Hi wintergasp,
Welcome to T2W - good to have a pro' amongst us!
When you say
"they're all terrible" - is that based on personal experience or does it just reflect the prejudice often expressed by professionals against spread betting firms that focus on the retail market? I ask because many T2W members are novice traders and the vast majority of them (regardless of experience) are retail traders with small accounts. This is just a guesstimate having spent many years here, but I'd say the average account size is probably less than £5,000.
I'm sure I speak for many in saying we welcome your comments on this and other topics but, to ensure your posts have maximum impact, it will help enormously if you keep the typical T2W member in mind when you write them. I'm not talking about dumbing down, just being aware that most members have small accounts, the majority of which will be with a spread betting firm.
Tim.
I've worked as a market maker and know how those firms talk about their clients behind their back. Retail brokers are scumbags and thiefs, they will lie to you because they know you don't have the capitalisation to sue them in court. In the institutional environment, we hate retail brokers, everytime there is a f*cking rape story about a broker it's a retail broker, they have no culture no knowledge, they're always full of drugs etc. Most of the ones I've met probably wouldn't be a cashier at Tesco.
> IG : IG is a very well politically connected firm in the UK and they're the father of spreadbetting, which is tax free because nobody makes money spreadbetting, so IG pays the government a fee and the government is happy because a small fee is better than 33% of 0$.
I believed many years ago they pushed the government to make spread betting trading tax-free.
The founder of IG went to Eton College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College where some of the alumnus are Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Richard etc.
> ETX Capital : those guys don't book your trades so everything you trade is just against them.
> XTB UK : never heard of them.
> Plus 500 : Plus 500 was developed by a few guys in Israel and they're very very well known because they pay Introducing Partners 50% of their revenue, sometimes even more. So if you bring them clients, they will give you 50% of what they make. And ... as you may have guessed it.... they don't book anything on you so if you have a 5k£ account, they expect you to lose 5k£ within 30 or 90 days. They'll make 5k£. Their business introducer will get 50% of that or 2.5k£.
That's the reason why most websites and "trading gurus" tell you to open with Plus 500.
It was a genius move for Plus 500 because it allowed them to scale huge volumes and pay 0 in marketing fees.
> InterTrader : never heard of them.
Usually speaking when you see CFDs + Spreadbetting on a broker's page, you should **go away ASAP**.
My advice would be to try to open an account with a more institutional broker, 5k£ is difficult but with 10k£ you may find some Junior Account Managers who don't have clients yet and will on board you, because they need to bring in business and they'll tell their boss you want to put in 100k£ or 250k£ at a later stage.
Also tell them you want to put in 100k£ + at a later stage. Then 6 months later say you're not happy with something and that's why you didn't put the 100k£ and they shouldn't bother you much as the hardest compliance cost for them is opening the account. Or say you lost money in Brexit. Or in anything else. And you're not looking to put in much more at the moment. If you don't call them 5 times a day you should be good. We had over 200m$ with RJO Brien and never had any problem, very good customer service etc.
RJO Futures and Macquarie Futures are the "slightly less institutional" branches of RJO Brien and Macquarie Bank. They are still much much much MUCH MUCH better than any of the providers quoted above.
Of course with a 10k£ account with RJO Futures, you won't have the red carpet, but at least you'll avoid all the "we trade against you" bull**** and sweatshop providers.
Marex has a "Marex Pro Trader" thing for "prop traders", most of what they sell you there is wrong, but if you enrol as a Marex Pro Trader at least you trade through Marex so if you politely say no to their Trading Desk, Squawk and other useless services, you may very well have a not-too-expensive Marex account.
If you have 5k£ and not 10k£, I'd advise you to work somewhere to get the extra 5k£.
10k£ is nothing already but some account managers will believe this is just the bread crumbs to put much more later on.
If you have 2k£ then I'd very very highly advise you not to trade, you're essentially gambling money away and the whole spreadbetting / cfd system was designed so that you'd lose most of it within 30 days.
Hope this helps.
