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Zap Futures broker



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Zap futures are THE WORST.

I have had personal experience with them and traded the SP Large 
Contract with several other people who bad experiences with them too.

Their "software" is slow and confusing to operate. even their own tech 
admits it is not friendly to use. It goes down OFTEN and when it does 
the order desk is in a frenzy. You will be left on hold for minutes 
waiting for confirmation of a fill. I had many bad experiences with them 
and their software. ANY error is automatically blamed on you because as 
they told me "you are your own broker, so its your problem" - nice

The main problem with them is that you consistantly get the WORST 
POSSIBLE fills. We used to joke about it because it was so predictable. 
All you had to do was watch the 1 min candle when you placed your order. 
Whateve the worst price was, thats the price you got. Everytime. It was 
a joke.

If you place a Limit, they will not execute it unless it trades through 
your price by 1/2pt. Whatever benefits are offered by the CUBS terminal 
are severly outweighed by the position of the terminal in the pits. In a 
recent visit to the CME (to find a better broker) we met with several 
locals and brokers who explained why you will allways get the worst fill 
price.

The terminal is in the center of the pit and is surrounded by the least 
experienced locals trying to scalp their living. These locals dont take 
positions or lead the market thats why they stand there. The orice 
action is around the edge of the pit. This is where direction changes 
first. When you place your order the local standing next to Tom who 
operates the terminal, simply buys at the better price and sells to him. 
This is their arrangement.

So now you have two factors working against you. Most of their customers 
will pay $25 per side, plus of course the de-facto minimum 1/2 pt 
"slippage" (actually "screwage" is a more accurate term), and sometimes 
it was as much as 1.5pts!  The only reason we stayed with them for a 
while was because we negotiated a deal for $12 per side.  Our true cost 
was in fact 125+12 per side!

The final straw for me was when I was left in a position all thorugh 
lunch without knowing it. Their server crashed a couple of times in the 
morning and did not notify me that an order was sitting out there. I 
found out hours later when I was down 5 pts on the large SP.  Then the 
software says it has codes for certain things, but in fact you will get 
different codes that are confusing. Their tech even admits he doesnt 
know why, or what they mean!

After some research I found another group of traders that had run 
screaming from ZAP. They steered me to another broker who is great. 
Their guy is at the edge of the pit. The fills are super fast while you 
wait and most of our group report often getting fills at better prices! 
The system we were using was a short time frame system so slippage was 
important.

Meanwhile the ZAP owner is busy promoting their new communications 
package as some "information" highway to sucknewbies into thier terrible 
service. When we confronted him about the many problems of their service 
at a recent show, he just slithered away and took a phone call.

Then their web based Account Info is a nightmare that lists all your 
trades. It CANNOT be viewed in chronological order. So all you see is 
long list of buys followed by a long list of sells. If youwant to match 
them up you need to d/l them, import them into excell, and cut and paste 
them line by line to make sense of what you did that day. I spent 4hrs 
sorting out THEIR mess up one day.