Hi everyone. I am based in the UK and have a small account (c. £12k). I trade conservatively, rarely risking more than 1% for one trade. I sometimes have very wide stops, as my trading horizon can be weeks to months. Therefore I need a broker that offers low leverage. I have used IG spreadbetting until now, but today I discovered that OANDA offers extremely low leverage and I am truly impressed! However, the downside is that they do not offer many markets to trade - I often want to hold positions in the bond markets (UK, US, German, French, Italian bond futures), emerging market indices and currencies (EEM, Sensex, USDRUB, etc), sector ETFs (XLY, XLP, XLE) etc. While IG offers most of these markets, the amount of leverage is most of the time prohibitive. Oanda, on the other hand, Oanda only has plain vanilla indices and currencies on the menu. To summarise, the question is: Are there any spreadbetting platforms offering a wide variety of indices/bonds/EM currencies/ETFs with low leverage for longer-term trading (weeks - months), suitable for a small account (c. £12k)? Spreads are less important. Many thanks
Well regarding this pair it has a steady uptrend now, due to Russian CBR intentions to cease to withhold roubles with market buck interventions.. Tried some short trades on Hotforex, but needed to hold position about 2 hours to cover spread and make about 300$ profit..
maybe i'm misunderstanding something, but low leverage is a need that you already have fulfilled. if you're risking 1-2% per trade, you should be putting up X amount - but that doesn't mean you have to use all of your remaining equity available? Do you mean to say that you want higher leverage? otherwise i'm not getting what the issue is.
Thanks for your responses. As regards IB, what is the minimum leverage I can trade USDRUB with? Also I suspect they don't offer spreadbetting, which means i'd have to pay 40% tax on all profits, no? The issue with leverage is this: IG wants me to put a minimum of 0.1 pounds per "pip" to trade the USDRUB. This means that 1% move in the ruble is c. £467 of PnL. The ruble is very volatile and i need a stop at least 3% away from the current level, which is £1401 - 10 percent of my total capital! That's just insane. I've found that FXCM are a lot more reasonable, I am able to trade with as little as say £20 per 1% which is great. The problem is they do not have US/UK/other treasury bond futures and many other basic assets are not available on their platform. IG is a lot better but they require crazy leverage.
http://www.ig.com/uk/forex-mt4-details / click on exotics. USD/RUB margin requirement is 0.5%, aka ~200:1. If you need a lower req than that then it's time to change strategies. FXCM UK will likely be the same amount. I am still not seeing what the issue is...
i don't either; but you're asking about leverage right? higher leverage = less margin req'd = less capital tied up. lower leverage = more margin req'd = more capital tied up.
I'm not worried about having capital tied up because i only have up to 3 trades running at the same time. What I mean is I want to be able to set a stop-loss say 3% away from the current price, and if get stopped out I lose 1% of my capital which is £140. With IG this is closer to £1,400