GFTUK Spread Betting Platform Reviewed

General Points (we will strive to keep this review up-to-date)

The company allows client to trade foreign exchange, contracts for difference, forex options, binaries or spread bets. GFT offers trading on 120 currency pairs and spread betting on 2900+ financial instruments.
Offers desktop, web, mobile and iPad versions of its DealBook trading platform. DealBook 360 is the original platform - a desktop-based based trading platform that can be configured to give traders the look and feel they want. DealBook Web is a web-based version designed to give clients the freedom to trade from any computer while the DealBook Mobile app does what it says on the tin and there's also a dedicated application for the iPhone.
Minimum stake for all markets with GFT Global Markets is £1 (or currency equivalent). Minimum deposit is £120 The maximum bet size is virtually unlimited. For instance I like to trade Scandinavian currencies versus USD, and GFT will allow you to go all the way to £1000/pt! On a decent sized intraday swing, and with sufficient margin, that's potentially over a million pounds tax free profit (or loss!) on one trade!
GFT's response when I asked them outright if they manipulated prices to take out stops was they are too big in the currency markets etc to risk damage to their reputation.
The GFT web site does claim: 'instant order execution' for spread bets and that 99.4% of all orders filled without any dealer intervention. In practice fills seem to vary between "instant" and around 5 seconds or so. All stops so far filled at the stop price (I don't hold positions through news events so this is for periods when the price is not moving very quickly).
GFT also let all bets run individually until they are closed. So a long FTSE bet of £1pp is not automatically cancelled by a short FTSE bet of £1pp.
Live 'Dow Jones newswires' news service. GFT also makes available technical analysis predictive tools to its clients; two of the most interesting being the Foresight-A.I and Autochartist -:
1. The Foresight-A.I is a short-term market timing indicator that is intended to predict the points at which high-probability trades might occur. Foresight-A.I works by scanning historical market patterns to identify the most likely patterns that have a tendency to repeat. It then generates a forecast in the form of a trend line which indicates when the market may reach the high or low or when it is likely to change direction.
2. Autochartist consists of an automated pattern recognition tool that scans various markets on your behalf and alerts you when certain criteria are met. Recently, GFT have also added a built-in feature dubbed as 'Autochartist Trade Ideas' to the Autochartist software (which at the time of writing is still not available to UK residents). Autochartist by itself helps you to identify market patterns and highlight possible trading opportunities, while 'Autochartist Trade Ideas' takes the pattern-identification process one step further by detecting trade setup and displaying the time frame in which the trades may unfold. Clients can also view real-time data based on over 15 common charting patterns, including 1) Entry, stop, limit points, along with how many pips the trade could potentially make, 2) Probability of the trade reaching its forecasted level and 3) Currency pairs to trade, whether to buy or sell and the time period of the trade. Traders who fund their GFT account with $2,500 or more can access Autochartist Trade Ideas for free.
3. In addition, GFT also offers a charting package which includes technical analysis tools such as Fibonacci, Gann, Andrews’ Pitchfork and DiNapoli D-Levels to help identify possible entry and exit levels.
4. Introductory spread betting webinars and more advanced seminars focusing on the risk and money management side of things are also offered regularly. The webinars provide an overview of Dealbook 360's spread trading platform and there are also weekly onging webinars which you can subscribe to covering fundamentals and economic happenings affecting the forex, shares and commodity markets. The webinars also take a look at forthcoming economic data releases and there is a review of the charts to highlight key support and resistance points. The seminars themselves are hosted by market strategist David Morrison with the more advanced seminar being about technical analysis including Fibonacci and Gann Retracements and providing a summary of present market trends and things to look out for.
GFT's basis of execution for stops is that stop orders are activated at the value you pre-determined. This value will be the bid or ask you see on the GFT platform at the time (which includes underlying value + their spread). For example: If you set a stop to be activated at 100 as a sell, when on the GFT platform you see a bid price of 100 your stop will be triggered.
Social Interaction: GFT has just launched MirrorTrader which permits GFT clients to monitor and copy a range of trading strategies. The MirrorTrader software is available for foreign exchange and allows users the option to semi-mirror by receiving trading alerts, or mirror in full by automatically following technical trading signals.
Novelty markets include being able to spread bet on the the UK consumer price index (CPI), the country's measure of inflation and the VIX. UK inflation futures are quoted from 8am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday (UK time) with 5% being the margin requirement. As I'm writing this, GFT is pricing the March 2009 inflation contract at 3.65-3.75. If you believe an economic slowdown will result in lower than forecasted inflation then you would sell the March contract at 3.65 for say £10 a point, creating notional exposure of £3,650. Should the official date come out at 3.10% the bet would return a gain of £550. GFT has also recently introduced 29 sector indices covering the FTSE 350 which include industry areas such as miners, food producers or real estate. These come in handy if you believe that specific UK market sectors are presently under or overvalued or will outperform or underperform the market as a whole. The normal spread on FTSE 350 sector bets is 0.45%. GFT has also just introduced the US Dollar Basket (USD/BKT) market which is one way for clients to trade the relative strength of the US dollar in relation to some of the most liquid currencies in the world, including the Euro, the Japanese yen, the British Pound, the Canadian dollar, the Swedish Krona and the Swiss franc. This allows investors to potentially hedge USD portfolio risk or maximize USD exposure in just one transaction.

* A note on Joe DiNapoli D-Levels. A trader I know investigated his systems in some depth and the following was his feedback. 'He has predictive stochastics and predictive MACD. He combines them with Fibonacci to get his own indicators but keeps his calculations secret. So, anyone trying his indicators has to throw out of the window all that you have learnt on Macd and stochastics and start again almost trading blind under his forecasts. When I first saw his indicators were available on GFT spreads, I thought great, a predictive indicator. It completely messed up my trading for a while.'