We are happy to announce that from December 2018 and onwards, we will offer extended trading times for:

• CFD indices, including the most popular CFD indices
• A range of futures contracts – equity indices, fixed income, volatility and MSCI futures

For more information on the extended trading hours, please contact Sales & Trading at [email protected].

The ‘turn’ effect is a phenomenon that exists in financial markets which is caused by supply and demand for funding over key dates such as year or quarter-end. This can create anomalies in the forward curves for certain currencies, and we are already beginning to see this priced into the year-end swap points that we receive from our liquidity providers.

Swap points are a key component of the FX Value Date Rollover which is used to adjust the opening price of a position[1], and therefore if you hold a FX spot position over year-end you may bear the cost of paying these inflated swap points[2], when compared to normal market conditions.

For more information on the FX Value Date Rollover, please contact Sales & Trading at [email protected].

[1] Applicable to the default rollover methodology
[2] Depending on the currency pair and your positioning (long/short)

Market data subscription fees will change from 1 January 2019 for a number of exchanges and news services.

To view the updated subscription fees, please log into your Global TradeStation (GTS) platform from January 1, 2019, view the Account tab, and click Subscriptions.

Note: Not all listed exchanges and services are supported on Global TradeStation (GTS). Please contact Sales & Trading at [email protected] for clarification.

We are pleased to announce an improvement to our corporate actions process. Stock premiums (share premium dividends and capital gain distributions) will be paid on the actual pay date rather than ex-date.

For clients having instruments with both an initial and maintenance margin, the account summary will soon be enhanced with additional information to clarify your available initial and maintenance margin status.

This will include:

• Initial margin reserved – the overall initial margin required for your open positions
• Initial margin available – the margin available for opening new positions
• Maintenance margin reserved – the overall maintenance margin required for your open positions
• Maintenance margin available – the margin available for maintaining current positions

This information will be shown in the account details for the selected account(s) available from:

• The account summary toolbar in Global TradeStation (GTS)
• The account summary panel in Global TradeStation (GTS)

To create a buffer between your available trading collateral and the margin close-out level (which ESMA recently standardised), we apply two margin requirements:

Initial margin

Initial margin is a pre-trade margin check on trades and orders where you must have sufficient initial margin collateral available to meet the initial margin requirement.

Note that initial margin is cumulative and not just an initial check when placing a trade; you must continue to cover the initial margin for all existing trades (shown by Initial margin reserved) before you can place new trades (shown by the initial margin available).

Maintenance margin

Maintenance margin is a continuous margin check, that you have sufficient margin collateral on your accounts to maintain your open positions. Maintenance margin is used to calculate your margin utilization.

Trading Conditions

The current margin requirements for a margin instrument can always be seen in the trading platforms in the trading conditions for the instrument.

A number of improvements have recently been released to the chart in the Global TradeStation (GTS) platform:

• Share annotations across time periods
• New chart study – Williams Acceleration/Deceleration Oscillator (WAC)
• Chart default settings (from last month)

Share annotations across time periods

A new option in the chart configuration menu, Share Annotations across all time periods (selected by default).

When selected, annotations you apply to a chart will be shared across all time periods for the instrument. For example, if you draw a trend line on a 60-minute chart, it will also be shown on all other time periods 15 min, 4 hours, daily and so on.

Share Annotations across all time periods is on (checked) by default but can be disabled in the Chart configuration (right-click > Chart configuration).

New chart study – Williams Acceleration/Deceleration Oscillator (WAC)

The new Williams Acceleration/ Deceleration Oscillator (WAC) indicator is now available in Global TradeStation (GTS) from the indicator menu.

The WAC indicator measures the acceleration and deceleration of the current direction and will change direction before the price changes acting as a warning signal for changes in price direction.

The oscillator is a histogram that fluctuates around a zero line where there is balance. When the oscillator is above the zero line and the histogram is green, there is higher likelihood that a rising trend will continue and when red below the line higher likelihood for a downtrend to continue.

Users of this indicator watch for changes in the histogram colour and not when the histogram crosses the zero line. When the histogram changes from red to green it can indicate a buy signal and vice versa.

Chart default settings (announced last month)

The chart in Global TradeStation (GTS) now offer the ability to set the settings for new charts when launched in the platform.

Default Chart Settings allows you to set the default properties for:

• Chart type
• Annotations
• Indicators
• General settings
• Line colors and styles

You can access Default Chart Settings through

• the platform settings
• chart settings
• right-click > Chart setting in the chart