Trading-Gurus.com » Spread Betting

Ray Robot Makes More Money Spread Betting with GKFX than with Alpari

Jim — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:26:22 +0000

Ray Robot II™ has now been running his live spread betting test comparing Alpari UK with GKFX for over a month. We're rather obsessive here at the Trading Gurus, and we've noticed a variety of interesting differences between Ray's four experimental accounts during that time. Some observers have however suggested to us that all that matters in a trading account is "the bottom line". Whilst we humbly disagree with that assertion, Ray is nonetheless now proud to announce that there is at last a difference between the bottom line of his Alpari accounts (currently standing at £255.00) and his GKFX accounts (currently standing at £261.00). There are any number of other (less significant?) differences also.

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Persistent Patterns in Ray's Spread Betting Live Test

Jim — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 17:53:39 +0000

Another day dawns, and all four of Ray Robot's MetaTrader spread betting accounts have suffered another small loss overnight. Another cable short, another -10.0 pips, Ray's bottom line down to £246.00 at both GKFX and Alpari UK. This "false breakout" was however longer lasting than the previous ones. It took 3 hours and 21 minutes on both GKFX and Alpari for Ray's (overly tight?) stops to get taken out this morning.

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Our MetaTrader 4 Spread Betting Live Test Suffers Some Delays

Jim — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:50:56 +0000

Ray Robot II™ has been automatically spreadbetting on four different accounts for 3 days now, two of which are live accounts with real money in them, and two of which are solely for demonstration purposes. The trades themselves have been fairly uneventful so far, although I'm sure much more excitement is waiting just around the corner! Today the live and demo accounts at both GKFX and Alpari UK all suffered their third 10 pip loss in a row. They all shorted GBP/USD just below the previous day's low yet again, and they all lost once more. Some sort of a pattern does seem to be developing however. Just like yesterday, it took longer for Ray's stop loss to get taken out at GKFX than it did at Alpari UK. 6 minutes at GKFX versus 5 mins at Alpari UK on this morning's trade.

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Ray Robot II™ Spread Betting Live Test – Alpari UK versus GKFX

Jim — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:04:13 +0000

We were just gearing ourselves up to gently launch Ray Robot II™ onto an unsuspecting world when Alpari UK announced that they had started offering MetaTrader 4 spread betting accounts. In contrast to some reports elsewhere on the web, here at the Trading Gurus we are well aware that automated spread betting via MT4 has been available for well over a year from another broker – the recently renamed GKFX. We figured we'd kill several birds with one stone by running RR2 in identical fashion on live accounts from both MT4 spread bet brokers. While we're at it we thought we'd also try him out on demo accounts from both brokers, to see if there is any noticeable difference between automated live trading and pretend trading at our small sample of MetaTrader brokers. Whilst we're at that we thought we'd also compare some backtest results with all those forward test results, to see whether that made any difference to the outcome(s).

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Alpari UK Introduce MetaTrader 4 Spread Betting

Jim — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 15:18:04 +0000

It's been quite a long wait, but Alpari UK have announced today that they are now the second broker to offer automated spread betting using the MetaTrader 4 platform to UK residents. According to their news release:

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Smart Live Markets Renamed GKFX

Jim — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:39:01 +0000

Yesterday evening customers of UK spreadbet and forex/CFD broker Smart Live Markets received an email announcing that:

Smart Live Financial Services Ltd will be changing its name in the coming weeks to GKFX Financial Services Ltd.

According to the email:

GFT Launch MetaTrader 4 Softly but Globally

Jim — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:46:54 +0000

I suddenly find myself writing my second blog post of April 1st 2011, and this one is no joke either! I'm already a GFT spread betting customer here in the UK, but nobody from GFT called or emailed to give me this news. I heard a whisper on the grapevine and called my account executive who confirmed that I could indeed open a MetaTrader 4 account with GFT today, as long as I didn't mind parting with at least £150. I said I didn't, and so I am now the proud possessor of a brand new GFT MT4 account. I'm told if you're a GFT client anywhere else in the world you can do this too. Everybody else will have to wait for a few more weeks.

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Dealing Desk or No Dealing Desk – That is the Question!

Jim — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 12:58:47 +0000

Smart Live Markets are proud of their dealing desk and their fixed spreads. In this guest post Paul Hare, their Director of Trading, explains why. (Note that Smart Live Markets are a UK based broker, and are therefore regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Some of the regulatory points Paul makes don't work in quite the same way in other jurisdictions.)

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Ray the Random Robot Successfully Starts Smart Live Spread Betting

Jim — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:42:37 +0000

It's been an extremely busy week for Ray the Random Robot™, and he has undergone a number of cloning operations. First of all the MetaTrader 5 Automated Trading Championship 2010 finally got underway at midnight on Sunday, Moscow time. Ray's multi-currency MT5 clone started perfectly, but he has had some teething troubles with EUR/USD and has now slipped back to 273rd position out of 314.

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Boston Technologies History Center Rescues MetaTrader Backtests

Jim — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:32:44 +0000

I was browsing around the Boston Technologies website yesterday for a very different reason, when I made an interesting discovery – the Boston Technologies History Center. As we reported recently, the historical data you can download into the MetaTrader 4 History Center seems to have developed some big gaps recently. If you're new to MT4 backtesting, or if you haven't been religiously logging in to your account regularly to keep your data up to date, this might well cause your backtest results to be rather misleading. This problem has affected the backtesting of some members of our Community, and they now have another solution to their difficulties apart from waiting for me to export some of my own data from MetaTrader!

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