FXCM Discussion

fxcm has been cheating me for years. i just noticed recently when i would go into a long position, it would instantly go against me, close it. go the other way. and it instantly turns the other way against me again..

fxcm is a scam broker, they are taking the other side of my trades and taking thousands of dollars from me. i've noticed it multiple times, not only against my trades but spiking the spread so they can hit my stops.


i will be closing my account with them soon, they've made me lose thousands of dollars and i plan on suing them soon


their forums at dailyfx says it all. they are a contrarian company, whichever way the masses are going, they go the other way. it's right there for everyone to see.

you obviously don't understand what i'm saying. just shut your mouth and move on

your right, nobody is that bad at trading so there has to be something going on
good luck finding another broker

the screen shot of 2012 profitability also shows who's the better brokers and allowing their traders to win with their strategy's
and who is not

thank you for understanding

it's been extremely hard, especially with most of the other brokers shut down. FXCM monopolized a big part of it

Are you the "masses"?

32 losses in a row is almost unheard of especially in a bull market
the coin toss method would be more profitable

one of the better True ECN would be the best bet
CITIFX Pro (possibly are not so bad) but likely institutional as they control 15% of the FX market, so would need deep pockets, although according to recent reports they have been implicated in the FX fixing, along with Deutsche Bank
so maybe not

maybe IQL or IB
even Alpari don't seem too bad afterall, (in the list) but have seen their spike stop hunts a few too many times
but True ECN is the only way to go really

Carlsberg - This isn't 32 losses in a row, he simply filtered from his highest losses to his lowest. I sincerely don't know what else to say... I don't see any valid arguments on Allisonmagic post.

However, the profitability chart that you did post is interesting. Could you please share the source of thoses data? I personally really like FXCM tools and strategy, thats why I'm a bit surprise by this.

Malouin

poundtrader could you please tell me what was the low of GOLD on 31st dec 2013?
and what was the high of yesterday?

Yep! You can't tell anything bad about brokers they are all "angels"

They don't stop hunt you, they don't do slippage tricks and they don't disconnect you.

I have right now my broker platform in 2 different computers.

One computer is my main where I trade anything from 30 to 50 bucks per pip.

The other computer is in the name of a relative in a different ISP. There I trade cents per pip.

The computer I trade cents Oanda's platform is rock solid.

On my main computer I already experienced 9 disconnections today.

In the past I tried to swap ISP and the disconnections seem to follow the main computer where I trade bigger lots.

So i realized it is not a coincidence and i learned to manage it

Hi Allisonmagic,

In order to protect your privacy, I will not post specific details about your account on this public forum. However, I will speak generally about concepts such as margin and the reasons why dozens of trades in your account were automatically closed due to insufficient margin. That way you and others reading these posts can understand that your trades closed for valid reasons.

If after reading through my explanation below, you still have follow up questions regarding why specific trades of yours were closed, please submit a trade inquiry form. Our Trade Services Team will review the specific elements associated to your query, and will provide you with a prompt response on the elements requested.

First, it's important to understand that when you open a trade, you are required to set aside money in your account as used margin ("Usd Mr" is the label for this column in the Accounts window of Trading Station. Your MT4 account login also works on Trading Station where you can see these details.) The exact amount of used margin you must set aside depends on the currency pair and the size of your open trade(s). Let's take GBP/NZD as an example below.

CFTC regulations require that traders set aside at least 2% margin on forex trades. That means for a US resident, trading with a USD-denominated account, the minimum margin requirement ("MMR" on Trading Station) for GBP/NZD is $38.00 per 1k micro lot being traded. If you a trading 7k GBP/NZD then the margin requirement is 7 times $38 which is $266. That means you have to set aside $266 in your account as used margin at all times just to keep your 7k GBP/NZD trade open. If due to trading losses your account equity falls below $266, then the margin watch feature of the system will automatically close your trade out to prevent further losses. When a trade is closed due to insufficient margin, then you will see this noted in the Condition column of your account statement with the notation "MC".

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800...0/546/txf1.png

Note that if you are adequately capitalized for the trades you are opening this is unlikely to happen. For example, DailyFX studies into trader profitability statistics show that successful traders tend not to exceed 10:1 leverage. That means the total value of their open trades seldom if ever exceeds 10 times the equity in their account. That means a trader with a 7k GBP/NZD open position (or 7000 GBP worth of open trades) would want to have at least 700 in equity.

