broker went down

Went long the EUR/USD about 10 mins ago with a market order. Their connection goes down immediately after that. I call and the rep tells me he can't check to see if the order has gone through, can't put a stop in, "I can only take orders over the phone" he says. "Can you check to see if I at least have an open order?" I asked.."No, I can only take orders over the phone, the sever is being worked on now..." That was about 14 pips to the plus side ago...getting the quotes from somewhere else right now. I still can't log on to my account...15 mins later...

Same for me I can't log in

None of the CMS site are loading up...the vt Forums on CMS won't load either. Apparantly everything about CMS is on the same server, that isn't right. I still don't know if I have a position open or not. Have you called?

40 minutes later still nothing...

I havn't called yet I had time to put a stop loss. I hope my stop got filled, looks like Eur/usd hit support and going back up!

Over an hour later, still nothing. I emailed them but I have no idea what will come out of this. I'm about 23 pips to the plus side, maybe, and I can't do a f#%&*n thing about it..nobody can apparantly.

Well, 4:25am over an hour later and VT is back up. 30 pips to the plus side and of course the order never went through in the first place.

What happened till now? Were your orders filled or even compensated?

Please inform us, as I'm interested in this company, and that's not a small drop...

If the trade would have gone against you, you can bet that the order would have gone thru. I traded with these people and they are the worst of the worst. This is just another way of taking your money. If forex was regulated, this broker would have been shut down a long time ago. I opened a $15,000 acct with them a few years ago. Promptly took it $25,000 and that's when the problems started. At that time, the server would go down for hours and when it came back up you would find yourself 100 pips down and had to produce proof that you had a stop in place by producing a screen shot of your order. Freaking unbelievable.... and still there are forums and people promoting this big time "BUCKETSHOP" knowing what they stand for.

- Frank -

When the server came back up 1 hour and 15 minutes later I could see that my order did not go through. I went long right after the 3am bounce on the London open on the EUR/USD this morning and missed all of that move. I didn't put a stop in because this was a market order but I always put a stop in at some point. I called a broker and he said that all he could do was take orders over the phone. Okay I thought, with my long position up 25 pips I said close out my position...Sir, we can't do that because the server is down...WTF!? OK, place a stop loss at 1.2nn, Sir, we can't do that I was told again.....I emailed CMS asap so the current time would be on the email (as if that would have meant anything) and basically asked them WTF? If I would have gone short and be down 30 pips, more than what my stop loss would have been, I'm wondering what would have came of that? The CMS website was down as well so apparantly the entire CMS workings are on one server, orders, forums, VT, account info,...everything on one server! I was drawn to these guys because of the charting but now I'm in search of a MT broker. None of this is ethical at all.

Submit a compplaint to the NFA...

Here is their registration page with tha NFA,,,look close there are two pages.
http://www.nfa.futures.org/basicnet/...=firm&firm=CMS

Thanks JD....I go through that this evening.

Oanda Oanda Oanda..... ok, their software sucks... forget about charting or automated trading, but they are the most HONEST in the block... talking from experience here, after bouncing around 12 brokers all over the world.

Just my tow pips.... Don't you even waste your time with somebody else.

If you trade futures, Interactive Brokers is a good option too!!

Hello,
i'm still a newbie in FOREX world..my whole experience is not more than 4 months...i started a MINI account with CMS..actually i'm fully satisfied with their service..they seem truely honest with me at least! they granted almost all my cliams about non filled orders at NEWS TIMES..actually i had a very nice start with them...and i hope they will keep the same over the long way.

My deal with them was that for an hour and a half they could do NOTHING for me. An hour and a half in the FX world can be a very long time. When I realized that the entire CMS 'community' was on one server I was floored. I'm wondering what I would be doing right now if that position had gone through and was moving against me the whole time. Good luck with them. There are several people (moderatators) on the VT forum that put an awful lot of time in answering questions about indicators and systems from, it seems like hundreds of people every day, and I have a great deal of respect for them. They have always answered all of my questions when it is my 'turn' and I thank them deeply for that. I know this is not their fault. It is CMS in general.

Not necessarily only one server. It could be that a problem with power distribution in the building affected several servers on the same power grid. UPS would not help here, as UPS is primarily to give the opportunity to do a graceful shutdown of the servers.

Another cause could be a programmatic interlink between servers. We had this issue at my workplace recently where a buggy program on one server caused two linked servers to crash.

These situations are common to any business these days where the employees are constantly pushed to getitdone-getitdone-getitdone!!! Never time to design systems properly, but always time to do it over.

Your best defense against this happening again is to maintain an account with another borker so you can hedge your trade. Although in this instance it wouldn't have helped you because you didn't know if your trade had been executed. Even so, having the ability to hedge via a different borker is better than nothing.

And even if they really have only one server, it is not unethical. It's just stupid.

I opened up a CMS account a little over a year ago. It's still open but I have pulled most of my money out and now use Oanda to make trades. Except for charting, Oanda is superior in almost every way.

1) Overall I found CMS to be very slow at trade execution. I hate waiting 5-10 seconds for trade confirmation with CMS. It's not always this slow but many times it is. Oanda's order confiration is usually less than 1 second consistantly.

2) CMS has a dangerous stop loss method. When you enter a stop loss order you must also add a "traders range". If the position moves past the stop loss point by too much then it may not get executed unless your "traders range" is large enough. This means you can loose a lot more money (maybe your entire account) even though you had a stop loss order. This alone is reason enough not to use CMS. They claim they will always honor limit orders, but they don't have to.

3) I also don't like the fact that the official VT Trader forum is censored. I posted a question and the admin refused to allow it. He said it was broker specific. The question was not broker specific. He said that it didn't matter because the particular error I was getting was related to my broker, even though I didn't know it, and he wouldn't allow the question. I decided at this point that they were not being honest with me and moved to a different broker.

4) Oanda's trading system is open 24/7. While this isn't a huge deal, I like being able to monitor the price on the weekend. Although its rare, I have seen the price move early sunday, well before most brokers are sending out a data feed.

Overall my personal feeling is that CMS borders on being dishonest. They have too much downtime for instance. Oanda may not be perfect but they are basically honest IMO.

Regards,
Mark

Well, it seems like this is pretty much what everybody thinks....

I've never found so many unhappy people about one broker...if you google their name you won't find anything good about them.

Too bad 'cause they offer direct transfers form your bank account to fund the forex account, without wires....


I wonder how can they still be in business if everybody is so upset...

Future

I have a live CMS account as well. It has around $10 in it at the moment, and I wouldn't keep much more than that in it. Another "trick" that might help the CMS customers: if your platform shows that an order was sent and recieved, but no action was taken (sent a signal to close, but the position is not closed), I would close the platform and reopen. There were numerous times I called CMS asking why does it take 20 minutes to close a position during the Asian session with no news at hand. The representative thought I was stupid each and every time, because on their side, it was showed to have closed shortly after the order to close it. My platform just showed it as still open. CMS or VT, who cares, but I use neither as of now.

Here we go again...thank God I never had an account with them. I also read somewhere that somebody is investigating them, but it could be a rumor.

All I read is that once you start to become profitable, they start to give you connection problems, and when you call to inquire, they get arrogant and keep denying anything is wrong.

They must definitely trade against their customers to act in that way...

Future