Hacker

First off - I have next to no idea about financials at all. But my interest is growing.

I opened a spreadbetting account with CMC Markets to get to their free mobile offer (see cheap deals thread)

Just been mucking about with their platform to place the trades to qualify for the offer, playing the FTSE100 cash. Bought £1 at market (5920) and then put a limit order to sell £1 at 5926.

Price wiggled about a bit, their spread climbed to 5926-28 and then 5927-29, hovered for a minute and then came back to 5920ish. My limit sell order to close at 5926 went unfilled.

Pulled up their chatbox to ask why this was, operator said they had a fire alarm and the entire building was evacuated. Now call me a raging cynic, but in the short time before they responded I read this:

Source - Can you become a successful trader with CMC?

My questions are:

- Does anyone here think they had a fire alarm?
- Aren't small limit orders filled automatically? Surely that's a waste of time/money someone having to manually fill an order for £1 a point?
- Tradefair operate a 1 point spread on the FTSE100 cash, this compares very favourably to their competitors (CMC 2pt, IG 2pt, Spreadex 3pt) - should the average mug financials punter send their business to Tradefair or are there other factors to consider?

My gut feeling is that I would never make money out of day trading but would stand a marginally better chance swing trading over longer periods when the spread would be a little less likely to kill me. I would probably still lose, just a bit slower.

Companies like CMC markets filling orders (or not) like this sounds like a route straight to the poorhouse though?

chemist

Dealing with anyone who sets the prices is a route to the poorhouse IMO.

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Jd007

the question is did they put their hands up and say our mistake, or did they stiff you. If it's the latter I would go elsewhere. If that's their policy for £1 a tick, imagine what it is when you get bigger!

A long time ago I used to be a big player on the Daily FTSE and hedge my risk with IG index, who were the tightest spread at the time. They had an internet based fill, but I was able to take advantage of this and effectively could turn their 4 tick bid/offer into a 3.25 tick bid/offer, by watching the actual FTSE futures contract. The last time I looked at the FTSE on IG they had a system which countered this, I forget what.

Hacker

"Was there really a fire alarm yesterday?" has now billowed out to triple figure odds, when you see this many people all talking about the same problems it's pretty unlikely for me that they are a nice, honest bunch:

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Sounds like they are deliberately and consistently filling orders well away from the market and always to their own advantage, which happened again when I was playing around later on yesterday.

Hear_No_Evil

I tried them for the first time a few years ago. Gave them a stop order on my third order - and guess what - they filled me well away from the market.

Spoke to their compliance dept and they almost said "our traders are crooks, now get lost".

Wouldn't touch them ever again. They are complete idiots to do that though; I was a total amateur and if they kept me happy I would have lost a few thousand to them easily by overtrading.