Please don't open any accounts with these brokers

The New Zealand regulator FMA (Financial Markets Authority) issued a warning against one the companies that carries its license, Fullerton Markets. The warning came under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act (AML/CFT Act).
According to the FMA announcement, a compliance inspection found that the broker does not have adequate risk assessment and AML/CFT compliance programs. Worse still, Fullerton failed to carry out customer due diligence in line with the Amended Identity Verification Code of Practice. For example, failed to fully identify clients who are a politically exposed person (an individual with a prominent public function), particularly foreign politicians, as required by law.
The FMA warned the broker to take a number of steps to eradicate the issues listed above, or they could face a penalty of NZ $2 million per offense.

I have had an account with with Think markets (formerly ThinkForex) for about 18 months and used to find then pretty good.
However I noticed a couple of months ago that trade executions (specifically market orders) seemed to be getting worse. And now just about every market order entry I execute seems to get slipped. I created an EA to execute market orders with defined risk, SL and TP but it also takes a screenshot at the exact time of entry. Here is an example of the slippage.



As you can see the trade buy entry line (dashed green) is a good 0.6 pips above the ask line. This is fairly typical and now I hardly ever get the entry line matching the appropriate bid/ask line.
The worse case I had was about 5 pips slippage shortly after market open on a Sunday evening. Of course there was very low liquidity at that time but in another MT4 broker I used I had no slippage at all.

The profit I have been making in this account has increased this year and I took out a significant withdrawal about 3 months ago. I don't believe that the withdrawal and subsequent poor executions are coincidental. I have complained 3 times but they insist that this is normal and that my trades are being directed straight to the market but I highly doubt this.

I will be closing the account shortly.

Canada’s regional regulator, the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), has issued a warning against the forex, CFD and binary options broker uTrader and its owner Day Dream Investments Ltd.

According to the regulator, the company claims to be based in the offshore zone the Marshall Islands, but is not regulated and is not licensed to operate in British Columbia.
Also, according to client complaints the company pressures people to deposit money and then refuses to allow withdrawals by employing the various tricks used by such companies.

The Swiss regulator Finma issued a warning against a pair of unlicensed binary options brokers: UBSOption and Brokers Option. UBSOption claims to be based in Switzerland but has an office in Eastern Europe. Between that blatant lie, the lack of regulation and the fact that they want to be seen as related to the major Swiss bank UBS I would say that they shouldn’t be trusted.

Are you constantly checking regulator page for new warnings and fines?

A few years go, when I was a newbie trader I was terribly naive and trusting and it never occurred to me to check for any sort of warnings, let alone the actual regulation of the brokers I worked with. Then, at some point, a friend of mine told me that she was working with a certain broker and that an employee of that broker was calling her on the phone to give her instructions how to trade and that she had made a lot of profit thanks to that. She then convinced me to open an account at that broker, which I did, once again, completely trustingly without doing any research. Indeed, the man in question called me as well. The first few times he did give me good advice and I profited from the positions I opened. Then he started giving me advice that seemed off, but, being trusting, and not very well-educated about analysis yet, I followed that advice and opened the positions he told me to. They quickly went in the red and when I called back to ask what to do he told me not to worry and to invest more money so I could wait out the market, that it would turn back and I'd profit eventually. This went on for several months until my account was eventually completely drained. My friend who had convinced me to open an account at that broker was in the same situation. When we called the broker we were told that the guy in question "had been fired". Only we later found out a third acquaintance of ours was communicating with the same guy working for the same broker pulling the same scam on him. All of us lost quite a bit of money because of that scam and I in particular, learned a bitter but important lesson. Later I found out said company was completely unregulated and was taking advantage of naive, ignorant, vulnerable people like me.
So yes, I do check for warnings regularly. I hope others do as well and if I can help them do so I am glad to do it.

The Belgium regulator FSMA has issued a warning about ten Forex brokers operating in the country without a license. Among them is the Trade24 broker, which has multiple warnings written against it by various regulators all over the world - he Ontario Securities Commission (OSC), New Zealand’s FMA and Belize’s IFSC, which warned that Trade24 is displaying a fake license. Clients are complaining they cannot withdraw their money.

Another broker from the list - CMS Trader – has garnered warnings from UK’s FCA and the OSC and clients have complained about scams.

Also, clients have described a third broker from the list - Markets Broker –as a scam, fraud and gangsters who steal money from said clients.

Very helpful thread

yea good thread

it's a shame that many good threads tend to be forgotten and die as people tend to ask the same questions over and over without using the " search " function and keep on opening new threads

in this way useful info gets mixed and dispersed over a myriad of micro-threads

there should be a system and a rule that prevents this from happening , similar to other forums :

1 Insert the " Sticky " section where important threads are highlighted and kept right up and on top of the segment

2 Impose a limit on the opening of new threads with same topics