Smart Live Markets - Spread Bet on MT4

[invicta3000]

Now are SLM a professional outfit???

Apparently not. This afternoon (Friday, May 20) at 17:55 hrs UK I lost connection with the SmartLiveMarkets servers. I called them thinking it maybe a problem on my PC and was told their systems had crashed. Their web site also went down. I asked if senior management were aware of this catastrophe and was told they had gone home.

This occurred when hopefully most clients would have already closed their positions and, fortunately, it was still possible to close positions by phone. 45 minutes later their systems were still down, which is surely indicative of a lack of redundancy in their systems.

I shall be closing my account, which is a shame because this is the only spread betting company I've found that offers the MT4 platform.

 

[JDTRADER]

Apparently not.

I shall be closing my account, which is a shame because this is the only spread betting company I've found that offers the MT4 platform.

Why not email your concerns ?

I hope they learn from this and get back up servers in future

 

[pineappleman]

Apparently not. This afternoon (Friday, May 20) at 17:55 hrs UK I lost connection with the SmartLiveMarkets servers. I called them thinking it maybe a problem on my PC and was told their systems had crashed. Their web site also went down. I asked if senior management were aware of this catastrophe and was told they had gone home.

This occurred when hopefully most clients would have already closed their positions and, fortunately, it was still possible to close positions by phone. 45 minutes later their systems were still down, which is surely indicative of a lack of redundancy in their systems.

I shall be closing my account, which is a shame because this is the only spread betting company I've found that offers the MT4 platform.

Invicta3000: I see you've just joined and that was your first post - just to tell us you're closing your account after one slip up with a connectivity problem which was down to BT not SLM???!

You're gonna throw in the towel on SLM after that one small thing and go with whom exactly? Steal4Free? IG? Finspreads? And all their crappy little bespoke trading platforms?!! REALLY??! If you look around you'll see people nagging about these companies just as much with platform freezes, bad fills etc.

Sounds like you're ready to quit before you've begun... not a great trading attitude. In this imperfect world of imperfect trading retail traders have to find a way to work with what is on offer, not swim against the tide looking for the (un)promised land.

EDIT: remember they very humbly apologised and promised to compensate. Not all (or should I say "many") brokers would do either of these. What more do you want/can they do? You're lucky you don't live in the old trading world of limit up and down situations when markets would get locked out for the whole day or even week while positions ran against you. Oh what a hardship to have to phone them and have them close your orders, oh the pain the pain.

You're living in great trading times, stop moaning about a bloody server/phoneline going down for a few hours. People are starving somewhere right now.

 

[JDTRADER]

Invicta3000: I see you've just joined and that was your first post - just to tell us you're closing your account after one slip up with a connectivity problem which was down to BT not SLM???!

You're gonna throw in the towel on SLM after that one small thing and go with whom exactly? Steal4Free? IG? Finspreads? And all their crappy little bespoke trading platforms?!! REALLY??! If you look around you'll see people nagging about these companies just as much with platform freezes, bad fills etc.

Sounds like you're ready to quit before you've begun... not a great trading attitude. In this imperfect world of imperfect trading retail traders have to find a way to work with what is on offer, not swim against the tide looking for the (un)promised land.

Well said :clap:

Think of retail trading like this:

Your watching a football game
All the players are on the pitch
You in the stands watching the game
The players make all the moves
you can't control the score
BUT
a bookie at the game will bet with you, who will score first
now you know player A in this team scores 85% of the time
You bet player A scores
In fact player B scores today
AND
you lose

WELCOME TO TRADING lol

 

[Pi3141]

Invicta3000: I see you've just joined and that was your first post - just to tell us you're closing your account after one slip up with a connectivity problem which was down to BT not SLM???!

You're gonna throw in the towel on SLM after that one small thing and go with whom exactly? Steal4Free? IG? Finspreads? And all their crappy little bespoke trading platforms?!! REALLY??! If you look around you'll see people nagging about these companies just as much with platform freezes, bad fills etc.

Sounds like you're ready to quit before you've begun... not a great trading attitude. In this imperfect world of imperfect trading retail traders have to find a way to work with what is on offer, not swim against the tide looking for the (un)promised land.

EDIT: remember they very humbly apologised and promised to compensate. Not all (or should I say "many") brokers would do either of these. What more do you want/can they do? You're lucky you don't live in the old trading world of limit up and down situations when markets would get locked out for the whole day or even week while positions ran against you. Oh what a hardship to have to phone them and have them close your orders, oh the pain the pain.

You're living in great trading times, stop moaning about a bloody server/phoneline going down for a few hours. People are starving somewhere right now.

