If you are considering starting an account with this broker, I would ask you to read what I have to say below about my experiences with them, and make your own decision.
I had started a thread a few months ago complaining about the terrible slippage that I experience with is mkts. See thread below:
http://forums.babypips.com/forex-brokers/73515-slippage-ecn-broker.html?highlight=carra
To summarise what I mentioned in the thread above, the slippages that I experienced were terrible, average about 0.5 pip on entry, same on stop losses. That is only average. Worst slippage was 2.4 pips slippage on eurusd on entry, and 0.5 pips on being stopped out on the same trade, for a total of 2.9 pips on one single trade. All my trades were during normal european or u.s. sessions, far away from news, and I never trade during news events. I have raised the issue of slippage with ic markets before and of course they give the usual reasons/excuses like they route all orders to the interbank market/they don’t control the price feeds/slippage is normal with stop entry orders. Funny thing is when I ask them why I never get positive slippage on my limit orders, they could not provide me with an answer. Their live chat support personnel are also not the most professional and well trained, often appearing aloof and sometimes downright rude. I had a run in with one of them who even got angry with me during a chat and mentioned he does not like my tone. I complained to ic mkts and they forced this guy to apologize to me in an email. I think he might have been reassigned after that coz I never saw him on live chat anymore. Not that those still manning the live chats now are any better.
After trading with them for 1 year or so, I decided enough is enough, and moved on to Hotforex. My experience with them have been much better, with only a small slippage in ONE of close to 100 trades I have done with them so far, but that is a matter for another day. Anyway I had left my ic markets account alone for a while, and recently decided to wire the money back to myself. On their website it is stated clearly that international withdrawals are subjected to a fee of AUD 20. I was prepared for that, no problems. But when I received my money, I found out that I was charged SGD 40 in total(1 AUD is almost par with 1 SGD). So I emailed them to ask why and from their reply I found out that they transferred the money first to their intermediary bank in Singapore (let’s call it bank A) before the money can be transferred to my bank (bank B). I know bank B doesn’t charge for incoming international wires(I checked with them twice to make sure), so it must have been bank A that charged the extra SGD 20. When I asked them why they cannot transfer the money directly to my account, instead of having to go thru an intermediary bank, they just replied that they have to go thru an intermediary. I did not know that before, and never expected that. Thus overall even though I had a slight profit thru my trading with ic mkts, the fees that I paid to transfer money to ic mkts, together with the fees that I had to pay to get the money back, resulted in a small profit becoming an overall loss.
I am not ranting because I lost money overall trading with ic mkts. What I am peeved about is that with regards to the transfer of money, an unexpected charge emerged because they had to go thru an intermediary bank, and I did not know about it beforehand. Not to mention the horrible slippages that I experienced with ic mkts, and the bad and unprofessional service from their live chat personnel, made it overall a very bad experience with ic mkts. I only had three brokers so far, and they are definitely the worst of all three. The other one is Oanda, which at least has professional service staff.
Thus if you are considering ic mkts, from my personal experience, I would advise you to look somewhere else. I am very happy with hotforex so far, and highly recommend them. That’s it, ranting over!