So I was looking at reviews for forex.com and It just seems that many people are having issues with this. I come from Binary and one of the good things about it was Nadex wasn’t taking the other side of the trade. So they didn’t care if you won or lost. I also see things like the spreads showing 2 to sometimes 5 pips difference on forex.com. I’m within the US but it appears that it’s very limited as far as broker options… Any suggestions guys? Thanks for taking the time to read my post!
I must make a correction; the service was great from 2011 to 2016. The fact that I lost during the first five years doesn’t mean I didn’t have my moments. I actually ordered many wire withdrawals during my loosing period; I won some battles back then -in 2015 I won £1,000 in one day- and I never had problems, not even once. The real problem begun in 2017; I ordered five wire transfers of which three never arrived and one arrived until the second try.
Hi @e_castillon,
Thanks for responding to our offer to investigate this issue for you further.
It seems you can’t send us a private message, because that ability is not available to brand new members of the forum, and you only recently started posting on BabyPips. Fortunately, we received a forum notification of another post you made a few hours before this one and since deleted which included your email address and phone number.
We were able to use that information to review the details of your case and note that it was investigated in accordance with our complaints procedure and by the UK Financial Ombudsman Service who agreed with FOREX.com and rejected your complaint. Both investigations concluded that the issue you raised regarding wire transfers was a result of a problem with the your bank in Mexico, and not FOREX.com.
Thanks, that’s good to know.
Please notify our customer support team when you want to make your next withdrawal, and we will be happy to reach out to your bank in Mexico to confirm they now know how to receive your funds properly to avoid the problems they had previously.
There is one broker which is not a Market Maker so it doesn’t want you to loose. I’m talking about Fx Pro, “Trade Forex Like a Pro”. With them at least you avoid the conflict of interest. Why in my opinion that matters at all?
The Educational Resources that you will get with a Market Maker Broker will be designed for you not only to lose; but to lose as soon as possible. So they will want you to overtrade because the more often you trade the faster you lose. They actually have a 90 90 90 rule that you can check on Google; it’s really something. And even worst, if you make money you will be an annoying client.
On the other hand, you can have a broker that is not against you because is not taking the other sides of your trades. They just pass your orders to the market. Even if you have to pay higher fees or commissions I think it’s a better deal. At least I’m looking forward to give them a try.
The investigation (Our ref: 20346045) was completed and indeed, apparently Forex.com was not the one to blame on the missing £870.00 that I tried to withdraw in December the 20th 2017. So far I have to agree on that, it’s a shame that my Bank HSBC -The World’s Mobster Bank- is responsible for that, and I will have to sue them.
Nevertheless the investigation concluded; the case (Our ref: 20346045) is alive and well, is still open. It was going to expire on May the 7th 2017 but I called the investigator and we both agreed that there is only one thing which is worth of investigating further, which is the fact that HSBC Mexico insists on that Forex.com have sent wire transfers with no funds, and Forex.com insists on that HSBC is deliberately canceling the wire transfers.
Since I have an open complaint against HSBC here in Mexico they have been forced to provide written evidence of everything they say; and they actually provided a PDF document which is a system search of all the wire transfers attempts received in December 2017, showing 2 results of 2 wire transfers attempts from Forex.com Gain Capital and both of them share the same Rejection Reason and that is because of “Lack of Funds”.
I already translated and sent all that evidence to the investigator and if it’s necessary for an Ombudsman to verify the case we will have to wait for the result.
And just lo let you know on May the 15th 2017 I attempted a £200.00 wire withdrawal and of course, the funds haven’t reached my bank account in Mexico. I really hope you can do something about it. Thanks!
You have brought up several points in your post, so we will address them one by one.
While it may seem that way at first glance, it’s good to know the details before jumping to conclusions. For example, in the case above, both our internal investigation and the ombudsman’s external investigation reached the same conclusion that the problem was with the client’s bank in Mexico, and not FOREX.com.
In regards to other reviews you mentioned, it’s important to keep a couple of things in mind:
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It’s possible for problems on the receiver’s end to cause delays processing a withdrawal request that are beyond our control. While a client may think the issue was on our end, the example above shows how that may not be the case.
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One challenge on the internet is that no one verifies whether the people posting broker reviews are real clients:
What’s to stop some obscure broker from trying to fake a reputation by having its employees post positive reviews for itself and negative reviews against its better known competitors? Have you ever wondered why some little known brokers seem to get great reviews online while more established brokers with clients around the world get poor reviews?
Your comments about “taking the other side of the trade” reveal some misconceptions about the forex market we would like to address. It’s worth noting that for institutional traders, our parent company, GAIN Capital, offers ECN solutions through the GTX marketplace, where we do not take the other side of the trade.