^ Couldnt agree more.

 

[JDTRADER]

People are starving somewhere right now.

 

[invicta3000]

JJDTrader: I posted yesterday to agree with SimonK and warn others that SmartLiveMarkets seem to be operating a system that lacks redundancy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I wasn't moaning. Simply relating what happened and what I had decided to do about it. I don't know why this should warrant your tirade or perhaps it was just the normal welcome to be expected on this forum.

You assume I was aware that the fault lied with BT. SLM did not claim that when I spoke to its trading desk. Even if it was a BT fault it is surely inadvisable for SML to leave itself so vulnerable.

Unlike you I have not received any apology, humble or otherwise, from SLM. Nor have I received an offer of compensation.

I've been trading commodity futures for over 25 years and have several trading accounts with brokers in the US and Europe so I'm not "quitting before I've begun" or "throwing in the towel". I'm simply not interested in trading with outfits that are not prepared to make a sufficient investment in redundant servers and connections.

However, if you are happy trading with SML, I wish you well with them.

 

[JDTRADER]

JJDTrader: I posted yesterday to agree with SimonK and warn others that SmartLiveMarkets seem to be operating a system that lacks redundancy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I wasn't moaning. Simply relating what happened and what I had decided to do about it. I don't know why this should warrant your tirade or perhaps it was just the normal welcome to be expected on this forum.

You assume I was aware that the fault lied with BT. SLM did not claim that when I spoke to its trading desk. Even if it was a BT fault it is surely inadvisable for SML to leave itself so vulnerable.

Unlike you I have not received any apology, humble or otherwise, from SLM. Nor have I received an offer of compensation.

I've been trading commodity futures for over 25 years and have several trading accounts with brokers in the US and Europe so I'm not "quitting before I've begun" or "throwing in the towel". I'm simply not interested in trading with outfits that are not prepared to make a sufficient investment in redundant servers and connections.

However, if you are happy trading with SML, I wish you well with them.

I think you have some of my comments mixed up with another poster

I don't know why this should warrant your tirade or perhaps it was just the normal welcome to be expected on this forum.

I think this is a bit harsh mate "tirade"
I think others will say I'm to the point and also add humour to my posts

I've been trading commodity futures for over 25 years and have several trading accounts with brokers in the US and Europe

T2W forum is the best for engaging with the Forex Community and hope to see you post again espacially someone with your experience. We can ALL learn from guys with 25 years grinding the market :smart:


All the best and Safe Trading

 

[JDTRADER]

 

[Mata Nui]

I like the demo so far,bit scary though servers going down, luckily late Friday not too bad.
How often has this happened? I was thinking of going live soon..

To be honest i have found the demo pops off pretty regularly. The live though is a lot more reliable.

 

[geewcee]

To be honest i have found the demo pops off pretty regularly. The live though is a lot more reliable.

Nice to hear, as I'm hoping to go live with them real soon. Never seemed to have a problem with the demo platform, just a slight gap in the feed on USDJPY one day but I wasnt in a trade anyway.

 

[JDTRADER]

Nice to hear, as I'm hoping to go live with them real soon. Never seemed to have a problem with the demo platform, just a slight gap in the feed on USDJPY one day but I wasnt in a trade anyway.

I'm LIVE

Had only ONE re-quote all week :clap:

And on a news trade got out with profit on a spike

No complaints from me............yet

 

[magicdogsbrain]

Personally I only trade small amounts with them. Maybe in a few years, if this kind of thing becomes a distant memory. At the moment there are just a procession of issues.

 

[twinj]

I'm LIVE

Had only ONE re-quote all week :clap:

And on a news trade got out with profit on a spike

No complaints from me............yet

Hi JD TRADER, good to hear you are doing well. I should add sorry to hear about the problems due to the outage to all affected.

Also interested to read that you profited from a news trade. This is in contrast to the experiences I have had recently. I got order processing and failed to execute. I contacted about the issue and was told that normally one would not experience these things but you will come across it more often if you trade around the news. Please could you tell me your trade size for news trades? I try 2to 5 pounds. Perhaps trade size matters? In any case, please could you let me know how the execution is during news releases?

Thanks in advance.

 

[JDTRADER]

Hi JD TRADER, good to hear you are doing well. I should add sorry to hear about the problems due to the outage to all affected.

Also interested to read that you profited from a news trade. This is in contrast to the experiences I have had recently. I got order processing and failed to execute. I contacted about the issue and was told that normally one would not experience these things but you will come across it more often if you trade around the news. Please could you tell me your trade size for news trades? I try 2to 5 pounds. Perhaps trade size matters? In any case, please could you let me know how the execution is during news releases?

