Broker cheating on their demo :)

Guys,


I am running a demo of the Active Trader platform, now when I buy I get most of the time filled 0.1 pip lower than the ask and when I sell 0.1 pip higher than the bid.

This is not slippage since quotes haven't changed when I clicked the price.

This is for the EUR/USD which has a spread of around 0.5 pip average, taking into account the above, you are trading with a spread of 0.3 pips.

They want to give you better prices on the demo, probably on a live account you will get slipped consistently 0.1 pips in the WRONG direction taking the reputation of fxcm into account ?


P.S. Open an AT demo yourself if you don't believe me...

I don't know where should I post this reply, because I'm new here, so I'll just write here:

Does anyone know or have any clue why are my orders hitting Stop Loss, even though the price hasn't even come close to stop loss? I'm using FXCM Demo Account with $50K. All charts are on 1 min timeframe.
You can see it on the image above. Here I'm trading NZD/CHF.
I opened a MARKET order with SHORT:
@ 0,56838 and set
SL @ 0,56900 and
TP @ 0,56722

By looking at exported trade report, I can see the trade was BOUGHT not even a minute later exactly @SL, even though the price hasn't risen at all! And Gross P/L says a full loss @ $77.2 I guess the red line from an arrow to the SL above represents this trade, but I have no idea why it happened. Would there be a difference taking a LIMIT trade at the same price?
Next trade was the same, automatically bought a minute later.

But here is the 3rd trade:
With this trade everything went well. Took short @0,56842 , with SL and TP set. There was no automatic buying like before. But then, I decided to move my SL lower, just over the price that I got into the trade @0,56841. I made this change by clicking on "stop" under the open position trade and just changed the numbers, left TP the same and trailing was not set either. Then, after some time (again, about 1 minute) the trade got closed again! All of these trades on paper look like the price hit my SL, but it hasn't! I even thought the values are lagging, but after checking TradingView and other charts, it looks the same. In this trade, the Gross P/L says it was a profit of 0.1 or $1 - exactly the difference between the value when trade was activated and the value of newly set SL. The green lines are seen on the screenshot.
But it still boggles my mind - why would all of this happen? It may be the stupid easy mistake from my part, but I don't know.. Maybe something about spreads? I'm a beginner and still learning. If there is anyone willing to offer a suggestion or a reason for why this happening, it would be very much appreciated!

Ist it demo or live account? there is no liquidity involved in demo so if it happens most probably it is platform glitch and you should change broker. Otherwise you should consult about spread widening, i.e. what was the spread when the trade was closed, there is nothing else to blame for.

Thank you very much for chiming in!
It's a demo account. So the only problem could be the low spread?

demo provides limited information, ideally a real environment with low initial capital.
common issues are slippage, spread widening, latency (depends on you vis-a-vis broker's server), and/or datafeed error mispricing.
do bear in mind 1 min timeframe is (really) fast so you may try higher timeframes to see if the problem persists..

It is defintely the spread. The chart only displays the Bid price, which is the price your short would have opened at. The exit price will be the higher Ask price, which is not seen on the chart and it is the reason the price does not appear to touch your stoploss.

As they previously said you are checking the wrong price, Sell positions open with the BID price however they close with the ASK price which is not active on the screenshot attached, impossible for you to see if the price actually touched your SL or TP.

Bro, it is just the demo account. No retail brokers would pay much attention on it.

Yeah, I've never heard of a broker manipulating a demo environment. The only difference with demo is that brokers don't pay as much attention to the performance of a demo server. So usually there are more problems / poor performance on demo compared to live.

Well, on the contrary demo trades are not passed to LP, hence, you may see they are executed faster compared to live. This creates distortion which you should take into account when you backtest your trading system.