Pepperstone closing account with floating loss

As some of you already know Australian branch of Pepperstone will be closing UK customers accounts because they are opening offices in London and forcing people to move there instead. All is fine apart from fact that you are forced to close all your positions first in given time frame even if they are currently in floating loss.
So my question is: in this circumstance Is it possible to close all your positions by broker without compensating/refunding you for your all lost positions? Is there any financial regulations which cover this?
Thanks

Hi ipoopy

talk to them through the customer support, i always find them very helpful and this time they wavered all my trades on the on the old account before the notification was sent and then adjusted/transferred them to the new UK account, was done very quickly and with minimum hassle, took about a couple of hours max to change everything over.

regards

Phil.

Long time reader here. But this topic finally made me join the FF-Forum.



What a bunch of crap they tell you at Pepperstone. Trading itself was all nice and good, until you need something. Then the problems start.

The whole FCA switch is premature at best. They only offer MT4 accounts. No cTrader. They told me it is planned and might take several weeks.
When I told the rep I only got a 2 week ultimatum from PS thoug, he just said "Sorry about that".

What I'm even more pissed about is that they force you to close at a floating loss. I have a rather complex and long term trading system.
Everything was going fine and well. This year I was up about 40%. Now I have to close at -30%.

I don't have anything against a loss. If it is purely my fault, my wrong analysis or my mistake. Fine.
But when you have to scramble everything out of nowhere and turning a positive year into a negative one it sucks.


They had this FCA thing going on for a long time now. Where they suspended EU clients. So they knew what their intention was and yet, they give us very little time. The PS rep told me in chat that they feel 2 weeks are enough. Not if you trade an a daily/weekly chart.

I really feel kinda robbed and misstreated how they are running things down there. I even offered them to reset my account to the year starting balance. So not only to wipe my losses, but even my winners. At least that way I would have "only" lost my time and not my money. But of course they declined.
They onle kept replying with stadardized answers out of a FAQ and with "Sorry, Sorry, Sorry" ....

Now I'm looking for another broker. Don't let them treat you like a pawn. You are the customer and it's YOUR money.

Here an opinion from a newly registered, but well-read forum member.

I have been on and off with Pepperstone for quite a few years. Patchy engagements has been due to issues I have with this broker. Namely:

1. Commissions are higher than competitive brokers. If you ask to lower, they say yo have to trade specific volume per month. Hence that pushes you effectively to high lot scalping or day trading. Which means they will get your money... sooner or later

2. Spread is higher then other. Yeah, yeah... I know what they advertise. I am talking about real spread, tested and recorded over months if not years. Both average spread and max spread. Again, I am comparing to decent competitors in the space. Surely they are many worse than Pepperstone, but so many others are better. Lest take eurusd. They advertise 0.0, but most of the time is it constantly couple pipets higher. 0.0 happens sometimes, but for marketing reasons.

In fact I have been able to compare spread 24/5 over period of months against other good brokers, and Pepperstone always shows consistent markups on spread. Even on they razor-whatever account.

3. They have very rarely negative spread. Very, very occasional. Of course from time to time they will hit -0.1p, but for marketing only again.

4. Their swap is almost always negative, whichever way. Which means you pay very premium for holding a position. This is extra way to such money our of you - again most of the time they charge you swap both ways, to be clear, I understand how swap works.

5. I asked number of times to either reduce spread or commission. They never agreed unless I bring actually millions to the table. BUT they give me VPN for free!!!! Hahaha, like I cannot afford VPN for peanuts

6. They send a lot of marketing s***t to my mailbox.

7. So called representatives, read: sales people, change every few months. I guess they have high turn over.

I summary, Pepperstone is an average FX broker that poses to be something much more than actually it is. Better then Cyprus XYZ? Sure. But... do some shopping around. From time to time I will give them a nudge to see if anything has changed, but no change... they know their business well and how to get suckers... You cannot scalp with them due to high spread and commissions and you cannot long term speculate with them due to high swap. I mean you can try, but in both cases you start on very back foot...

J

Fully agree. Since you are forced to move to UK with Pepperstone, there are better options under FCA to move your business, i.e. ActivTrades, TickMill UK, FxPro UK, all with lower costs. Even in Australia now IC has lower costs as Pepperstone increased spreads in everything but EUR and AUD. On top of that, their feed went super slow, taking now approximately 2 minutes to close a basket of orders (7 of them) and having lots of slippage (on edge7). After 4 years I finally moved all my trading away from them.

And what's the best UK option in your view? Have you done any live testing to share first-hand expreince?

Imo the best is IG with prorealtime charts, but noone seems to like them for different reasons. For mt4 I have accounts with Tickmill which beats Pepperstone in commissions and spreads, has faster feed for Europeans (no stupid NY servers) and shares the same feed problem (new day does not start immediately at 00:00). Activtrades is also good, no comms, but I don't like their feed gmt offset because it messes up my indis. Darwinex is excellent, lower comms than Pepper, better feed, good spreads. Any of the 3 easily beats Pepper (I have accounts with all). I kept Pepper because I wanted a non-fca broker too but since they are forcing me out of AUS, I don't need to keep them anymore since UK brokers offer better conditions.

I am bit surprised that one of the best said by many is having difficult time, as every now and then, I see a thread related to them. It’s strange that giving such high quality service for so long and suddenly things are turning differently.

Fredricks,

and your surprise is based on what? Opinions of anonymous strangers? A feeling? Or psychological marketing tricks?

Do you base your opinion on majority's opinion? Then I guess you must enjoy dinner at MacDonald's, since it is one of the most visited and profitable "restaurant" chains? Do you and if not why not?

How about forming an opinion based on facts? Would that be reasonable for people who claim to be highly intelligent, to a point to believe they can beat the market? I bet it is!

I presented you 7 facts. Facts based on number of years dealing with Pepperstone. More over you have other people, freely expressing their experience agrees with those facts. According to your experience dealing hard money over extended period of time with Pepperstone, which of those facts does not converge with your experience?

And mind you this: the tread started with a person who is forced by Pepperstone to closed all his long-term positions with in 2 weeks, potentially in loss, because Pepperstone somehow, surprise surprise, suddenly "HAS" to move those accounts overseas immediately. What this alone does tell about quality of the service? Is is great? Is it exceptional? Or just... at best... average...?

Finally is there any chance you have been a victim of anchoring bias?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring


J