Advisory: Galvan & CFDs

I had a bad experience with Galvan CFD Advisory services over a 3 year period – the cost per trade at .5% is inhibitive, although I didn’t have the extra .7% for the stop-loss to be guaranteed. Likewise they soon lost the bulk of the £2500 I had deposited.

However I placed a short on Marks & Spencer myself with the little margin i had remaining and it went really well and brought my balance back up over £2000. Soon after I got a call from Galvan apologising for how badly things had gone and offering me an “olive branch” in the form of much lower costs per trade of .2%

I stupidly agreed to give it a go believing these vastly improved terms and maybe somewhat better fortune would see me to a profit. The lower costs per trade simply meant it took them longer to lose it – about 12 months !!!

I’ve since opened my own account with IG and the cost per trade is only .1% ! They also told me Galvan are only charged .05% which makes their business very profitable whichever way the market goes. There’s certainly a slight smell of “pyramid scheme” off it.

Bottom line is – NOBODY knows with ANY degree of certainty the direction of any market over any period of time

….despite what you might intuitively think by looking at the pay packets of Goldman Sachs employees !!!

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Another experience of Galvan by a user who e-mailed me: Carrera32

A word of warning if you are thinking about it. I quite liked the sound of it. CFDs being similar to what I do on Betfair with the horses. Back big in the morning and lay off shorter in the afternoon. The trading platform they use IG Markets even looks similar to Betfair. (or is that the other way round?)

So Galvan got me to deposit £2,500. Their trader would phone me in the morning and suggest a stock. He would place the £10,000 trade on my behalf and a guaranteed stop loss at 3%. This meant that I only had to cover the margin at around £300. They charged 0.5% per trade to get in and 0.5% to trade out plus a charge of 0.7% to guarantee the stop loss. A bit of interest on top, so the risk on a £10,000 trade was aprox £500.

They placed 6 trades for me over a 10 day period. I made £200 net profit on one and the other 5 all stopped out. 1 in less than 24 hours. A net loss of about £2,300.

Never again.