If you started with $700 in equity, and opened a 7k GBP/NZD position requiring you to set size $266 as used margin, that would leave you with over $430 in usable margin ("Usbl Mr"). Since the value of a pip ("Pip Cost") on GBP/NZD is about 8 cents per 1k, you'd be risking less that 60 cents per pip on 7k position. With $430+ in usable margin to risk, that means you would have to lose over 700 pips on the trade before having to worry about running out of margin.

However, if you overleverage your account, and open a 7k GBP/NZD position with less than $340 in your account, then that's a recipe for disaster. You'd find yourself running out of usable margin after only a $70 loss, which is only slightly more than 100 pips. That's hardly anything for a wide ranging currency pair like GBP/NZD. Even the most successful trades will not travel in a straight line from the price you open to your profit target. If you look at the charts, you will see that prices move in jagged lines with up and down movements. You need to make sure you have adequate margin to withstand the price fluctuations or you will find yourself running out of margin often.

I hope my explanation helps you to understand why you ran out of margin frequently on trades due to overleveraging. For future reference, if you have only $200 or $300 in your account, then you should try not to open more than 2k or 3k total in open positions, otherwise you risk running out of margin again. If you want to trade 7k, then you should consider increasing your equity to at least $700 so you don't exceed 10:1 leverage.

You're trading on FXCM's No Dealing Desk (NDD) forex execution. That means we offset your orders 1-for-1 with our 10+ liquidity providers. We simply pass on the best prices we receive from them plus a fixed pip markup which acts as a commission. We make money off your trading volume, not your losses, and we have no interest in hunting your stops. If you see our spreads widen, then it's because our liquidity providers have widened their spreads. This is most likely to happen during news announcements, the Sunday open, and trade rollover at 5 PM New York time. Whether your stops get hit or your take profit orders get hit, we make the same money from the trading volume. If anything, it's in our interest for you to be profitable so you can grow your account to place larger order sizes and be a client for life.

I hope my explanation above has made it clear to you that your trades were closed due to insufficient margin. Also, in regards to the research provided by DailyFX regarding contrarian indicators such as the Speculative Sentiment Index (SSI), remember that we provide the information from these indicators freely to our clients, so they can make informed decisions about their own trading. As you said, it's right there for everyone to see.

Jason

What your screenshot is really showing is how the leverage you use and the amount of capital in your trading account can affect your profitability. I mentioned this in an earlier discussion about trader profitability with data compiled by DailyFX research from over 10,000 FXCM client accounts: "Traders with at least $5,000 of capital tend to use more conservative amounts of leverage. Traders should look to use an effective leverage of 10-to-1 or less."

http://media.dailyfx.com/illustratio..._Picture_4.png

The same study showed that FXCM client accounts with a balance of $10,000 or more had a profitability rate higher than 44%. That's right in line with the data from your screenshot, since the first two brokers on that list have a minimum balance requirement of $10,000.

Hi Jason,

The level of customer support received from FXCM has been excellent (came over from the Alpari-US transition). Not only that, but trading behaves on my MT4 client as I would expect and is on par with any other broker that utilizes MetaTrader. In-fact, the slippage reconciliation is something new that I have yet to experience elsewhere which just makes this service even more fantastic.

I just want to say that you have handled the previous response in this thread very well and have elegantly explained the situation. I wouldn't have expected this out of any other broker. It was clear from the post that this person is leveraging too high and most likely just does not understand market dynamics on any level. I do not mean to be so blunt and derail your proper customer centric response, but the blatantly false accusations drive me absolutely crazy. We all remember the early days when it was the broker "cheating us". Clearly it can't be our "trading"...

If any words could ever be more truer about the market, it is that the market is what it is and will do what it wants. Nothing more, nothing less.

Cheers, and thanks for a wonderful service.

Jason, you have the patience of a saint when it comes to dealing with some of these traders "complaints"

Its amazing how traders blame their broker when things go wrong. The majority of the time it is the traders fault for not understanding basic concepts of trading ie margin.

In regards to the profitability graph shown be a member above it is quite obvious why the 2 brokers at the top are there. Its because they both have minimum deposits of $10K so therefore they wouldn't get all the muppets gambling, trying to turn a $500 account into $100K in a year.

