[Pip Machine]

Forex Savior – I have a few questions that I hope you and others here will help me with. I have been investigating trading forex for about 3 months and I’m now looking for a broker to open an account. I saw somewhere that NickB uses GFT. I also saw that they are well-capitalized (in your posts). So at first they were my first choice.

In doing my due diligence I found some complaints about GFT. People complain that money disappears out of their accounts and they didn’t know why. Digging further I found that GFT has a policy that when a trader closes a trade, it is apparently not fully settled for a couple of days due to international exchanges, and GFT will charge the trader for two days of currency movement after a trade has been closed. Here is an excerpt from a post explaining the reason for this policy:

"Let's say you have a base currency of USD and want to take a buy position on EUR/JPY, this means, you're converting your USD to JPY, then selling that JPY to buy EUR. So if you close this EUR/JPY position, it means you're selling the EUR you bought earlier to buy JPY again. Now your profit is in JPY and would normally take 3 days to be converted back to USD which is your base currency.

"If this is clear, then have you ever thought of how this happens, by just clicking a button? This process goes through a clearing that usually takes 3 days, and you know price is not stable."

The complaint, including several posts discussing the situation, the above quote and a copy of a chat session with a GFT person, can be viewed in this link: GFT Forex Reviews | GFT Forex Ratings | Ulrich Dietz| gft.com review and ratings by Forex Peace Army

My question is this: In your experience is this policy of GFT’s a standard operating procedure among forex brokers? Any comment would be greatly appreciated.

I also checked into Oanda, and found what appears to be a well-researched post on google answers.

My only concern here is that Oanda looks like a very small company (so I’m worried about customer service), and that my account will not be insured in any way.

Question: is this, too, standard procedure among forex brokers, not to insure the clients’ accounts?

Last question: In my overall research, so far the biggest complaint is slippage – I’ve read about spreads jumping up to 30 pips in some posts! Can you experienced traders reading this tell me which brokers you think are the best to trade with as far as the least amount of slippage? Or at least the most consistent spreads? I’ve done a lot of googling, and I’ve found some broker comparison sites, but I’ve found nothing in-depth enough to really help me make a decision. Anyone know of such a website?

Thank you, Savior, for posting the broker capitalization lists every month and all the other information you share. As a forex noob, I’m more than a little paranoid about learning too much of this the hard way. Your posts give me a little insight into how this all works. I greatly appreciate any comments on this.