Pepperstone Forex

I agree with a lot you said. However, my point is that FX trading in itself is tough enough. So trader should be looking for a broker with the lowest spread possible and good execution. Broker having a spread of lets say 2.5 pips on the EURUSD is a good model for the broker and its agents but not for a trader. I like brokers with tight market spreads, good execution. I can live if they do not offer me 20% bonuses and other stuff because then I know that they get their money the honest way. There are no 20% bonuses and huge rebates at regulated markets like futures and options. Because these brokers are not allowed to manipulate with clients. So basically huge bonuses are a warning sign for everybody.

The rebate industry in general, I find, can be just as much of a negative as a positive.

Traders will seek out rebates once they become aware of them... which causes the following pressures:

 

1. Brokers who already spent money acquiring a client through marketing expenses will see that client create a new account under a rebate IB... now the Broker's ROI on that client is shifted greatly.
2. Rebate companies have to constantly compete with thin margins to keep clients, it becomes a game of who's willing to operate on less markup.
3. Brokers won't want to shut out the influx of clients an IB program can offer, so they'll be less willing to thin their spreads so they can afford IB program payouts.
4. As competition increases between rebate companies, and brokers want to give incentive to rebate companies though thicker payouts (so rebate companies promote them over other brokers,) the clients end up not winning through higher competition between brokers and instead they plateau on the total cost of trading front as related to IB's and rebates.
5. All the while, value added IB models suffer greatly. Companies who provide 3rd party services for free to clients who sign up thought their IB program won't see as much interest as the rebate model gets more popular, or they'll have to start providing rebates themselves to keep clients (joining the thin margin game.)

In the end, IB programs in general are awesome for everyone involved... but with the way things are going now that rebates are popular I can see things eventually getting to a "Wal Mart put the local store out of business" story without the benefit of lower prices or good products.

Just to point WHY I don't trust ARMADA:

1. regulation ALMOST NONE estonia... LOL

2. Website copyright 2007-2012 while domain created last year:


Domain Name: ARMADAMARKETS.COM
Registrar: HETZNER ONLINE AG
Whois Server: whois.your-server.de
Referral URL: http://www.hetzner.de
Name Server: NS.SECOND-NS.COM
Name Server: NS1.YOUR-SERVER.DE
Name Server: NS3.SECOND-NS.DE
Status: ok
Updated Date: 04-dec-2011
Creation Date: 29-sep-2011
Expiration Date: 29-sep-2013

Just few points saying this is a small shop. So take care guys.

13

Estonia happens to be the best run country in the eurozone. Their government debt to GDP is around 6%. No joke. The country is run with German precision and legislation is also a copy paste of German legislation. There is a wave of Finnish and Swedish companies moving their headquarters to Estonia due to transparent tax and corporate law and financial stability. But yeah, you can always go to Greece if you feel better there.

That doesn't mean anything. For example, Finland is an AAA country, and has zero Forex regulation. Same thing in
Switzerland a few years ago (before they changed the law), the country itself had a good reputation, but due to the lack of fx regulation alot of forex fraudsters were based there. CrownFX being the most prominent, if i remember correctly.

Personally i only trade with UK based firms, for several reasons. First, i can be in London with a short plane ride, if need be. Second i know the language. Both is important if you really run into problems and need a lawyer or talk to authorities. Plus, an FSA license is not that easy to get, unlike jokes like Cysec and such, and they actually got a compensation fund for the worst case.

this is (both naive and repulsive)agressive marketing campaign

of a dubious broker by staff members in disguise

and it is all over forum

Been looking at a couple of brokers as I need to change.

Opened live accounts with Pepperstone and DF Markets but still researching which to fund. May end up funding both just to test but wanted to get some feedback on the outages and disconnects I keep reading about both here and FPA.

They say they've been eliminated because of the server upgrade in December. Can anybody that uses them confirm that?

Thanks

Lux

PS: Any comments on funding and withdrawing on the above two brokers would be appreciated too as that's the reason I'm moving from my current broker. WAY too difficult to give them money and a hassle to get it back too.

Personally I think Pepper is better. But they've had major connection issues lately during important news releases.

Thanks for the response nuclearoptio.

I'd read about the connection issues which is why I was asking if they'd improved after the server upgrade. Did you notice any improvement in the past month?

Lux

The upgrade definitely sort the issue of regular interruptions in the price feed, and also now execution speed is much faster (about 300 ms for a market order for me here in UK). However there are still brief disconnections about 2-3 times a week lasting about 2-8 minutes. I get the impression they occur more around news times than at other times, but it is possible it is just random.

There have been some improvements but connection is still down pretty often.

The server upgrade fixed a different issue... back then their MT4 server wasn't able to keep up with all the new clients and was having trouble processing so many transactions at the same time... so orders would sometimes hang or time out and cause all sorts of problems. The quote server also would stall during this time..

Since then, they upgraded to a much more powerful, cluster-like, setup so they not only can handle the transaction load but should be able to scale well into the future without running into the same problems as before. And I'm really glad too, the server issues from before the upgrade were a deal breaker for me if they weren't fixed, but now after the infrastructure upgrade, I'm able to recommend Pepperstone to people as a great place to try out the ECN feed + comms model.

