GO Markets VS IC Markets VS Think Forex

Hi

I am starting this thread to discuss these three Aussie Regulated Brokers namely Gomarkets vs IC markets vs Think Forex.

I am looking for feedback on withdrawal from these 3 brokers so only those who have done withdrawal from these brokers need reply.

Please let us know how long you have been with them , and what is amount that you have withdrawn and the mode of withdrawal ( swift , ecurrency, card etc ) .

Feedback from non resident aussie traders most welcome , How many withdrawal done so far.

Why would they not allow a customer to make a withdrawal?

All are regulated, all have ok to good reviews, all have offices that are easy to locate in a first world country.

If I was you I would concentrate on actually making profitable trades than worrying about a regulated broker not sending you your own money.

Sorry for being a smart arse but really.......

Well there has been some adverse reports that is why ?? and as regards making profitable trades that is no big deal

I am agree with mitch77, No one is going to tell you about his income at this forum. A reputed broker never cancel your withdrawal request.
IMO, You should read the reviews about each broker and try their demo platform first. Brokers need valuable clients who stay in business on long term basis.

I have withdrawn from both GO and IC without any issue

Go are a Market Maker so they take your losses while pretending to be on your side and thats dishonest

I traded profitable with ICMarkets for 6 months and then they lost a deposit of mine and prevented me from adding funds to support my positions. It took numerous emails and phone calls in which I had to prove the deposit had been made which took 4 weeks. They liquidated my positions. I believe they also take the other side of the trade and benefitted from my losses which were actually caused by them. They claim ecn but as far as I am concerned thats not exactly true.

I am looking into Think Forex and they look good but lets not kid ourselves, there is no such thing as true ecn for little guys. You can't send a mini lot trade to the interbank so they must provide the liquidity for small traders. That means they can load the spread rather than pass on the raw feed and are basically just glorified Market Makers.

Hi MACDoug:

I just briefly saw your story with ICMarket.
It is unfortunate that you had a bad experience,but I have no comment at this moment since I didnt go through the detail.

Here I agree with you on one point: if the trading size is not provided by the very upstream, it is likely the broker is practicing MM thing.
The thing unclear to me is "what volume is a good volume".

Note: In my words: 1 lot = 100,000 unit / mini lot = 0.1 lot / micro lot = 0.01 lot.

If you are talking about EBS or Reuters, where many big guys are playing, the necessary size is more than 5 lots per click I believe.
At the meanwhile, there are many places providing smaller volume per click.
For example, some bank streams start from more or less 1-5 mini lots. (such as Currenex and FXall)
Also, there are places like LMAX, advertising as an exchange, providing starting volume at 1 micro lot.
There are also many ecn/stp brokere setting up their starting volume at 1 micro lot.
Btw, there are some brokers providing 0.1 micro lots, and that is certainly a MM thing for sure in my opinion.

You mentioned mini lots (0.1 lots) doesn't exist for the banks steam, actually I think it might not be true.
If that is true, I would be interested knowing how LMAX and many other famous ECNs brokers run it.


In my opinion, it is not easy to tell what is the reasonable starting volume to avoid the MM thing.
[If anyone can share some more solid thoughts, that would be helpful.]

The real case might be more complicated than this, and there might be few possible scenarios:
1) 0.01 lots upstream liquidity does exist, and some brokers have access to them, and purely pass them to clients to achieve ECNs.
2) 0.01 lots upstream liquidity does exist, but some brokers still only use higher starting volume liquidity,
such as EBS (hope to get better price) and then practice MM.
3) 0.01 lots upstream liquidity doesn't exist at all, so most brokers are actually practicing MM. (if so, many of them are violating regulator's regulation*)

*Although regulator is not necessarily to help traders (I believe there are many doubts on them), but I think at least they should still hold this bottom line.

--
Also another point:

To be honest, even if you are using a MM broker, and even if they are hedging your orders on the market, that shouldn't effect you at all.
If you don't actually trade with very large volume (which is likely to be the case), your strategy is unlikely to impact the market, and MM's hedging is unlikely to cause your loss (if you loss, it is likely because of the whole market, even if you trade directly to banks, things can still happen.)

The concern with using a MM broker might be that
(1) they hedge in their own way (rather than pure hedge),
so one may find a way to rob this broker (if he finds some weak point of this MM broker's strategy).
If so, in a better scenario, this trader is politely asked to stop.
In a worse scenario, the account is banned and the fund is locked for whatever reason.
(2) price manipulating, and then try to trigger your sl often (but I think this concern is everywhere, not just for MM brokers)

Apart from that, if you can find a reliable MM broker providing you cheap overall cost, and the access to the good liquidity, I dont really see the problem.
*It is just that most MM brokers have quite high overall cost (commission + spread).

--
Above are just my opinions, and hope I don't mislead anyone.
Please correct me if I am wrong.

Many thanks, Wjack

I recently closed my IC Markets account after over a year of trading, deposits, withdrawals, tried to withdraw my total remaining balance and was asked to provide a bank statement with all my details, which was a bit out of character seeing withdrawals are simply reversals of the deposits. Provided 4 docs of recent bank transactions to/from my trading account, still wouldn't release my money. Provided an old statement along with my words of getting F.O.S involved and they released my money. Been through this type of crap before, and even get pleasure from going through the reporting process to straighten these corrupt F^%kers.

Doesn't pay to be a faithful or even build repor with your broker, doesn't mean sh!t.