Thanks in advance.

News event was Thursday 19th May UK Retail Sales

The whisper was the number was going to be bad, but I did not hold that view so I took 3 positions to cover my risk.

05.19.2011 09:35 05.19.2011 10:34
EURUSD Buy 0.50
1.41983 1.42967 1.42467 1.42360 -10.7 -5.35 59m -1.07%
05.19.2011 09:41 05.19.2011 10:34
USDJPY Sell 0.50
81.94600 81.24600 81.74600 81.89400 -14.8 -7.40 53m -1.48%
05.19.2011 09:35 05.19.2011 10:30
GBPUSD Buy 0.50
1.61525 1.61975 1.61475 1.61826 35.1 17.55 55m 3.51%
Note: Times shoe GMT+1 for BST. Trades log taken from MyFXBook link:
http://www.myfxbook.com/members/TRADER1967/slm/106761

GBP/USD just before the numbers broke my trade was in the red and it spiked over 40 pips. I hit close as you can see right on the release 09:30 (10:30 BST) No problems closed instantly. But you can see I should of closed the other two at the same time lol can't win them all. With all three trades I was +£ and that is the name of the game :smart:

I'm very open with my trading, you can follow my trades on Twitter @JD_TRADER and the MyFXBook link. Stop by my blog to

 

[easytimes]

the critisms of one outage for approx 3 hours are a bit harsh to be honest if it occurred frequently then I could understand it. We have had instances where the entire LSE has gone down on at least 2 occaisions in the past couple of years. That is with a huge amount of redundancy in their systems. I've been part of a support team where the link has gone down and the redundant backup link has failed as well. Sure SLM need more redundancy it sounds like they need a mirror site also but they're pretty new i guess it comes down to investment.

We are talking an SB platform here, over the years I've been through about 5 different SB platforms most of them have been flaky, I've experienced several outages occurring on virtually all of them. People moan and say never touching them again but still continue to use them. The senior management bit did make me laugh just how useless is that leaving early on a friday afternoon obviously typical corporate types do that crap from my experience. All of the corps I've workked for key management always bog off early PM on a friday they need to sort that out SLM isn't big enough to have slackers in their management team.

 

[SimonK]

the critisms of one outage for approx 3 hours are a bit harsh to be honest if it occurred frequently then I could understand it. We have had instances where the entire LSE has gone down on at least 2 occaisions in the past couple of years. That is with a huge amount of redundancy in their systems. I've been part of a support team where the link has gone down and the redundant backup link has failed as well. Sure SLM need more redundancy it sounds like they need a mirror site also but they're pretty new i guess it comes down to investment.

We are talking an SB platform here, over the years I've been through about 5 different SB platforms most of them have been flaky, I've experienced several outages occurring on virtually all of them. People moan and say never touching them again but still continue to use them. The senior management bit did make me laugh just how useless is that leaving early on a friday afternoon obviously typical corporate types do that crap from my experience. All of the corps I've workked for key management always bog off early PM on a friday they need to sort that out SLM isn't big enough to have slackers in their management team.

So I guess they never heard of on-call support or Service Level Agreements

 

[gle101]

JJDTrader: I posted yesterday to agree with SimonK and warn others that SmartLiveMarkets seem to be operating a system that lacks redundancy. Nothing more, nothing less.

I wasn't moaning. Simply relating what happened and what I had decided to do about it. I don't know why this should warrant your tirade or perhaps it was just the normal welcome to be expected on this forum.

You assume I was aware that the fault lied with BT. SLM did not claim that when I spoke to its trading desk. Even if it was a BT fault it is surely inadvisable for SML to leave itself so vulnerable.

Unlike you I have not received any apology, humble or otherwise, from SLM. Nor have I received an offer of compensation.

I've been trading commodity futures for over 25 years and have several trading accounts with brokers in the US and Europe so I'm not "quitting before I've begun" or "throwing in the towel". I'm simply not interested in trading with outfits that are not prepared to make a sufficient investment in redundant servers and connections.

However, if you are happy trading with SML, I wish you well with them.

Trading with market makers you must have a setup where you can hedge yourself out of the position, this in case the site goes down or some other problem occurs. Still, you will have some down time with all SB and a plan how to operate when these takes place. SLM is quite new player, so these problems is to be expected. Being the first SB on a MT4 platform contribute to them taking it longer to tune in the platform and service.

 

[dmt257]

All prices as of midnight Sunday are frozen.

Not good.

 

[Mr_p]

All prices as of midnight Sunday are frozen.

Not good.

Strangely enough my price is working, allbeit very slowing but the front page of the website is updating prices in real time