----------------

All that side, the disconnection issues we are experiencing now are still an issue, but no where near as bad as the problems before.

Some days are better than others, for a while it was no worse than any other MT4 based broker (since even my most trusted broker has the odd disconnect,) but the overall frequency and times of day they happen are still concerning.


They have done right by me and fixed any trades affected by the disconnections... so I'm happy to continue working with them.. but obviously it would be ideal if the issue wasn't around at all.


The last time I spoke with chat support about it, they said that particular instance was their IT team restarting the server to get things ready for the London session, and that they do this at least once a day just before the London session to keep things running smooth.

I asked chat support why "now", and if there was a scheduled time the IT team does this every day... the response I got was that the time of day varies and the IT team tries to pick a quiet moment in the markets to do so. The disconnect in question was an hour after the RBA rate hike announcement just recently, and things were anything but 'quiet'. *sadface* (but on an up note: the trade I was in was positive by the time connection returned, and if it had blown past my stop then Pepperstone would have corrected the difference... it's really just the annoyance and panic of not having control that bugs me most.)

I don't think the IT team is actually doing a reset though.... from an IT perspective, service continuity and availability in a production environment rank higher than thinking a hard restart and flush of cache is a good thing to do every day... and the idea of a clustered MT4 setup would be that you can take individual nodes offline without affecting the service as a whole.

So to be honest, I think chat support was saying that to calm any upset clients pouring in to the support lines thanks to the disconnect (which is not exactly saying chat support was doing a bad thing, for all I know it's actually happening in that way -- and they need to revise their tech department policies/procedures -- but people get odd when it comes to their money and little bits of misinformation (even said with good intentions) could create very tricky customer service issues down the line (the average small account forex trader is way too skeptical and prone to externalization after all..)


ALL that being said, the disconnects are annoying but they only last ~1 minute (give or take 30 seconds) and happen about 1-2 times a day. So they shouldn't affect you if you trade from higher time-frames (15m+,) swing trade, position trade, carry trade, hedge trade (different pairs), or basically any style of trading that's not scalping a tick chart.

Oh, and always have a stop, if any of their system issues cause you trouble, having a hard stop on their server with a set price is all the ammo you need to work with them. It's hard to argue that a given problem caused you to lose more than you were expecting if you didn't have a stop in place that would have otherwise triggered.. they can't read your mind to see metal stops


Let's hope these small bumps in the road smooth out as Pepperstone keeps growing.

Cheers everyone!

Excellent Post Jack , thanks for all the Info.

Two questions. How many orders can pepperstone handle per second? And why are they still having connection problems when they say that everything was fixed?

re-read my post above.

Thanks for the response Jack. I'll most likely give them a go next week and see how I get on. I also took a read through your thread about psychology. All good stuff and just wanted to say you're doing a great job. Takes a lot of mental fortitude to conduct such an undertaking on a public forum and one that I most certainly would not have the patience to embark on.

Lux

Hi all,


new member from Germany here (new to this website, not new to trading).

I've been running two demo accounts with Pepperstone for about a month now: one for manual trading, the other to forward-test an EA.

During these four or five weeks, I've experienced very few (maybe three or four out of a hundred) orders with execution times above 500ms; since I am not a scalper, any execution time not exceeding that is okay for me.

I usually get one to three disconnects per day, none longer than five seconds so far (most were re-connected before I even had time to turn my head back to the MT4 window); so I'm quite surprised to read about so many of you having connection issues with P-stone.

One negative aspect is the lagging price feed: looking at the Market Watch, one can observe the clock freezing for anything from a half to five seconds with annoying frequency.

I have contacted email support twice so far (on different matters, not the price feed issue): responses were prompt, complete, and friendly.
The three times I have used their chat support, my (simple) questions were answered competently, which is about what one may expect from a quick-help function.

In conclusion, I'm rather happy with Pepperstone so far.

Lastly I'd like to say that, in my opinion, what is important and telling about a broker is how they handle complaints; there will always be issues, no matter which broker one works with.
After having read this thread, I think that P-stone readily listens to people: if you can substantiate your grievance with hard data, they're prepared to reimburse you for losses which were caused by malfunctions of their hardware (position closed way below S/L because of a disconnect et cetera).

Please bear in mind that I have only run demo accounts (which probably have a better execution time than real ones, not to mention slippage) and that a single month's time is of course not sufficient for a conclusive evaluation.
Hence this post is merely a preliminary assessment, albeit a favourable one.


Cheers,
P.

A new tick only arrives when there is a new bid/offer... Market watch just shows the time of the last tick... not the current time...

I've coded a little ea that logs connectivity status, it checks the connection every second, and if it has changed writes the corresponding details to log file, i've been running it for a few days now, i'll show the results shortly.

Hi rooicol,


thanks for the heads up.

I know that new ticks only arrive whenever there are new offers/bids.
However I did not refer to the column 'Time' of the Market Watch, but rather to the clock showing the broker's server time above it.

This 'master clock' sometimes freezes for a few seconds, resulting in no updates of market watch prices for any currency pair.
Then the clock proceeds, and all currency pairs change price simultaneously.

I might be mistaken, but to me that looks like interrupted price feed from the broker's side.


P.

any one else have frozen price feed minute or so after US CPI and then a disconnection for about 90 seconds?