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Be very wary of Zap futures. I know MANy people that have run screaming
from them. My personal experience with them was bone chilling!
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
If there is an "error" that turns out to be a windfall for you they
subtract the money from your account. If the "error" costs you money
guess what .....
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.
Whatever the worst price was, thats the price you got. Everytime. It was
a joke.
We strongly suspected a scam because the timestamps are a dead givaway.
Lets say you hit your button to send the order at 09:00:00am. It is
routed to their server and the tops system instantly. No problems there.
Then the jiggery pokery starts. Lets say your order is actually filled
at 09:00:06 (on a good day), you will not get that confirmation for at
least 20secs minimum, sometimes as much as 2 minutes (happend to a
trader i know as we watched it - not a fast market either). So now your
order has been sat on for all that time while the market moved.
So eventually your printer spits out your fill and you realize you just
got screwed again so, you pick up the phone and call the order desk. If
you ask them to look up that particular trade (which they refuse to do
untill after the market has closed) then you will discover there are in
fact 4 timestamps associated with your order. Time sent, time received,
time filled, time confirmed.
Hmmmmm, now call me suspicious if you like, but I wonder what price I
got in between the order being filled and the confirmation being sent?
do you think its A) the actual price of the trade, or B) THE WORST
POSSIBLE FILL PRICE THAT THEY CAN LEGALLY GIVE YOU! (And by the way
some prices we got were so bad the market never actually traded at that
price!!)
and this is just one of the many ways you get screwed with ZAP.
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.
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