I’m brand new to Forex trading, but I have done quite a lot of reading on the subject. I’m ready to open a practice account, and am thinking it’d be best opening a practice account with the same company that I’m going to use when actually trading live too, so I’m familiarised with everything when the time comes.
I’ve searched the forum for threads relating to different brokers and to be honest have found it quite confusing. Of the few I’ve read there doesn’t seem to be much clarity on what the best ones to use are, and a lot of it just seems to be new accounts recommending brokers that nobody seems to have heard of, which is suspicious.
I’d really appreciate if any UK traders on here could provide some good options that:
Are either based in the UK, or accept UK traders, and are fully regulated.
Provide legitimate negative balance protection, and are not going to try and claim money if a trade goes completely off the scale, through a stop loss and in to massively negative territory beyond the deposited funds in account.
I’m sure there must be a few big firms out there who you guys could recommend I have a look at that you use personally, I’d really appreciate the help.
[QUOTE=“PipatronG6;731947”]Hi guys, I’m brand new to Forex trading, but I have done quite a lot of reading on the subject. I’m ready to open a practice account, and am thinking it’d be best opening a practice account with the same company that I’m going to use when actually trading live too, so I’m familiarised with everything when the time comes. I’ve searched the forum for threads relating to different brokers and to be honest have found it quite confusing. Of the few I’ve read there doesn’t seem to be much clarity on what the best ones to use are, and a lot of it just seems to be new accounts recommending brokers that nobody seems to have heard of, which is suspicious. I’d really appreciate if any UK traders on here could provide some good options that: 1. Are either based in the UK, or accept UK traders, and are fully regulated. 2. Provide legitimate negative balance protection, and are not going to try and claim money if a trade goes completely off the scale, through a stop loss and in to massively negative territory beyond the deposited funds in account. I’m sure there must be a few big firms out there who you guys could recommend I have a look at that you use personally, I’d really appreciate the help. Thanks in advance. :)[/QUOTE]
I’m in the US, and use FXCM. I just started with a demo account, having tons of fun. They have good YouTube tutorials check them out to see if you can sign up in UK. Best of luck!
Hi RBonat, thanks for the suggestion. I checked their site out and everything looks good, until I Googled them and saw this article in the WSJ:
I know that having down turns of anything over $50,000 would only be possible quite a way down the line when trading with more capital, but I’d still like to join somewhere that offers protection no matter what the negative balance ideally.
Be careful with “fully regulated”. There are a lot of brokers who choose to be “fully regulated” in Cyprus, and there are reasons why they choose that, and they’re not reasons that are good for customers.
Have you looked at ActivTrades? They provide negative balance protection, are FCA-regulated in London (which is what you want, in my opinion) and are long-established and well-known. [I]I haven’t used them[/I], myself, but certainly haven’t heard anything terrible about them.
Personally, I would stay [I][U]well[/U][/I] away from FXCM because of their strongly adverse regulatory history of fines in the millions for matters arising directly from the way they’ve treated their customers, but that’s just my perspective.
The best thing to do may be to use a genuine broker rather than a counterparty market-maker. I like and use and trust Interactive Brokers, but their deposit requirements may not suit you (and there’s no reason why they should, if you’re “new”).
You might also want to think (if you’re UK-based) about trading by spreadbetting, too? All profits are free from both income tax and capital gains tax, which is a very attractive “edge”. There’s a lot of outdated and mistaken “information” around, online, about spreadbetting firms (some of it is frankly “prejudiced” and dreadfully ill-informed) and it’s a perfectly viable proposition, these days. If that potentially interests you, I can recommend CapitalSpreads, who are well regulated and I’ve used them for years with no complaints. They’re effectively not counterparty market-makers, much, because they off-set their own net liabilities in the underlying markets and therefore don’t care, in principle, if clients win regularly (as long as you’re not an out-and-out scalper, which might not go down too well in the long run).
I don’t know whether my rambling post has been helpful to you, but in summary my quick suggestion, anyway, is “look at ActivTrades”.
