What do you think about CMC markets?

What do you think about CMC markets broker? Any complains?

They are market maker and they have dealing desk. They are not good for News Trading. At News time your order will not get filled and you will receive message " Wait for dealer to respond". I had profitable long position and when I see that message I again click to sell and you know what my order was executed and also they open short position in my account at top and I lost big. All order goes first to their dealing desk.

Because 90% newbies will lose in trading, as a market maker they want to get that newbie's money.

Also they are in CFD's business where most people will lose.

One of their strong points is that you can trade a lot of stocks, both US, Europe and Asia (CFD's). Also you can trade things like gold, cotton, coffee, etc. And they have a lot of "strange" currencypairs. But mostly for longer term trades, not intraday, like Isotonic wrote.

So if you want to trade less known assets, it is a good choice. If you want to trade normal assets, like S&P500, EURUSD, Gold, etc they aren't better or worse than others.

What I disliked about them is that they started commissionfree for the stocks, but afetr 6 months I suddenly had to pay commission for most CFD's. Which is bad, because I liked to trade combinations of 10 long and 10 short stocks.

I have been with their spreadbet account about 2 years now.

Pros:

1, More than 1000 instruments to trade, including global Shares and Indices, all major Currencies (inter-bank spreads), Treasuries, Commodities and Bullion.

2, Customer Service is excellent.

3, Common instruments are good to get filled.

4, Real-time Dow Jones News.

5, For UK residents, free online debit card payment and free BACS withdrawl is a plus.


Cons:

1, Java application can eat much more PC memory than C++ ones. I have 1.5GB memory but when I run the application (with lots of charts open), free memory can down from 1000MB to 500MB approx.

2, uncommon instruments can take long time to get executed. AUD/NZD may take 20 seconds for a smallest size.

I have been using CMC for about 3 weeks now to trade the news but I have been slipped everytime I have entered a trade. Luckily you do not have to accept the price they offer you when they slip you which is useful as the offer price has always been awful.

Do not use this broker if you trade the news.

I had many bad experience in the past. They will not let you close your profitable trade in volatile time. I thought today I will give one more chance to them. So I successfully shorted GBP/USD today at 1.9535 and when price reached around 1.9485, I order to close at market. They froze their platform for 15 minutes, waited to retrace back and close my position at 1.9525. I had these type of situations many times.

If you are loosing and want to close your position, that's fine with them. They are doing same thing like FXCM does. I will close my account.

For CFDs I don't know much. For forex don't even think.

I'm currently using a demo account from CMC markets to learn all the basics of trading using Price action, soon I will be ready to enter the market for real and I'm currently trying to which broker is the best between CMC and IG Markets(which allow MT4 and ProRealTime).

What do you think about the developments of CMC and IG Markets the last year and what about the spreads?

All the best and happy trading!