I am thinking of trading the London stock exchange, and need info on the basics. 1)Does London have a emini futures market like the nasdaq emini? If so what is the symbol for it? 2) Does it have Exchange traded funds like QQQ? If so what is the symbol? 3)Is there a site I can go to get charts for londons equities and index quotes? 4) what is Europe equivalent of the S&P 500? would it be the FTSE 100? Thank you for any information that you can provide.
1) No. Full size only. 2) Not sure. 3) Yahoo Finance (remember, UK stocks quoted in pence, not pounds) 4) Yes.
There used to be a smaller ftse future contract of £2 a point insted of £10, not sure if it still exists. The ftse future is like the emini in that is an electronically traded contract. All european futures apart from oil and metals are electronically traded. To trade individual shares there is a 0.5% stamp duty so the market makers who are exempt do the daytrading. To get around the tax you can trade contract for differendes electronicaly with www.gni.co.uk. good luck, why are you interested in this market?
1) There used to be a mini-FTSE contract but it was a flop, it might still be listed but nobody trades it. The Exchange got the tick size wrong and listed it too late. The contract that you want is the FTSE 100, £10 a tick. 2) Yes, ticker is ISF but it's got no liquidity, check it out yourself. 3) www.advfn.com is the best, sign up for the free membership option. 4) For Europe you want the EuroStoxx50 which is the 50 largest Euro demominated stocks (no UK or Swiss). On a good day it trades I think 1m contracts. But there are a few contracts called STOXX listed so make sure you've got the right one. otherwise Dax futures for Germany SMI for Swiss Mib for Italy Cac for France FTSE for UK All of the above have excellent liquidity. There's also an index contract for spain but I forget it's name. Hope this helps. But be warned the bid/offer spreads on UK stocks (even within the FTSE 100) can sometimes be a problem. And the market can take a good 1/2 hour - 1 hour to get going.