Looks like IC may be just a white label of EToro anyway, prob old news. http://forexmagnates.com/etoro-launc...-in-australia/
“We are delighted to launch the eToro platform in Australia and New Zealand and partner with IC Markets” said Jonathan Assia, CEO of eToro. - See more at: http://forexmagnates.com/etoro-launc....Gg97OSeu.dpuf

Also looks like Pepper is a white label of Axitrader. I know Axi will lock you out of trading if you are a threat to their profits. Have evidence of this one.
Opened a demo with Pepper the other day and this is what I saw in the history files:

When Maat was trading with IC-M, the spreads were fantastic as were the fills. I wouldn't get too caught up in the Market Maker thing as in reality, someone must take the other side of your trade. What matters most is immediacy, accurate fills, and small minimum trade sizes. Most retail traders actually benefit from market making whether they realize it or not. It was unfortunate that some brokers were using dishonest practices like asymmetric slippage, stop hunting, etc and that caused the entire aggregation industry to get a bad wrap. All that happened is that brokers shifted their advertising efforts to include the words "ECN" or "true ECN" and "99% of all trades executed in under 1 second".

Usually you will not know until you deposit and trade to see what a broker is truly capable of. If you are really an informed speculator, then stick to the institutional brands or retail arms of institutional capital management firms. Be careful going offshore, and check personal references and people on forums that you trust.

Would you please kindly provide the evidence about: " I know Axi will lock you out of trading if you are a threat to their profits. Have evidence of this one."
Thanks.

Everyone knows that Axitrader are a market marker broker. If you ask them for a trade receipt they wont be able to give you one, there are a few traders over in Donna forex who have tried this and got knocked back. I would approach with caution.

Are there any brokers out there that are actually ECN?? Who do you guys use to trade now?

IC Markets and Global Prime are my preferred brokers.

Yes one thing that I find with IC Markets is that your positions do get liquidated very often and you do end up sustaining large losses. Their margin stop-out level is 80% and it is based on USD and marked-to-market in real time so if you are trading in a base currency that's more expensive than USD like GBP or EUR, then you are at lot higher risk at having your positions stopped out once it reaches below their 80% stop-out level. Now they DO allow you to do transfers to help support your positions and their transfers are instant so I will give them the benefit of the doubt here for now regarding their stop-hunting maneuvers as their prices do seem to be inline with the prices posted from several different sources bar for bar; I didn't notice any unusual price spikes/dips that showed up exclusively on their charts and not on others and my positions were liquidated at prices that did exist on charts from all sources. So I am going to try to support my positions better to see if it helps with the situation and makes a difference. If it doesn't and my positions still get liquidated constantly at unreasonably then I am switching brokers. I sign up with a broker to make money. If I can't make money, then the broker is no good, very simple.

With regards to funding the account, IC Markets is a bit slow on that. I funded my account via a wire it took four business days and I had to spend more than an hour on the chat with them to finally get the fund deposited into my account. The representative and their back office was really nice and patient though and they eventually tracked down the wire and got the funds deposited into my account but a wire shouldn't take that long and that much follow-up from the client. So if you are thinking of trading with IC Markets, you need to allow them more time to deposit your funds. They have several funding methods that can get funds deposited into your account instantly. I don't know if using them would get the funds deposited faster but they are very expensive.

I have traded with IC Markets for about 8 months. I found them very good until I started to withdraw funds as I made profits.
I funded my account through my credit cards back in May - August
The problems I have encountered are they don't place the funds back into the credit cards as "Payments" but as "Refunds"
Now they state in their info that all withdraws are "Refunds within 60 days of receiving funds". However in my case I am well outside the 60 day period.

OK what is the difference. Well the credit card companies don't recognise that you have made a payment if it is classified as a "Refund" and you will still require you to make payments to cover the cost of the minimum payment and charge you fees for late payment if this is not done.

In addition when a business makes a refund then they don't have to pay the bank card merchant fees, 3% in the case of IC Markets. Now there is a financial incentive for IC Markets (3%) to make the withdrawals as "Refunds" rather than "Payments". This is the same 3% that gets deducted from the funds that you deposit with them.

To date I have not been successful if having them make a "Payment" rather than a "Refund", is spite of lodging complaints and tickets.

Initially I thought it was just an administrative mistake, and pointed out the problem to them, but it has continued, so I am coming to the conclusion that it is deliberate.

I am glad you posted this. I am about to withdraw from IC Markets and I was wondering what that experience would be like. So do you get charged the 3% when withdrawing to credit card? IC Markets states on their website clearly that withdrawing to credit card is free.

And it really beats me why they wouldn't make it as a payment and instead as a refund. Anybody can make a payment on your behalf to your credit card and you don't get charged for making a payment so I don't know why IC Markets would choose to make the withdraws as a "refund" instead of a "payment". And if they are really making a "refund", why do they ask for all 16 digits of my credit card? Unless they are making a payment on my behalf to my credit card, they don't really need all 16 digits of my card. This can lead to potential security risk not that I don't trust IC Markets completely.

Overall this is the thing that I find with ECN brokers is that they always nickle & dime you as much as they can on the little things, whether it's the swap rates, or an extra commission for fx conversions, or exchange rate spread on converting your funding currency to your own home currency (that I am still yet to find from IC Markets so if anybody has any experience on those would appreciate your comments), charges on this, fees on that...

And they don't charge you for a lot of fees, then you either have a broker who's also a MM (like IC Markets) or like IB who has almost non-existent customer service (from US office, Canadian office is lot better) and skeleton infrastructure. They keep their spread tight and commission charge competitive, I guess they have to make up the difference somewhere. At the end, you pay for everything because they are not big enough to absorb them all or don't want to and don't have to as long as we are sucked in into trading forex.

No you do not get charged 3% when withdrawing to a credit card - it is free.

Its just that all credit card transactions are done as a "Refund".

I have just heard back from their support team and have been informed that the only way to get money back into the credit card it through a "Refund"

So what you have to do is have the funds transferred into your bank account then pay in to your credit card. It little wonder customers get Pissed Off.