I’ve been trading for the past three years with a small real account and have finally been profitable for the past 6 months. After tons of trial and error, I am completely comfortable with my system and am confident in my ability to manage risk. I am ready to move my trading to the next level. I have a stable job and had been planning and saving to invest $5,000 in my account initially, followed by $5,000 more if I am still profitable after the first cash injection. I feel the time has come to enact my plan.
My only problem - my broker is FXCM, and I don’t trust them. I’ve been reading horror stories of people who claim they withheld or refused withdraws and gave spotty execution on profitable accounts. They’re also very shady…publicly traded, lost $250million a few months ago and had to be saved, obnoxiously high leverage.
Does anybody have any advice? Is FXCM really that bad? I’ve been fine with them so far, but my account is only a few hundred dollars. I’m worried that once I start using some real money, I may end up losing it because of some broker-related bs.
I need a reliable broker where there is no chance of them acting shady. Any suggestions?
FXCM is fine. They struggled when the Franc went nuts, but they were reputable enough to get a 300 million dollar outside investment in a matter of days. A random chop shop can’t command that type of trust.
That all says, I’m partial to Oanda for a million reasons.
But still, they’re on recovery stage now and can be exposed to different problems (capital adequacy, liquidity, staff reduction). Let’s hope they will get over that ordeal but it isn’t wanted to involve yourself in this unstable situation to become of a part of unfairly treated customers.
Instead you can consider such brokers as Tickmill, Hotforex, GlobalPrime I have firsthand experience with their systems and LP and quite contented with their trading services. I doubt that being obsessive with regulation you can come to wise decision as nowadays this point lost it significance (I mean any broker can be affected with unfavourable market moves). But still due diligence is essential for companies rendering such kind of services, so keep on with keeping unbiased feedback from traders, as much as it’s possible.
I don’t have first hand experience with FXCM but to get $300 million outside investment who must have done their due diligence on them must be fairly sound. Saying that needing the investment to stay a float is a little bit worrying!
If you are worried, maybe consider splitting your funds across a few different brokers. You may find one you totally trust and can look to transfer you total capital to them.
Congratulations on your success. Trading is a journey that can take varying amounts of time for traders to build their strategy, and I’m happy to hear yours is coming along well.
FXCM traders can withrdaw funds at any time by completing a withdrawal request through www.myfxcm.com. It’s an administrative portal you can access with your live account. Withdrawals are typically processed within 1-2 business days. If there are any errors in the information you’re submitting it could create a delay. But in any event, our operations team will reach out if there are errors to get your withdrawal processed as quickly as possible.
We had over 194,000 active trading accounts as of our latest operating metrics release in February, and our customer support team is available 24 hours a day to help our traders, including yourself, when you need help.
I see you don’t have first hand experience with FXCM, but you’re always welcome to give us a shot and join the other 194,000 active accounts with FXCM as of February :57:
Over the past few years, FXCM has spent over $250 million dollars making strategic acquisitions building up our non-core businesses, mainly the institutional side as we tried to diversify the firm. We are now looking to sell some of those non-core assets in order to pay off the loan.
@Jason - Thanks for the info. I must say, as a current fxcm customer, I have never had any issues and your execution has always been satisfactory. I think that’s reason enough for me to invest some more with fxcm.
i would not recommend you investing your money based on what we say here, i can simply say yes i trade with hotforex, but i would like you to make a list of of broker and research them thoroughly and be sure to make a decision based on your own observation and best of luck\
On the above picture, you can clearly see that I went short before the current server time, and that the price blew right by my stop. I tried to manually exit the position, but I kept getting two errors - one was a FIFO rules error, and the other said that I had too many orders, whatever that means.
Frustrated and not wanting to lose any more money, I called FXCM just now. They couldn’t exit the positions for me either and said that once they could, that they would give me the market price at the time I called (which was 0.67104).
We’ll see if they actually do give me that price, but my confidence is shaken. How can I trust these guys with thousands of my hard earned dollars when they can’t guarantee proper execution?
Hopefully they’ll live up to their word and will give me the price we agreed upon, otherwise I’ll be pissed and will take my business elsewhere for sure.
Well, I gotta say…FXCM has their client support together!
They called about an hour after I posted this and said that I couldn’t close those positions because I actually had three positions on. Now, I could only ever see two positions on both the charts and in the ‘open positions’ sections of their trading station, so it’s obviously more than a little disconcerting that I was apparently in more positions than I thought I was.
But still, they closed my positions (granted, at a much worse market rate than we had agreed) and sent me an email saying that my account would be credited with the cash difference between the executed price and the price we had agreed upon. I’m assuming that that will happen within the next few business days.
I’m fairly impressed with this level of customer service and can definitely see myself staying at FXCM. I called them with a problem(that was their fault), and they corrected it for me.
This is a common issue with 'em. The platform sucks most of the time and I don’t like it. For a very long time, I have stopped using their platform. When Stoploss is Hit and trade is not exited, who else would you blame it on? God?
[QUOTE=“isrealz;710113”] This is a common issue with 'em. The platform sucks most of the time and I don’t like it. For a very long time, I have stopped using their platform. When Stoploss is Hit and trade is not exited, who else would you blame it on? God?[/QUOTE]
His has never happened in my experience. Who do you use now? Maybe I’m naive.
As MikeCa has confirmed, other FXCM clients have not experienced the issues you described, and we have 196,964 active retail FX accounts with $1.0 billion in customer equity as of the latest publicly available data.
You mentioned that you have not used our platform in a very long time, but if you ever decide to try us again, our tech specialists would be happy to troubleshoot the problems you had. If you feel a stop order on our platform did not execute correctly, I encourage you to file a trade inquiry. The Trade Services Team will perform a thorough investigation and make the appropriate correction to your account, if there was any error in our trade execution.
It’s also worth noting that FXCM offers multiple trading platforms, so if you don’t like one, you might like another.
FXCM TS platform has features you can not find in mt4, to mention a few, the NET LONG/SHORT for multiple trades, something i have to do with a calculator on MT4. Not to forget the totally awesome adjustable fixed & dynamic stops, of which you have to do the fixed stop manually in MT4. Still have not seen a better platform so far !!
I don’t think there is a perfect platform. I’ve had a few slippage in execution on very few occasion, but the platform has been great so far. If FXCM works for you and I think you should stick with them.
However, you mentioned that on a few occasions you’ve encountered slippage. I just wanted to make sure you’re aware that the Market Range feature on our platform allows you to limit the amount of negative slippage you receive, while still enjoying the full benefits of any positive slippage.
