Author Topic: Any traders in here who actively trade metals or FOREX on traditional exchanges?  (Read 4540 times)

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Offline jsidhu

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You arent trading on interbank which is real market.. ask yourself where your trade goes.. Lots of ppl made money but odds are stacked against u sooner or later you will see.

Maybe some shady eastern european brokers manipulate and restrict withdrawals, but no regulated US brokers do that.

Your order would take forever to get filled if it was put right on the interbank because there aren't orders always sitting right on the bid/ask.  If your order is large enough the broker passes it on to the interbank market, otherwise they match it in their own pool of funds.  Plus interbank ECN trading is more expensive because of the commisions charged to put the order on the interbank.

The broker is required to provide liquidity and match orders.  BTS will need something like this to succeed as a trading instrument.  Liquidity is king.

So with that information do you not see conflict of interest? You can see why brokers would do such a thing since they are market makers. FXCM has been in the news many times as many of the other big brokers for doing such things. Not saying it always happens to everyone but when you get into big money im sure incentive is high enough to do it and try to sweep it under the rug... with a decentralized market this is not possible, thus brokers will hesitate to come onboard unless retailers find they need to switch over, at this point they are happy to trade in the current environment because a) they dont know about bitshares and b) they think they can win long term with a retail trading account...
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Offline lil_jay890

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You arent trading on interbank which is real market.. ask yourself where your trade goes.. Lots of ppl made money but odds are stacked against u sooner or later you will see.

Maybe some shady eastern european brokers manipulate and restrict withdrawals, but no regulated US brokers do that.

Your order would take forever to get filled if it was put right on the interbank because there aren't orders always sitting right on the bid/ask.  If your order is large enough the broker passes it on to the interbank market, otherwise they match it in their own pool of funds.  Plus interbank ECN trading is more expensive because of the commisions charged to put the order on the interbank.

The broker is required to provide liquidity and match orders.  BTS will need something like this to succeed as a trading instrument.  Liquidity is king.

Offline jsidhu

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You arent trading on interbank which is real market.. ask yourself where your trade goes.. Lots of ppl made money but odds are stacked against u sooner or later you will see.
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Offline lil_jay890

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Thanks guys.

I should have pre-empted this in my original post.  My bad.   Better late than never.

If there was liquidity in the bit asset markets would it be a desirable place to for short, medium or long term traders? How would the fees compare?

Fees in Forex are charged by commision and/or spread. When bitAssets become more liquid i'm guessing the spread will be about the same as a regular stock, 1-3 cents.  The interface has to change, but I think that will come with liquidity.  Look up MT4 and that is what will be needed for a minimum for traders to consider trading bitAssets.

BTW... the vast majority of forex brokers have no interest trading against their clients.  That's just an myth spread by people who have not had success trading.  I've made thousands trading forex and have withdrawn thousands as well... never had a problem getting my money

Offline luckybit

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I am writing some marketing materials for bitshares, and I was wondering if the cost comparisons on using say an etrade/or other similar account compared to btsx are known?

Any information would help me compare the traditional options vs btsx. Information on fees, slippage and other costs I do not know about would be great on btsx and traditional trading platforms.

A comparison on non-monetray pros and cons would be great too.

Thanks in advance.

How about the fact that there is no artificial barriers to entry? Anyone can trade because it's completely open.
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Offline bitmarket

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Thanks guys.

I should have pre-empted this in my original post.  My bad.   Better late than never.

If there was liquidity in the bit asset markets would it be a desirable place to for short, medium or long term traders? How would the fees compare?
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Offline jsidhu

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Contracts for Differences ("CFDs") products were developed to allow customers to enjoy all the benefits of possessing a stock, index, ETF, forex or commodity position without having to physically own the underlying instrument itself. A customer enters into a contract for a CFD at the quoted price. The difference between that price and the price when the position is closed is settled in cash, giving rise to the name "Contract for Difference" or CFD.

Have you actually read the contracts for one of the brokers which offer CFD as a forex broker? It's mind boggling...

