A new broker

Before attending the course last weekend at the traders university, I tried to register with the recommended broker, Echelon in Glasgow. I had not really shopped around as I thought that it might be a detriment to my learning on the course if I chose a different broker than everyone else.

I started the process of opening the account and sent my details to Echelon. They opened a web based trading platform account for me so that I could see what it was like before I had been accepted.

The web platform was a bit clunky and being a web developer I could see it was pretty basic. After a week, I tried to contact Echelon to see how the account opening was going. I was asked to ring back 3 times. I was getting a bit nervous about having given them all of my passport details and private account details which they insist on having before opening an account.

I finally got through to Michael Cohen, who was extremely rude to me. He practically hung up on me after telling me I would just have to wait until they were ready to open my account.

After being a bit peeved at this, I wrote to Michael and told him to close the process and destroy my details as I will not deal with rude people. I can’t imagine trusting them with my money.

I shopped around and found there are actually hundreds of brokers for spread betting and I chose igindex.co.uk. They are the market leaders and the difference to Echelon is incredible. The service is very friendly and I applied online through their website and needed to give no details like passport information.

My account was open and ready to trade in under 3 minutes. I have found out they offer better spreads than echelon as well.

The interface is great and instead of having to enter up to four separate orders to place a bet, stop, limit and entry point, like in Echelon, you can do it all in one screen. This is much better and much less likely to be error prone.

The charting that comes with igindex is almost as good as sharescope as is obviously web based for those times when you are not at home.

I would definitely recommend them.