Alpari.co.uk Discussion

I think I went on wrong broker's webpage, I went on Activebroker page.
Sorry....
ATC have only 1 type of account.

just way too many requotes which can badly effect your trades, especially on the way out. Was fine till a couple months ago, but i have since moved elsewhere as i could no longer put up with the constant requoting and frustration.

Dear Traders,

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed their comments to this thread regarding Alpari (UK). We are keen to hear what all of you have to say but we think this thread is not complete without our response to your questions and opinions. As a result we have compiled a comprehensive response to all the points made with respect to Alpari (UK).


Slippage

In accordance with our Terms of Business, under normal market conditions all orders are executed at the price requested by the client:

5.26. Under Normal Market Conditions the Company executes an Order at the Order Level

Under abnormal market conditions or when market gaps occur, at market open on Monday (00:00 CET) for example, trades are executed at the best current market price.

5.27. When the Order Level falls within the Price Gap on the Market Opening, the Order is executed by the Company at the Quote which is presented in the Quotes Flow during the process of Order execution. Buy Stop, Sell Stop or Stop Loss is executed at the level less profitable for the Customer; Buy Limit, Sell Limit or Take Profit is executed at the level more profitable for the Customer.

5.28. Under Abnormal Market Conditions the Order is executed by the Company at the Quote which is presented in the Quotes Flow during the process of Order execution.

The policy outlined above is normal market practise and is a regular feature of the FX market.


Our quotes and ‘stop-hunting’

Alpari UK has decided to implement a prime brokerage model. Amongst our liquidity providers are 8 top tier European/American institutions such as UBS, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Capital, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Lava and Currenex. We are currently in the final stages of introducing 5 more liquidity providers that our clients can utilise to attain the best market prices.

Our Research & Development (R&D) team has created a multi-bank feed that captures pricing from our liquidity providers via FIX API and selects the best bid and ask prices available for the particular volume being traded in ‘Instant Execution’ mode. We then widen the spread symmetrically to the spread we would like to offer our clients.

Last year, before we introduced fractional pip (5 decimal) pricing it was often impossible to set our spreads symmetrically because we receive a 5 decimal price feed from our liquidity providers but must offer 4 decimal pricing to our clients. For example, if the best price is 1.27013/1.27031, we could only offer 1.2701/1.2703 or 1.2702/1.2704 to our clients. If we provide 1.2701/1.2703 and a client executes a very large buy order at 1.2703, then we cannot hedge this trade without making a loss (the best ask price available to us is 1.27031). If we provide 1.2702/1.2704 then we cannot hedge a short trade because the best bid price available to us is 1.27013.

For these reasons we introduced a 5 decimal pricing system: to provide the most accurate pricing for our clients and to be able to hedge client trades without risking financial loss for Alpari (UK) as a company.

Regarding your concerns about us “stop-hunting”; we would like to categorically deny such accusations. We always reflect the real market as quoted by our liquidity providers and in turn offer the best available price to our clients. Our prices are always within a 0.1 pip of the real market price which we never manipulate under any circumstances. If your stop loss/take profit order has been executed, it is because the market price has reached your set level and not because we have artificially altered something to our advantage.

Unfortunately, on rare occasions there can be instances of price ‘spikes’ being fed through to us by our liquidity providers leading to stop losses and take profit orders being executed at incorrect prices. On these occasions, we take action as quickly as possible to correct the situation rather than waiting for correspondence from the affected client. We either reopen the spike affected trade(s) or compensate the affected trading account appropriately.

This scenario is detailed in our Terms of Business:

9.24. If a Dealer erroneously executes a Stop Loss or a Take Profit:

(a) at an Error Quote (Spike); or
(b) because the Company makes a Manifest Error and clause 5.23 is breached; or
(c) because of failure, malfunction or misuse of the Trading Platform software and clause 5.23 is breached,

and the Company initiates a Dispute resolution in accordance with clause 9.1 or the Customer lodges a complaint which is recognised by the Company as reasonable, the Company has the right to reopen the erroneously closed position within 15 minutes from the moment the Dispute arises. If within this time the erroneously closed position has not been reopened by the Company, the Company will pay the Customer the difference between the value of the actual closing position and the value of the closing position at the best Quote which is registered in the Quotes Flow between the moment the Dispute arises and the moment of the indemnification.

