HeOfMuchDisgrunt

Who do you trade with? Few seem to quote on-line prices. People have been on at IG for years to do it.

@CharlotteIG I'm lending my support to this campaign. It's embarrassingly pre-historic not to have a log-scale toggle. It's not as if it would be hard to program either. Why deny your clients such basic functionality?

@MongiIG Thanks - I understand that you are saying IG will not be legally restricted or prevented from offering these products, but what I'd like to know is whether IG anticipates Basel III affecting any of these markets, eg in terms of liquidity, availability of products in the underlying markets, etc. Are there any products that IG is currently considering withdrawing by its own choice as a result of Basel III?

@MongiIG Let me clarify the question - is Basel III likely to affect IG's provision of products such as Gold and Silver options and futures and other precious metals?

@ArvinIG Cheers, dude! Good to get an acknowledgement. Do please let us all know what the tech team say. People don't mind offering feedback on the understanding that not every single 'genius' customer idea can be implemented immediately, but what irks people the most is to give seemingly good, constructive ideas and have no feedback at all as to why the idea can't be used now or ever. It drives us nuts as customers when we obviously know what we want and what we aren't getting even though we realise the requested add-ons aren't difficult to bolt on from a coding perspective.

@AndaIG Could information like this not be included in more detail on the info tabs? Often the expired options continue to update even though the settlement price has already been determined so it's hard to guess when or at what equivalent price one should roll or trade into the underlying. Also, an option to settle into an underlying product or roll into the next month rather than cash settle would be a useful feature for many traders.

@ArvinIG I would like to make a few additional suggestions for improving the platform. I understand that all products are shown in every account-type even if some can't be traded from within that account, eg a "non-leveraged only" product will still be shown in a spread-bet or CFD account (and note that the "Margin" info tab for some reason incorrectly continues to show a table of margin tiers that actually don't apply to a non-leveraged product.). Other products are sometimes "no controlled risk", "unborrowable", "closing only", etc. it's incredibly annoying and time-consuming to search through a list of results, pick out individual stocks/products, see a chart you like then have to check the info tab to see if you can actually trade the product. Why could there not be a series of symbols or letters in one or more columns, like there is for the "market open/closed" column (that, for example, sometimes has a "telephone only" symbol), but also included in the search results so that one can instantly see which products can be "eliminated from enquiries"? Perhaps the Alert feature could be augmented to include being able to be set to notify when "unborrowable" stocks, e.g. recent IPOs, become borrowable or when positions that were "closing only" go back to normal trading (if that ever happens). Also, in "Positions" I can see my total gain or loss for each position but not that day's movement, unless I duplicate the Positions into a separate custom list which DOES have this column, but if I do that then I cannot enter the position size as well so I have to flick back and forth between two almost identical windows. Also, it would be really useful to have a separate toggleable on/off column that could show the total margin currently being used by each position. Currently, if I have to bring up a deal ticket as if to close the position, just to see how much margin is being consumed, I'm at risk of mis-clicking and closing the position unintentionally. Thanks.

@CharlotteIG Can we have a response to our feedback on this topic please?

@CharlotteIG @MongiIG Does IG have any advance contingency plans on how to deal with this?

It could be that IG's Volatility offering is a "spot" price made up of a combination of the nearest two months VIX futures contracts which are both currently trading at a premium to the "cash" market. Note that spot products can be subject to a daily adjustment, usually a charge if in "contango" (later futures price higher than nearer month, partly to account for the interest you would earn on the money not required as margin as compared not earned if you had to buy the spot product outright paying in full) but sometimes it can be a credit if the market is in "backwardation", i.e. the later month trades lower in expectation of more supply (for commodities) or in the case of the VIX more calmness after a spike. Why the actual construction of the product isn't clarified in the "Info" tab on the order ticket is a mystery.

It would be highly unusual for the FCA to do a U-turn. They think they are "protecting" the little guy from the sharks, but this leads them to do ridiculous things e.g. with option margin whereby a retail investor gets charged the full futures margin on a short option position irrespective of how far out of the money it is and, even worse, gets charged the same margin again even on an opposite position which could not possibly lose at expiration if the first leg were losing. For example a roughly at-the-money Put sells for a premium of P and is margined at an initial M (plus there is daily variation margin if the trade goes in the wrong direction) . A conservative trader thinks the market is slowly grinding down and wants to sell a Put 10% below the market for a much smaller premium p, but is still margined for the full amount M, so his ROI is considerably less - this tempts him to take the arguably riskier position of selling the higher premium position instead. However, being a conservative trader he decides to play it safe by selling the out of the money put anyway, not minding if he ends up having to buy the underlying at the lower price, but he then figures to increase his potential return by also selling a 10% out-of-the-money call. He would normally not expect to have to fully margin both sides of the trade as it would be impossible to lose money on both legs at expiry and volatility would have to increase drastically for the premiums to rise enough on both legs to force him to close early in addition to posting variation margin on any daily losses. Yet he is dumb-founded to find that FCA rules require the full margin amount M on BOTH legs. Not only can he not double his ROI but if he gets a margin call on his account he may have to close positions at a loss due to the extra margin M, on the second option position not being available as margin for other positions that he would have preferred to keep open during some short-term turbulence..Thus the FCA can actually cause the retail punter in this scenario to lose money on a position that he would otherwise have likely profited from. To avoid being treated as stupid (cos you don't happen to have half a million quid on top of your years of amateur trading experience) many customers may inevitably end up trading with unregulated overseas brokers which isn't at all in any way even riskier for them now is it?

Yes you do (and deducted if you are short).. However, be aware that for tax purposes it is a capital addition or subtraction to your account not part of your annual dividend income allowance, but the interest costs and any daily carry charges can be off-set against profits - if you closed all your positions before the.end of the tax-year then replaced them with differently-dated contracts or went on holiday for a month your gains (or claimable losses) would just be your ending cash balance minus your starting balance, provided you haven't written any options expiring in the next tax-year, which would complicate things a bit..

You can certainly hedge like that if you are quick off the mark - sometimes the market is surprisingly slow to react. Occasionally it does something counter-intuitive like meme-stock AMC Entertainment did recently when it actually shot up on the news of a proposed rights issue! But do remember that a CFD replicates your position in the underlying so if you shorted the CFD pre-rights and held the position through to the ex-rights date then you would find a short position in the rights added to your account which you would have to buy back at some point in addition to closing your short. Hopefully you weren't thinking there was a structural anomaly whereby someone else would pay for your free lunch every time with no risk to you..

It would help make your point if you gave an actual ticker. For example if you were interested in a meme stock such as AMC Entertainments searching on AMC would also bring up AMC Networks and AMCIL Ltd then when you click on them the "Info" tab on the right has a section called "Codes" which shows the ticker, though. I'm guessing you would prefer the ticker to show on mouse-over. Personally I don't see why they can't have the option to add columns for info such as this along with whether the stock is "closing only", "unborrowable", "telephone trading only", etc. It's annoying to have to select each item in turn out of a search list and not know for two or three clicks whether they are suitable.

Aren't IG themselves the market-maker during these out-of-hours times, though? Should you be expected to account for the possibility that IG could drop their own bid price to zero, or double the offer price, causing massive margin calls and forcing lots of close-outs, probably at significant losses? What is actually a reasonable out-of-hours spread and how could you account for it in advance of trading? In fact there is a valid argument to say that the margin on these instruments should be based only on their prices during actual trading on exchanges and on the last closing price thereafter or perhaps the after-hours mid-price.