What is bad about GAIN Capital?

Here in FF, people regularly complain about forex.com and it a big scam. I wonder what is the reason for this number of complains, as GAIN Capital is one of the leading brokers of forex trading, since they have recently acquired several major reputable brokers too.

Is such a big broker really scam?

Is it because of their MM performance? Most of forex brokers are Money Makers!

If they are against their traders, how they have so many traders through different brand names of brokers?

Market maker brokers are not bad if they are not greedy. The problem is when they are trying to make more than just the spread. Plus, if you open and close your positions quickly say less than a few seconds, usually that means they lose their money whenever you win because they didn't have the time to hedge your positions. Sometimes because of their greed, they don't hedge their customers position at all. Most brokers have A-book and B-book. Winners are hedged/passed through and losers lumped together and not hedged. Whenever you lose they win and when you are supposed to lose but win big, that is when the problems will come. All big banks/liquidity providers are market makers, but their balance sheet are so darn big and they have obligations to make the market for businesses/public.

If you are swing trading then any good MM broker is okay for you. But if you are scalping/short term trades lasting less than a minute/if you are extremely profitable you should diversify in the broker you trade with.

Gain capital is a good broker but i would not use it. There are many other good brokers out there. As for americans, you don't have much choice but there is a way to trade legally with offshore brokers.

Could forex traders in the USA start complaining about the rules of nfa thatare limiting and unfair compared to other countries to the senate and house of rep. It appears we're just staying quiet and doing nothing and just taking the crappy regulations.

well said

for me, I don't care about high spread during news, don't care about slip page because I don't use pending orders. What's make me angry is Forex.com,Ironfx they adjust customers trades by hands due to price latency, of course they keep their severs slow for this purpose. If they want to adjust customers trades by hands like that, just don't apply to regulators : Fca,nfa,aisic,fsa... Unregulated brokers adjust customers trades by hands, it's fine because they don't have to play under the rules. I believe when these regulators see too many customers have been robbed by this way they will act.

To answer your question directly as to why people may claim that Forex.com / Gain Capital (same parent company) may be a scam, though note I am not making that claim:

1) They have violated the NFA's regulations on more than one occasion. In the most serious case they had to pay a $459k penalty to the NFA and refund clients hundreds of thousands of dollars to compensate them for their losses related to liquidating their positions in an unfair way and for asymmetrical slippage practices. The details can be found on the NFA website for that company.

2) Forex.com discloses the profitability of their customers as required by US forex regulations, I think these are CFTC regs, not the NFA rules. Forex Magnates reports this profitability quarterly, the most recent report I know of is this one. IT shows that only 38% of Gain Capital's (includes Forex.com) clients were profitable that quarter. Due to statistical calcs that I'm not going to go into detail on, it almost certainly means that the % profitable over the long term is much lower, likely in the single digits. When somebody loses a lot of money trading forex, it feels much better to blame something other than yourself, so people love to blame their brokers for their poor performance. Because Forex.com has so many customers, that means you are going to hear bad things about them more often than, say CitiFX, which has a fraction of the clients that Forex.com has.

Hope this helps.