Cheers.

i'm not sure it does - then again a rep would try to sell Eskimos snow if they could
anyways, i'm not going to argue the ins and outs
personally i won't ever be using FXCM, ive no axe to grind as never used FXCM,
there are just too many other stories and fines (but unfortunately the same for nr all brokers)

http://forexmagnates.com/q3-2012-us-...fx-pro-on-top/


broke(r)
adjective: broke
having completely run out of money.
"he went broke owing two million pounds"
synonyms:
penniless, moneyless, bankrupt, insolvent, poor, poverty-stricken, impoverished, impecunious, penurious, indigent, in penury, needy, destitute, ruined, down and out, without a penny to one's name, without two pennies to rub together; informalstony broke, flat broke, on one's uppers, cleaned out, strapped (for cash), on one's beam-ends, bust, hard up, without a brass farthing, without a bean, without a sou, as poor as a church mouse;
informalskint, without a shot in one's locker;
rhyming slangboracic (lint);
informalstone broke, without a red cent

http://forexmagnates.com/exclusive-q...-clients-gain/

Thanks for sending those emails. We can then take a look into the settings to see what could be causing this error with your New York Close indicator. Also, there is now a permanent solution that would eliminate the need for your New York Close indicator altogether:

New York Close charts are now available on FXCM's newest live MT4 server.

That means your daily charts will have 5 candles per week with no Sunday candle. Note that in order to make this possible, the time zone on this MT4 server is set to GMT+2 so that midnight on the charts corresponds to 5pm New York time (AKA New York Close).

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/4445/742e.jpg

If you have an existing MT4 account with us on a server that's set to GMT, you can email [email protected] referencing your account number to request that the account be transferred to the new MT4 server with New York Close charts. Your account must be flat. Please allow a couple of business days for your account to be set up on the new server. You will receive an email with your new login details when the setup is complete.

* Please let us know your thoughts on our new MT4 server with New York Close charts. Based on your feedback, we can decide how many of our MT4 servers to keep on GMT time and how many to switch to New York Close.

** FXCM Trading Station charts have always been set to New York Close. Unlike with the MT4 platform, Trading Station allows you to display the time zone of your choice, and the daily candles will still begin and end at 5pm New York time.

First Jason Rogers is not a saint. He is just a name that FXCM uses for the costumer rep of the day.

Now I agree that people blame the broker for their own mistakes. The newbies don't get that spreads widen and, volatility happens and leverage can kill.

FXCM looks really good on paper. I like how they give you the option of being screwed by their DD or going to a NDD model

But of course without trading with them is hard to say if they are really a decent broker.

I will give them a try one of this days. If I can handle the rats at Oanda I doubt FXCM would cause me too much harm.

Hi Tk5,

My first suggestion would be for you to check to make sure that you have the latest version of your tablet's OS. If not, then try updating that first before uninstalling and reinstalling Trading Station Mobile for your tablet. If you already have the latest version of your tablet's OS, then please contact our 24 hour live customer support. One of our tech specialists can walk you through steps to troubleshoot this error.

Jason

I don't believe that any big and reputable broker cheats its customers. There might be mistakes from brokers, behind brokers there are people not only machines, so they also make mistakes, but the assertion that broker is against client is not well founded. On the contrary broker wants client to be profitable and active. Client who loses money is making negative word of mouth campaign and none of brokers want this. Especially if you have few hundreds or few thousands worth of account, why broker wants to destroy your account, your negative word of mouth will make them lose more than can earn from cheating you.

The statistics posted above showing which broker has more winning accounts and which brokers have losing accounts are not clear example of one or another broker cheats its customer. CITIFX pro has highest winning accounts, why? Because they specialize on big accounts and on professional traders and FXCM markets its products everywhere, people who think want to gamble in Casino seeing FXCM ads in google may change their minds and put money in FXCM. So the losing accounts share in total accounts is because of the variety of traders each brokers have.

However I understand how frustrating it is to lose money and that you think losses weren't fair.

any of you who think brokers don't stop hunt, and take the other side of your trade. you are even more ignorant than i am. Jason Rogers, I don't care what you say man. i've been a loyal customer with you guys for years. I see the way fxcm manipulates orders by spiking spreads to kick me into trades early and stop hunt my trades. FXCM is a contrarian Broker, they go against what their customers are trading. Dailyfx is apart of your company and they blatantly admit that they work this way. you guys take the other side of your customers trades every day. So don't feed me your bullshit about regulations.