IE: I believe it was ATC brokers... which have a pool of money that all traders accounts get put into... the CFD's are traded backed this pool and if at any point the pool runs out of money, well shit out luck all accounts are seized and bankruptcy would mean some accounts would be paid out while others left to try based on the shortfall of the pool.
Holy Cow, thats pretty harsh. I think each broker (company) would have it's own policies. Really pays to read the fine print  :o
Yea they were surprised I did and I was surprised noone does. It was purposefully confusing so i asked for clarification until i got the truth out in general terms. Most major banks will not provide  liquidity unless it is risk free.. once hedged now brokers and 2nd tier liquidity has it in their interest to take customers positions.. be it change price feeds or spreads etc etc. As long as on avg they are up..

Ive seen cases where winning traders are refused service once they are shown to be profitable via bogus excuses.

forexpeacearmy.com is a good place to see all that is wrong with forex(and fixed in bitshares type systems)

I will say im glad i spent so many years with forex because I can read charts like recognizing someones face..
« Last Edit: November 06, 2014, 03:10:32 am by jsidhu »
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Offline House

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Contracts for Differences ("CFDs") products were developed to allow customers to enjoy all the benefits of possessing a stock, index, ETF, forex or commodity position without having to physically own the underlying instrument itself. A customer enters into a contract for a CFD at the quoted price. The difference between that price and the price when the position is closed is settled in cash, giving rise to the name "Contract for Difference" or CFD.

Have you actually read the contracts for one of the brokers which offer CFD as a forex broker? It's mind boggling...

IE: I believe it was ATC brokers... which have a pool of money that all traders accounts get put into... the CFD's are traded backed this pool and if at any point the pool runs out of money, well shit out luck all accounts are seized and bankruptcy would mean some accounts would be paid out while others left to try based on the shortfall of the pool.
Holy Cow, thats pretty harsh. I think each broker (company) would have it's own policies. Really pays to read the fine print  :o


Offline House

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With CFDs customers can buy ("go long") and close the position later by selling. Alternatively customers can sell ("go short") and close the position later by buying. Selling at a higher/lower price than the purchase price yields a gain/loss accordingly.

CFDs have grown in popularity over the past few years. It is increasingly becoming the preferred way to trade the financial markets.

CFDs work like this: instead of purchasing 1,000 Microsoft shares from a stockbroker, a customer could instead buy a 1,000 CFDs of Microsoft. A $5 per share fall in the price of Microsoft would give the CFD customer a $5,000 loss or a $5 per share rise in the price of Microsoft would give the CFD customer a $5,000 profit , just as if he had purchased the actual shares that are traded on the Exchange.

Any financial entitlements, such as dividends, are adjusted for in cash, directly to a CFD holder's account. However, any voting rights available to the holder of an equity share are not available to the holder of an equivalent CFD.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 09:47:45 pm by House »

Offline jsidhu

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Contracts for Differences ("CFDs") products were developed to allow customers to enjoy all the benefits of possessing a stock, index, ETF, forex or commodity position without having to physically own the underlying instrument itself. A customer enters into a contract for a CFD at the quoted price. The difference between that price and the price when the position is closed is settled in cash, giving rise to the name "Contract for Difference" or CFD.

Have you actually read the contracts for one of the brokers which offer CFD as a forex broker? It's mind boggling...

IE: I believe it was ATC brokers... which have a pool of money that all traders accounts get put into... the CFD's are traded backed this pool and if at any point the pool runs out of money, well shit out luck all accounts are seized and bankruptcy would mean some accounts would be paid out while others left to try based on the shortfall of the pool.
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Offline House

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Contracts for Differences ("CFDs") products were developed to allow customers to enjoy all the benefits of possessing a stock, index, ETF, forex or commodity position without having to physically own the underlying instrument itself. A customer enters into a contract for a CFD at the quoted price. The difference between that price and the price when the position is closed is settled in cash, giving rise to the name "Contract for Difference" or CFD.

Offline Rune

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I have been a forex trader for the last 4 years.

For one E-trade doesn't do forex trading unless you buy a currency ETF.  In order to trade forex you need to use a broker like forex.com, oanda, interactive brokers, fxcm, or Citibank.  There are additional options outside the US.

BTSX isn't comparable to forex trading currently because of the lack of liquidity.  Right now the only easy way to trade BTSX is to buy or sell it on the major exchanges.  The wallet trading for bitUSD is servicable for longer term traders, but will never work for day traders or even medium term traders.  This is because you cant short at "market" price.  You have to compete on orders from sellers and it can take days/weeks to fill an order.

