Stonk
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Posts posted by Stonk
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If an open position is at a loss, then that's its value. By closing it, IG are equally likely to have saved you from further losses.
You can't argue that future news flow would return it to profitability. Any expectation of that, and its likelihood, are already built into the price. It might happen, but it also might not, and the current price is at precisely the level that reflects that balance of possibilities.
You did not lose £7500 the moment IG closed the position. You had already lost it.
Bottom line, if you cannot tolerate losing £7500, then you should not let your positions reach a P&L of -£7500, because that's exactly what losing £7500 is.
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15 hours ago, Nalda said:
Thankyou so much. How is your trading going? Anymore hints to help this problem?
The Demo account is good to watch the way markets move, and to learn your way round the interface quickly and efficiently. I tend to nurse and tweak my positions as the situation evolves rather than "fire-and-forget", so it's important I can make adjustments rapidly and accurately.
A strategy that is only slightly profitable in Demo might not be profitable in Live. A strategy that loses in Demo will definitely lose in Live. Slippage works both ways, of course: sometimes you close in profit at a more favourable level than you requested. It just seems that overall Live is a bit harsher on you than Demo is.
The best way I found to learn was in Live, with minimal stakes. IG give you 31 days of reduced minimums on a new account (or were doing a month ago). Take advantage of it, provided of course that the amounts involved will not hurt much to lose. It was not long enough for me, though! I'm not consistent enough yet and my 31 days have run out, but fortunately the standard minimum stakes on the markets I trade are within my risk tolerance.
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I can answer from a spread bet perspective. CFD might be different.
The prices are expressed in "points". Your trades are based upon a certain stake per point. Your profit/loss is your stake multipled by the number of points moved.
For a Silver spread bet, a "point" corresponds to a US cent in the price of silver. When you see the IG price as 2510.5, then silver is at US$25.10, but you need to think in cents. Your profit/loss will be your stake multipled by how many cents silver moves.
A point is not necessarily the minor unit of currency. For Gold, a "point" on the spread bet corresponds to a US dollar in the price of gold.
For Tesla, a "point" is a US cent. The numbers are getting unwieldy, but maybe not for much longer ...
Always get a feel for your chosen market so you don't go in 100 times too large!
The enlarged part of the number (if there is one), draws attention to the tens and units of the points. For example, If 2510.5 changes to 2515.7 you can quickly see that is a 5-point change.
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I used a Demo account for a few weeks. The data feeds, and hence the charts, seem to be the same as Live, i.e., perfectly real-time.
Just note, however, that the trading experience is not the same. On Demo, every order goes through at the exact price you ask for, with no slippage.
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During the 07:00-07:01 candle, as you say, the mid price hit a high of13762.1, which was well under your stop-loss.
However, the high bid and ask prices were 13757.1 - 13767.1 (a spread of 10), and since the ask was above your stop-loss it triggered. Painful.
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I suspect I might have been caught by a similar thing once or twice, so I'm interested in investigating this using the chart.
I assume this is GBP/USD. What time did it open and close? As accurately as possible, please. To the second would be good.
I have put a couple of my unexpected closures down to a sudden widening of the spread. Which, of course, you have no control over.
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I'm not sure how being unable to trade has cost you money.
At best, trading via IG is a zero-sum game, so unless you have compelling evidence why you are an exception, the statistical expectation is that being unable to trade has saved you money.
Oh, and pointing to a potential trade in retrospect and saying "I would have done that" does not count. If it did, we'd all be zillionaires.
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Aha, I just spotted this in the Rollover block of the Info section:
Usually, initial position closed at official closing level of day before last dealing day +/- closing spread; new position in next contract opened at official closing level of the new contract from same day, +/- opening spread.
Goodness knows why, though.
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6 hours ago, amir128 said:
Hello all.
I had some open positions in gold Apr2021 futures. They all rolled over, just a few minutes ago. We are still one week away from April. Can someone explain please.
Regards.
The short answer is that gold futures expire on the 4th business day prior to the first calendar day of the contract month, which is 26 March 2021.
This is detailed here: https://www.ig.com/ie/markets/commodities/commodities-cfd-costs-and-details. The expiry date rules for futures can be pretty random. The take-home message from that page is: assume nothing -- and certainly not that an April future will last until April!
An easier way to know a specific expiry time is from the Info section, as in my image below. Mind you, this indicates that the Gold April 2021 future expires at 18:30 on the 26 March 2021, so although the rollover is imminent it does appear to have happened a day early.