Execution time

We are proud to say that 99.67% (in Jan 09), 99.59% (in Feb 09) and 99.54% (in Mar 09) of all orders with us were executed in under 1 second. In actual fact, execution times are measured in milliseconds but because MetaTrader logs are recorded to the nearest second your log files will show trades being executed at the same second as the order was placed or the second after. Only a small amount of orders are executed in 5-10 seconds.
In the near future we will be offering a full Non-Dealing Desk solution for ALL orders which means that all transactions will be executed within milliseconds.

One post on this thread referred to an instance of a trade being executed after 3 minutes. This is clear evidence that for some reason the order was not successfully placed on our server to be executed because the timeout period on our server is 3 minutes. As the timeout time was reached, a second attempt to place the order was made. In other words, it didn’t take us 3 minutes to execute the trade but rather, it took our server 3 minutes to receive the order.

It is a reasonable question to ask why some orders take longer than others to reach us. A definitive answer can only be given after examining a MetaTrader log file that was recording events at the time of the order being placed. For this, we need the client to provide the relevant ticket number(s) so that we can investigate.

It is true that we have had some capacity issues in the past where we received extremely large amounts of orders within a very short period of time making it very difficult for our server to queue all order requests efficiently. This issue has now been fully resolved as we have taken steps to improve the efficiency of our service by adding server capacity and separating account types into Micro and Classic.

To some degree we have been victims of our own success because our favourable trading terms and funds segregation policy has spurred over 40,000 new traders to use our services in the past 18 months.

Our tight spreads, fast execution and solid segregation policy are just a few examples of our attempts to provide a professional service. Some of our other benefits can be found here.

We would like to take this opportunity to announce that from 18th March 2009, we began to offer 100% segregation for all clients. The only condition is that only free margin will be segregated. Essentially this means that if you are not in a trade, 100% of your capital will be segregated as client funds making it completely safe in case of Alpari’s bankruptcy.

In addition to this, our clients are free to apply for the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) which is an independent scheme designed to pay back clients of FSA regulated firms up to £48,000 in case of financial difficulties.

We see ourselves as a dynamic, technology driven company so our experiences over the past few months have given us a good insight into how to prevent our growing client base and trade turnover from having a detrimental impact on your trading experience. We now know the limitations of MetaTrader and thus we are able to plan ahead accordingly in terms of how much server capacity is required to ensure a constantly high level of performance for all clients, all of the time.


Demo server

We periodically use our demo server to test new features before launching them on the live platform. New features can contain bugs in their initial stages of testing which has at times led to uptime problems and forced us to restart our demo server. We are sure that you will all agree that testing features on the demo platform is a sensible thing to do before applying anything to the live servers. Conducting tests in a secure testing environment without using demo or live servers is also done but the best way to test new features is to expose them to the stresses of mass use without the risk of affecting live clients – only the demo platform offers this compromise.


Re-quotes

Firstly, let us go through why re-quotes occur and how they can be avoided as much as possible. As we have mentioned previously, we are using a Prime Brokerage model by working with 8 liquidity providers including banks and ECN’s. As a result, we receive hundreds of price quotes per second from banks and even thousands from ECN’s.

Below is a small illustration of how many quotes we receive per second from Lava only:

08.04.2009 17:16:13 3890 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:14 1001 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:15 1211 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:16 1368 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:17 3124 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:18 1610 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:19 1297 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:20 985 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:21 2751 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:22 1263 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:23 1322 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:24 1175 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:25 2447 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:26 1522 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:27 986 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:28 1523 ticks
08.04.2009 17:16:29 3243 ticks

The total amount of quotes we receive per second from each bank/ECN can easily reach 6,000-7,000. On average we receive 200-240 quotes per currency pair per second.

If we stream all quotes we receive onto our clients you would see a drastic increase in the amount of traffic, bandwidth required and re-quotes. For this reason we are using so-called ‘market snapshots’ of current market prices several times a second in order to avoid unnecessary allocation of bandwidth and ensure the accuracy of our pricing is maintained.