BTS needs to have market makers to provide liquidity for it's bitAssets... otherwise it will never be a functional trading instrument or platform.

I second this. Competetive forex trading on BTS is still at least a couple of years away. User experience, liquidity and market functions simply aren't anywhere close to the minimum requirements yet.

If we begin to market BTS to forex traders now I think we will just end up getting in the same situation as bitcoin currently is where true believers have overhyped features that don't exist yet or are barely functional and still are unable to compete with the traditional systems. An example is probably remittance which has been touted as the holy grail of cryptocurrencies (and probably will be one day), but the current infrastructure and pipelines for bitcoin remittance is still so bad that the public prefer to pay WU fees rather than trying to deal with it, and we've got this negative situation where the average opinion is becoming that bitcoin was simply a dud, that can't actually do all those revolutionary things it claimed.

So, anyway, if we actually managed to convince forex traders to use the BTS client for trading they'd probably use it for about 30 seconds and then conclude that BTS is overhyped vaporware and after this initial bad impression it will be harder to get them to pay attention when the product is actually ready for real commodity/currency trading a couple of years from now.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 09:37:43 pm by Rune »

Offline jsidhu

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The biggest issue trading forex is you don't know you're enemy. You trade into a dark pool and you don't know who takes the other side of your trade, and unknowingly your spread is adjusted when it suits broker (if broker is a pure market maker)... there are some brokers that offer straight through processing (STP) however I believe there has to be an intermediary as the end bank will not trade without a counter party taking all the risk. Thus there is a straight through to some liquidity provider which hedges before sending the trade to the interbank (if that)... most retail trades don't even make it to the interbank as the liquidity provider/broker acts as a pure market maker and thus has incentive to game your account via spread manipulation or even changing price feed to capture stoploss etc. Thus the positino gets closed on the retail account and broker/liquidity provider pockets the trade with 100% profit. IMO forex trading needs to be shut down for retailers as it is the dirtiest of dirty games... a decentralized economy which would not let a market maker game the system would be pretty cool... spreads cannot be manipulated, price feeds cannot be manipulated, thus EVERYONE is on a level playing-field with a decentralized market.

Thus one of the better indicators is FXCM/Oanda's retail contrarian position indicators which have you go against the retail crowd as they are usually on the wrong end of the deal. This is the result of market-makers/big players fishing stop losses. I suspect this would be the case in any market but it wouldn't be so skewed against the retail trader as it is in forex.

One of the major incentive for market makers in forex is the ability to screw with people's accounts and not have to pay... so some of them are set up in Cypress and other places where regulation is quite thin or non-existent. Although FinCen is cracking down on US brokers I still believe they aren't playing by the rules.. ie: FXCM lawsuits for account/trade manipulation.

Anyone who has traded forex has realized the inevitable... that unless you can trade via the interbank (minimum $1000k USD accounts) it is really fruitless unless you're edge is so great that you profit even in the face of such adverse conditions. I've seen cases where brokers simply "find" reasons to not allow withdrawl... because int he end if a simple claus was not met ie: an automated trading strategy that traded 1 second too frequent would be OK as long as you lose money, but if you  made profit and tried to withdraw your funds would be seized and account closed, surrendering all profits, if any.

With a decentralized market all rules are known upfront and no manipulatino is possible...

1) No rule manipulation possible
2) No spread manipulation possible
3) No price feed manipulation possible

All of these things favor the retailers, and not the market maker... although once the traders start to come to a better system market makers will simply show up because of the opportunity to make money via fees... it should be a snowball effect... which is why we are trying to build one big rocket ship to reach the stratosphere, either it blows through or it crashes... it really is as simple as that.
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Offline lil_jay890

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IMO the real advantage that crypto provides over forex trading is transparency. In forex, depending on the broker, you can be trading against a feed price and have absolutely no influence on the market whatsoever because your orders are never hitting the real order book (on the ECN network) where the feed comes from.


If your order is big enough, a dealing desk broker will put that order into the main market.  99% of all currency traders couldn't move the market 2 pips even if they leveraged their entire portfolio 20X