site. One reports awful execution times, but does not report which machine was used and if the problem persisted (DealBook seems to be quite heavy an application, besides, today QuoteTracker did very strange things with my data flow from TDAmeritrade, which is usually reliable and solid, so the occasional glitch can happen everywhere).
Thanks
Fabrizio