Now we will look at the causes of re-quotes and how to deal with them if they occur.

Let’s assume the following:

1. ‘Market snapshots’ taken every 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds)
2. 2 pip spread
3. Client latency is 80 milliseconds (amount of time it takes for client requests to reach our server and vice versa). 80 milliseconds equates to an adequate internet connection.
4. We are receiving the following stream of quotes from our liquidity providers (and we pick the best bid/ask prices automatically):

Case 1: Currency pair with 4 decimal pricing; Maximum deviation = 0

Let’s assume the first quote of 1.2710/1.2712 encouraged the client to sell. The quote will take 80 milliseconds to reach the client so if we received the quote at 13:47:00:000, the quote will reach the client at 13:47:00:080. The client then presses SELL to sell at 1.2710 and the order goes back to our server.
The earliest possible time we could have received this order is 13:47:00:160. According to our example price feed, the price of 1.2710 is still the current market price so the order is executed at 1.2710 without a re-quote.

Case 2: Currency pair with 5 decimal pricing; Maximum deviation = 0

Let’s assume the first quote of 1.27105/1.27125 encouraged the client to sell. The quote will take 80 milliseconds to reach the client so if we received the quote at 13:47:00:000, the quote will reach the client at 13:47:00:080. The client then presses SELL to sell at 1.27105 and the order goes back to our server.

The earliest possible time we could have received this order is 13:47:00:160. According to our example price feed, the current market price is now 1.27103/1.27123 which is different from the price requested by the client initially. In this case our server is forced to offer the client a re-quote of 1.27103/1.27123 which can be accepted or rejected by the client. If the re-quoted price is accepted by the client, the order is sent back to our server for confirmation. Another re-quote could occur if the re-quoted price has changed within the time it took for the order to reach the client and for the client to accept. This is where some of you have had problems because a rapidly changing market will tend to generate many re-quotes unless maximum deviation is used.

Please note than in this case, a re-quote was necessary because the price had changed so the broker cannot be at fault whatsoever.

Case 3: Currency pair with 5 decimal pricing; Maximum deviation = 5 (0.5 pips)

Let’s assume the first quote of 1.27105/1.27125 encouraged the client to sell. The quote will take 80 milliseconds to reach the client so if we received the quote at 13:47:00:000, the quote will reach the client at 13:47:00:080. The client then presses SELL to sell at 1.27105 and the order goes back to our server.

The earliest possible time we could have received this order is 13:47:00:160. According to our example price feed, the current market price is now 1.27103/1.27123 which is different from the price requested by the client initially. However, due to maximum deviation being set to 5 a re-quote is not required because the trading platform has accepted the new quote on the client’s behalf; the trade is executed at 1.27103.

As you can see, the vast majority of re-quotes are due to rapid changes in market prices combined with maximum deviation being set to zero (asking the platform to ONLY execute at the price requested with no alternative) and not because of a desire to prevent a trade from being opened/closed.

Taking the above examples into account we can deduce the following solutions:

1. To reduce the amount of re-quotes by increasing the time gap between snapshots. This increase cannot be excessive because that would give the opportunity for clients with excellent connections to trade at old prices, thus giving them an unfair advantage.

2. The client can set maximum deviation to something other than zero which would reduce re-quotes drastically.

3. The client can obtain a professional internet connection that reduces client latency to <10 milliseconds (this is very expensive and unlikely to be a realistic solution).

4. Return to the 4 decimal pricing system. In this case the client would have sold at 1.2710 whereas under the 5 decimal system (with maximum deviation set), the client could have sold at 1.27103 which is a better price. With this solution, Alpari (UK) may face problems in hedging its clients’ exposure as explained earlier.


Hedging of client trades

Somewhere in this thread we noticed a comment which claims that we hedge all our client trades. This is not true. We are able to hedge reasonably large orders only because our institutional counterparties do not accept very small volumes. We have an agreement with our liquidity providers for us to only place orders above 0.5M at any one time. This means that any one order below 0.5M (5 lots) that we receive from a client is not able to be hedged although our overall exposure is monitored. The vast majority of trades are netted off amongst our client base (approximately 75%) so our clients are essentially taking positions against each other, not against us. Very large trade volumes are hedged as appropriate depending on our risk management model which takes into account our regulatory requirements, market volatility and overall market exposure.