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It sounds like maybe you're doing share dealing, whereas I'm using spread betting, but the following might have a useful analogue:
In my Positions window in the web interface, there is a column I've added (via the 3-lines hamburger icon at the top-left) called "Profit/Loss (GBP)", which converts the standard "Profit/Loss" column to my account currency. I don't know, but it might take account of the exchange costs. Might be worth a look, see if you've got anything similar.
I'd be a bit peeved if that column said I had a profit at the moment I closed a position, and then actually it turned out to be a loss.
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21 minutes ago, Mcg said:
Found a video of Combi lol
Anything is possible, given that this seems to be a typical thought process of many US "investors". There seems to be no shortage of willing Ponzi participants for the real day-traders to extract money from.
"... my new hobby is day-trading ... last week I bought some AMC ... I'm ready to hold and take it to the moon ..." So, the exact opposite of day-trading, then.
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9 hours ago, alam1 said:
Sorry.. I could not edit my message above...
I found a similar markup between buy and sell rate almost within 15 minutes of buy and sell
and computed you lose 1% of value between the two on $ purchase/ sales
Misleading since I thought I sold for a $ profit and ended up in a £ loss😪
What would you consider an acceptable loss for buying and immediately selling?
1% is about what I would lose if I bought and immediately sold £5K-worth of any mainstream UK share through my share dealing broker (not IG). That's two sets of commission plus stamp duty plus spread. So I wouldn't consider your experience particularly unreasonable.
It's essential to understand the fees before dealing, to avoid this kind of surprise and disappointment.
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On 17/03/2021 at 14:14, dylan1234 said:
This is the 3rd time I've posted on this issue and none of the previous posts has made it to the IG Forum, so I'm having another go. Clearly IG don't want this point made.I have traded currencies on a live account with Oanda for a decade so I know the ropes. I recently opened a demo account with IG in order to test the site and with a view to depositing over £10K to trade US stocks. The trading strategy worked well, very well, so I deposited a few thousand to get me going. I used the same strategy in exactly the same way, but got very different results on the live platform. I soon realized that although IG, despite what it says about the almost identical similarity between it's demo and live platforms, hides some key differences. When placing Stop orders in demo trades fill at, or very close to, the order instruction. However in live they filled at levels. I understand gapping and spreads, but the difference between the fills in demo and live is astonishing. I placed the same 2 separate trades on today simultaneously, same levels, one in live and one in demo. In demo one sell trade filled at 4325, in live it filled at 3815. That's a difference of 510, a mind-boggling 12%. Same with the other trade. How can anyone reasonably expect to make a profit if IG's algorithms fleece traders with disgraceful fills and IG mislead traders with contrasting information? This shouldn't be the case as the demo platform should reflect exactly the live platform for the sake of accuracy and integrity so traders in demo get a clear understanding of what works before they deposit real money. Anything different is misleading, a con and criminal. I've attached screenshots of live and demo showing the differences. Let's see if this gets posted, but I'm going to make a complaint regardless, and withdraw every penny.
When were these positions opened? The times shown are when they closed. The prices in the upper screenshot (from Demo) were simply not available at 13:30-13:31 on the 17th.
Immatics was around 1170 at close on the 16th and gapped up to open around 1550 on the 17th.
NRG Energy was around 4350 at close on the 16th and gapped down to open around 3800 on the 17th.
As such, it would appear that Live gave you correct prices and there's nothing much to complain about.
Either the Demo trades were opened the day before, or somehow Demo filled you just after opening on the 17th with an incorrect price taken from the closing moments of the 16th.
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I just wanted to chip in my expoerience as a new user.
I spent a few weeks playing with the Demo account before going live. I would say:
(a) I tried hard to think of the Demo money as real, with mostly success. I was very careful with it, and got really upset about losing Demo money. The annoyances subsided gradually, but only because I was exercising my risk muscle and getting used to the idea that you can't win 'em all. That said, ultimately I always knew it was not real cash, and that must have affected my actions to some extent no matter how much I tried to suppress it.
(b) I was completely aware from material I had real on IG's site that Demo would be unlike Live in several ways. Of course, if you don't want to spend time reading what they provide, then you won't see this information. I deemed that the most important difference affecting me would be slippage (I'm not big enough to move the market with my trades), and indeed it has been. On Demo, as far as I could tell, the prices were exactly like Live, but the big difference is that you always trade at exactly the price you ask for. On Live, it's completely normal to experience a bit of slippage, especially on stops hit rapidly.