Hi lexys, thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I hadn’t looked at Activ Trades, but have just had a look at their website and like the look of it. Think I will sign up and see how I get on with them.
That’s an interesting point you make about spread betting being tax free in the UK. I was under the impression that all personal financial trading was tax free in the UK, am I wrong about that?
I will look more in to it and see if it’s something I can get my head around, thanks again for the advice.
I’m no accountant, but to the best of my knowledge [I]only[/I] spreadbetting is tax-free, and I think profits from any other kind of financial trading are declarable and assessable for either income tax or CGT, with deductions of losses and expenses being permitted, of course. (But I’m only a foreigner over here, so what do I know??).
HMRC rules & [B]audit[/B] criteria are very clear regards tax & spread betting.
It’s currently off the tax radar providing the revenue is completely satisfied it’s not the individuals primary source of income.
If the revenue adjudges it to be however, then the profits/income derived from spread betting will be subject to the normal calculations for tax purposes.
After the EUR/CHF crash no one is willing to cover more than 50k unless they’re a dealing desk broker where your money is basically just a number (not that in those that offer 50k may not be so).
I saw your post and I feel like making a suggestion. I’ve been trading with fxpro uk for a very long time now and am confortable with them, try their ECN account, the platform is cTrader you’ll like it. Their customer service is one of the bests.
It’s important to understand that as an industry leader, FXCM is subject to a greater level of scrutiny than smaller, less-regulated forex brokers. We are one of the only retail forex brokers in the world that’s regulated on four continents and a publicly-traded company (NYSE ticker: FXCM) averaging $15.2 billion per day* in retail customer trading volume. We welcome this position of responsibility, and our retail clients who place 513,724 trades through us per day* are glad we do.
FXCM takes regulations very seriously and believe it is in our clients’ best interests for us to have regulatory oversight and transparency. That’s why we have over 80 employees in our compliance department as mentioned by our CEO Drew Niv in a recent earnings call. That’s not to excuse previous regulatory actions, but rather to emphasize how we actively work with our regulators to resolve issues and ensure the best trading environment possible for our clients.
For example, the NFA and FCA actions for positive slippage not being passed on prior to 2010 have been mentioned previously on this forum. FXCM reimbursed current and former clients who were affected in full. Furthermore, the changes we made in 2010 mean that FXCM is now one of the only firms in the industry to pass on positive slippage on all order types including market and limit orders.
It’s worth noting that to this day, some brokers may still not provide positive slippage to their clients, while others may provide positive slippage on some order types, but don’t provide it on other order types. Some brokers may re-quote their clients when the price moves in their clients’ favor but fail to re-quote when the price moves against them. There are no re-quotes at FXCM.
Furthermore, FXCM offers true limit orders on all the platforms we offer including MT4. That means our clients cannot receive negative slippage on their limit orders, only positive slippage. By contrast, some brokers treat limit orders on MT4 like market orders when triggered opening up the possibility of negative slippage.
When FXCM was founded in 1999, we were one of the pioneers in what is still a relatively young and quickly evolving industry that is retail forex. The key to our continued growth and success while others have come and gone is due in no small part to our ability to adapt to and lead change in this market. The stats below demonstrate this.
Below are the data from over 43 million orders executed through FXCM over a twelve month period from September 2013 through August 2014. In that year alone, FXCM clients benefited from over $21 million in positive slippage.
[ul]
[li]76.2% of all orders had no slippage.
[/li][li]13.5% of all orders received positive slippage.
[/li][li]10.2% of all orders received negative slippage.
[/li][li]Over 58% of all limit and limit entry orders received positive slippage.
[/li][li]52% of all stop and stop entry orders received negative slippage.
[/li][/ul]
Note how FXCM clients receive positive slippage more frequently than negative slippage. That’s due in part to the Market Range and Range Entry order types on our Trading Station platform that allow clients to specify the amount of negative slippage they are willing to accept on market and pending orders respectively. These unique order types allow FXCM clients to limit their negative slippage while still receiving the full benefits of any positive slippage that’s available in the market.
[I]* As of the latest publicly available data from October 2015[/I]