Alpari (UK) hedges the following:

1. All orders higher than a particular level but no less than 0.5m. The ‘particular level’ is flexible and dependent on the currency pair being traded, the volatility of the FX market, the amount of exposure already taken and regulatory obligations. This number rarely falls below 1M (10 lots).
2. Unhedged client positions once they have reached a particular level. The ‘particular level’ is flexible and dependent on the currency pair being traded, the volatility of the FX market, the amount of exposure already taken and regulatory obligations. We have strict risk management rules which have a profound influence on this level. For example, a company’s solvency ratio should never fall below 200%. For those who are interested in how the size of unhedged positions affects the solvency ratio please refer to the appropriate FSA rule.
3. We hedge selected large clients on every order and trade they make because of the volume traded and potential risks involved.

If you have doubts regarding Alpari UK’s actions in this matter please view our FSA permissions: http://www.fsa.gov.uk/register/firmP....do?sid=167495

Activity Name: Dealing in investments as principal

Investment Instrument
Contract for Differences (excluding a spread bet and a rolling spot forex contract)
Rolling spot Forex contract

Customer type
Eligible Counterparty
Professional
Retail (Investment)

Limitation
Rights to or interests in (both).
In our Client Agreement it is stated:

5.1. In relation to any Transaction the Company acts as principal to principal and not as agent on the Customer’s behalf.

We hope our response answered your questions and helped you understand our perspective on these matters. As always, our Client Services team is ready to answer your questions and help you with your concerns so feel free to contact us at your convenience.

Kind Regards,


Andrey Vedikhin
Chief Executive Officer
Alpari (UK)
www.alpari.co.uk

Nice to see a comment from Alpari. Most of the bucket shops would not even bother responding. My personal view is that Alpari is probably one of the few brokers that is on the level.

The only thing I would say is that your customer service is lacking and when there is a problem it can take a while to get resolved.

In general I find execution times to be fine and I rarely get requoted. Then again I am not scalping and trade off a daily/weekly chart so perhaps not so much of an issue for me.

Hello,
You have not answered about the servers that freeze, sometimes for several minutes, and we are no longer able to operate, this can create big problems if we have some open positions.

Thanks.

Hi Lubo,
I'm using Alpari UK since jan 2009 and I have to say that I'm quite comfortable with them. I never experienced any particular kind of issue in the platform, yes sometimes there could be a requote but I guess it's a normal thing with most broker. Moreover I'm trading as you from Italy, so maybe the freeze/connections you are experiencing could be caused by your pc or your isp (i'm using alice telecom). The only thing annoying that I can see is that they don't have a live chat support, so if there's some problem the only way is to email or phone them directly.

Cheers,
Skyline

I don't think so, I e-mailed them more than once when platform was frozen, and they told me that they have some servers problems, at those moments.
You can see if is your line that lost connection or if are their servers, because when platform re-connects you see a gap in the quote, i have some snapshots of this moments.
You can see also that other quote sources continue to work (i'm using more than one platform), so i'm surely that isn't my line that looses connection.

Lubo.

thanks for the very technical and detailed reply, but at the end of the day i have found that Alpari's service has deteriorated over the past months to such a level that i have moved onto other brokers.

Constant requotes are a major issue. I am sure that as a company, you would prefer to let traders trade at their price rather than endlessly requoting them for the sake of a fraction of a pip and lose them altogether. As you mention, you hedge the net exposure, so constantly requoting individual clients should not have any effect on this (or a marginal one at most). I found that although i traded less than your limit, fills were slow and requotes frequent, which to me implies that my account was monitored by a manual trader. And i am not a scalper or news trader.

Also, servers and consequently prices have been proven to freeze on many occasions by several users, and not dependant on individual internet connections.

Please make trading for the end customer SMOOTH and RELIABLE!

As a side note, customer service is a bit of a let down as support is slow and lacking, and research is frankly a joke of copy-paste articles from the net, apparently written by a novice.

hopefully these issues can be rectified and i will start trading with Alpari again. Please do not take this as an attack on your company, but use it constructively to improve service and reduce frustrated traders

Can't log , No connection!!
Anyone else? anyone can log to alpari?