(c) In my opinion, the introductory offer of reduced minimums is absolutely the best way to learn -- way better than the Demo account. It's real money that hurts to lose, but hopefully not too seriously, and you get hit full on by everything that's against you. The only catch is it only lasts a month, and I cannot get good enough in that time.
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I have just done a similar test, with results that agree with yours.
M&G PLC was going ex-div today for a juicy 12.23p, so yesterday I bought GBP0.25 per point (25 shares worth) of the June forward. Sure enough, sometime before markets opened this morning I was credited with the full dividend amount of 306p. As expected, the spot and forward prices opened with a drop of roughly the dividend amount, with the forward price staying at the same differential from the spot price as it was yesterday. All good.
Next week, if I can find a sufficiently cheap share paying a noticeable dividend I will test taking a short forward position to verify that dividends are debited in that case.
City Index are clearer than IG in their documentation that dividend adjustments are made to all equity positions, spot or forward. City Index also state that the 10% dividend tax is withheld, although I can't reason out why that is necessary. It feels like it would just complicate the user's tax affairs: if your personal circumstances are such that your P&L is taxable, then some of it needs declaring, while some of it has been dealt with at source.
Next question! What determines the price upon which forwards are based? Obviously the longer the forward the wider the spread. But, also, longer forwards tend to have higher mid prices. It might be something to do with the general expectation of increasing prices and the risk-free interest rate, but then I would expect the differential to be consistent across all shares, and it is not. I wondered whether IG is building some of their own opinion into this differential, on a share-by-share basis. I'm pretty sure last week I saw a couple of shares with forward prices at a discount to spot prices. That might have been a glitch because I cannot find it today (note to self: exploit this when you see it in future!).
Just to add another spanner in, City Index's forwards are priced with broadly similar spread but significantly higher mid prices. For example, take BT PLC. On IG, the June forward is priced off spot +0.21p, and the September forward off spot +0.40p. On City Index, they are +0.94p and +1.91p respectively.
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From here:
If you can’t go long (open a ‘buy’ position) on cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, ripple, or ether, the most likely reason is we have reached our internal limits on these products, and so the market is set to ‘unlongable’. This means we are unable to accept any new long trades either by phone or online – but you’ll still be able to close existing positions.
Due to the risks associated with cryptocurrencies, there’s a limit to the total amount of physical cryptocurrency we can hold as a business. When this limit is reached, we are unable to purchase more cryptocurrency to hedge your position.
This is when a market will be set to unlongable. And because we don’t know when we’ll be off of our limits, it’s not possible for us to estimate when the market may become available to trade again.
Odd though it may seem (since you're not taking a real position), the Demo platform becomes restricted at the same time as Live.
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On 09/03/2021 at 18:30, herdassistance said:
In case anyone is searching for this topic I bought one fwd equity as a test and did receive a dividend adjustment on the date it went ex-dividend:
John Laing Environmental Assets Group LimitedJUN-21
04/03/21
DIVIDEND
Adjustment for dividend in John Laing Environmental Assets Group Limited
£1.69I'm going to assume you do get dividend adjustments but will be careful with size until I've seen a few more be paid.
If anyone from IG could confirm that dividend adjustments are paid for equity and ETF forwards that would be reassuring.
This confirms my belief that dividend adjustments would be made on equity forwards. I will find out more and report back when one of mine goes ex-div, but none are imminent.
The amount you have been credited is odd though. JLG are paying 7.82p/share, so £1.69 would be the dividend on 21.6 shares.
If dividend adjustments were NOT paid, then surely there would be (on average) easy money to be made by going short the nearest-dated forward of any equity with a dividend larger than the spread thereon at 16:29 the day before it trades ex-div, then closing the position the next day.
Forced CFD position closure by IG
in Shares and ETFs
Posted
Of course you believe you know better than the market. You'd better rein that in: relegate it from "firm conviction that I cannot be wrong" to "well-researched belief with a stop-loss attached in case I'm wrong".
You mention a "predictable news flow that would have set them right in due course". If it's all so predictable and your "deep DD" is so infallible, why didn't it tell you hold off and invest after the upcoming £7500 loss?
"Deep DD" also ought to have lead you to realise that CFDs are a bad way to take a position on something that needs considerable time.