Hi, so far I trade CFDs 24h automatically. I have been profitable here for several years. Now I would like to switch from CFDs to futures. I have calculated a financing advantage of several 1000€ per year. In the meantime I have an account with AMP and I am using the future prices. I would like to gain experience with this new underlyings. Therefore I run a demo account with my system on the MYM. With the Cfds I have a fixed tight spread, basically they are based on the time of day. With the futures I have extreme spreads at the end of the trading day and at the start of the trading day. Crazy ticks - spreads of 50 points and more, price drop to 27800 in one second (yesterday) back to 27850 while the Cfds did not make this fluctuation. This is a catastrophe for existing stop loses. I also have these ticks in my real account - do you know this situation and is it normal? Everybody says Futures are the best vehicle so i‘m very confused... at this moment
If your goal is to spread futures against futures, AMP is not ideal as they will not give you margin offsets. I've been through this with several clients already. There are some big Chicago FCM's who clear all kinds and types of spread traders, and they have the proper Risk Controls and professional knowledge to correctly margin futures spreads interday.
Then don't change a thing. Just scale up in your CFDs? As for the bid/ask issue, that is what happens to the book when the market closes. The spread becomes huge because the working limit orders can be way out of the previous range. In futures that does not affect your stop loss, because your stop order would not be filled since the market is, well, closed.
In the case of Cfd's, the financing costs are enormous. I pay interest on short 2.25% and long 3.25%. But I have good spreads. I just try to optimize myself further and further. My goal is to go on other indices for scale NQ here I have tighter spreads on the futures as well as the financing advantage. CFDs are not interesting here. Even in the last Tick is not executed it could cause fails in my ea. I started to rebuild my program yesterday - I will filter the prices myself (I will filter the last and first trading seconds completely for my program) and I will also operate with market orders instead of stop loss, limit...so that no existing order is executed by mistake. I am also excited about the slippage, which could be better for the futures. So everything is going on as before and I make first real comparisons with the minis MNQ and MYM. (CFD vs. Futures)
Are you talking about CFds Bid Ask spread or Spread between 2 CFds? also with CFDs you are most likely playing against the house and most probably if you are doing CFd against CFD you won;t get margin offset!
good that you had no problems with "broker" playing games.. but just be aware of this business model that is all