I don't know why it wasn't working but i removed mt4 and install it again
now working

Alpari-UK what is the relation of Alpari-US to your operation? I can see that they use the same servers and data (except for the ridiculously! higher stop levels) - Some of us (myself included) have had Terrible LIVE experiences with Alpari-US and have Demo'd both UK and US. Should their response mirror yours for US clients (seems like it would since US to US should be pretty snappy) - but generally they actually seem to be quite a bit WORSE!

I would assume that since they use your namesake and servers that techniques and methods would almost be identical. Do you have any comments regarding the US operation to set a distinction between the two entities. (And when are you gonna have them update their website to the spiffy new UK version?) - OR as I suspect that they may be WORSE because I have to talk to US servers and the US servers have to talk to the UK servers? (If this is the case no wonder I get a billion requotes!! - OF COURSE the price has changed between all these handoffs)

nice response from alpari. Sums it all up, even why rarely and order is not executed. Interesting to know that most my trades are hedged with other clients...
I find their customer service is excellent although yeah can take a while to get a response via email, but there is another thread around here that is moaning about a company with excellent customer service but crap data/order execution service, i think its IBFX. So as a broker you cant actually win, there will always be someone moaning.

Andrey,

Thank you for the extensive response. Unfortunately, I'm afraid you miss the point. You explain how your business works and why phenomena as slippage, requotes, etc. are happening. This is fine - and I think that any trader who invested some time in learning how brokers operate should have known this already. The point made by several people was that at a certain stage (around February this year it was?) the performance deteriorated sharply to a point that trading became less profitable (not to speak of "less enjoyable"). The quantity of complaints and their similarity suggests there is a point here... Responding to this point directly, creating a dialogue, could have been beneficial for establishing relations of trust between your company and your clients (or former clients, as in my case). I'm afraid that a "monologue" of the kind you delivered doesn't promote communication.

@troll2010: Sir, please, don't comment on this post before you brush up your manners or simply grow up. I'm happy that you are happy with Alpari, just let the "idiots" go on moaning without your illuminating comments.

That's strange Lubo I never experienced platform hang or gap in price so frequently or at least I never look at it closely. Maybe you're a scalper so this could hurt you a lot more than me (long timeframe trader) but in my opinion if one want to scalp metatrader isn't the right platform to be used.

ciao ciao
Skyline

I'm not a scalper, i'm a short term trader, but this is not the issue.
The platform don't lost connections every 5 min., but couple a week, some week every day....and if u have some open position..... lol.... it's funny!!!
Lately in the last month this issue happens less often.
I hope that this happened because of the transition to new servers and new liquidity that has worked Alpari starting the new year, and I also hope that it will resolve completely.

Lubo.

all i have to say is.....
LOL

Dear Traders,

We would like to reassure you that the platform freezes/connection problems some of you experienced in early 2009 were caused by limited server capacity i.e. there were too many orders and trades being processed for our servers to handle efficiently. All these issues were resolved after we split accounts into 2 separate independent servers. Our servers are now working excellently with no downtime problems. We understand that service interruption/deterioration hurts our clientele which is why we took all the necessary steps to make sure that the effect on your trading experience would be minimal.

With regards to our relationship with Alpari (US), we have always been completely separate entities with no resources being shared whatsoever. All trades/orders being done with Alpari (UK) are ONLY dealt with by Alpari (UK) with no exceptions and there is no communication at all between Alpari (US) servers and ours. What connects Alpari (US), Alpari (UK) and Alpari (Russia) is that they have the same shareholders but client facing aspects of each business are decided independently by each company with no operational crossovers. All companies have their own trading desks, compliance, marketing, client services, back office and IT teams.

We would like to thank you all for your comments and we will do our best to respond to your concerns as quickly as possible.


Kind Regards,

Client Services
Alpari (UK)

Thanks for your reply.
I appreciate your interest in traders.
Regards.

but Alpari Uk says "Alpari (US), we have always been completely separate entities with no resources being shared whatsoever."

so are they sharing servers??? hmmmmmm

Read beatter the previus Alpari.UK post, i can read this ...........
Lubo