Bookies raising Margins

Cantor Index have raised margins by 10% with immediate effect. IG Index have upped theirs too.

Spreadex has temporarily changed its financial spread betting Notional Trading Requirements (NTRs) due to the current extreme conditions in the global financial markets. For UK shares, they are currently only accepting trades on UK 350 stocks.

The NTRs are now 20% on the first 100 stocks, 25% on the next 150 shares and 35% on the next 100. Spreadex’s indices NTRs are now: UK futures x 200, UK daily x 100, Dow futures x 300, Dow daily x 200, Dax futures x 200, Dax daily x 100, SPX x 30, Nasdaq x 75, SMI x 200, Eurostoxx x 150, Nikkei x 500.

Spreadex have given clients a week to cough up:

“All existing financial positions will need to be covered by cash on your account with all NTR/margin paid by 3.30pm on Monday, 20th October 2008.”

However my experience is that they will not roll over daily positions (i.e. not futures) at the end of trading if your a/c is on margin call. Maybe they’ll be flexible on this due to the huge rise in margins – from 3% to 20-25% on FTSE350 and from 20% to 35% on others.

Tags: Cantor Index, cantorindex, IG Index, margins, notional trading requirements, ntr, spreadex

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Industry Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.