However, for retail traders, FOREX.com is a market maker, because we believe market making is the best way to provide our retail clients with reliable pricing at retail trade sizes while effectively managing our own risk. We are fully accountable for every execution and don’t outsource that responsibility to a third party.
It’s important to understand that if a particular retail forex broker tells you they are not taking the other side of the trade, that only means they must offset your trades with another firm that is a market maker. That’s because market makers perform a vital service, not only in forex, but in many financial markets, including major stock and futures exchanges.
Consider what the world’s largest stock exchange says about how their market model works:
The cornerstone of the NYSE market model is the Designated Market Maker (DMM). DMMs have obligations to maintain fair and orderly markets for their assigned securities. They operate both manually and electronically to facilitate price discovery during market opens, closes and during periods of trading imbalances or instability. This high touch approach is crucial for offering the best prices, dampening volatility, adding liquidity and enhancing value.
DMMs apply their market experience and judgment of dynamic trading conditions, macroeconomic news and industry-specific intelligence, to inform their decisions. A valuable resource for our listed company community, DMMs offer insights, while making capital commitments, maintaining market integrity, and supporting price discovery.
In the following post, we discuss the three methods retail forex brokers can use to offset your trades in greater detail: Who is the counterparty in an exchange?
The key point to take away from all of this is that FOREX.com welcomes profitable traders. We even offer volume-based rebates to attract more of them.
Without more details, it’s impossible to tell whether such spread variation is normal or out of the ordinary. You mentioned in a previous post, you are still new to the market, so it’s important to consider the following:
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Is it possible you were looking at tenths of a pip (the fifth digit to the right of the decimal point) instead of full pips (the fourth digit)? Spread variations from 0.2 to 0.5 pips are quite common even in normal market conditions.
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Which currency pair were you looking at, and at what time? Spread variations from 2 to 5 pips are quite common with exotic currency pairs in normal market conditions and with major currency pairs in illiquid market conditions.
On the contrary, the reason only four firms are currently approved as forex dealer members as of the latest data from the CFTC is precisely because the standards for US regulated forex brokers are so rigorous both in terms of financial transparency and accountability regarding the price where each customer transaction is executed.
Particularly noteworthy are the requirements for financial transparency and trade execution accountability. Below is an excerpt from the CFTC site:
The final rules include financial requirements designed to ensure the financial integrity of firms engaging in retail forex transactions and robust customer protections. For example, FCMs [futures commission merchants] and RFEDs [retail foreign exchange dealers] are required to maintain net capital of $20 million plus 5 percent of the amount, if any, by which liabilities to retail forex customers exceed $10 million. Leverage in retail forex customer accounts will be subject to a security deposit requirement to be set by the National Futures Association within limits provided by the Commission. All retail forex counterparties and intermediaries are required to distribute forex-specific risk disclosure statements to customers and comply with comprehensive recordkeeping and reporting requirements.
For example, the CFTC and NFA set the requirements a broker must meet in order to offer forex trading to US residents. Though not an exhaustive list, this membership application will give you an idea of some of those requirements: Compliance Requirements for Retail Foreign Exchange Dealer (RFED) Applicants | NFA
It’s our pleasure to help you. Focusing on brokers that are regulated by reputable government authorities where you live can go a long way to addressing these concerns. Key advantages of trading with a well-regulated broker are:
- minimum financial and trading standards they must meet,
- ongoing monitoring by the regulators to ensure compliance,
- a framework for handling complaints from customers, and the
- power to enforce actions against regulated brokers for violations.
Hi @e_castillon,
Google is a great search engine, but you still have to check the quality of the sources it finds for you. Your comments remind me of the following quote:
The point is you can’t believe everything you see on the internet. Where did you hear of this so-called “90 90 90 rule”? Was it from a company that’s in business of selling its own educational resources?
If you want real numbers, it will interest you to know that US-regulated forex brokers are required to provide client profitability data to the CFTC and in the risk disclosure statement given to all account applicants. The text below is from the latest version of FOREX.com’s US customer agreement.
For the calendar quarter ending December 31, 2017, there were 33,885 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 33% were profitable and 67% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending September 30, 2017, there were 34,138 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 32% were profitable and 68% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending June 30, 2017, there were 34,911 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 31% were profitable and 69% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending March 31, 2017, there were 33,636 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 36% were profitable and 64% unprofitable.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NOT NECESSARILY INDICATIVE OF FUTURE RESULTS.
We won’t speak for other brokers, but FOREX.com welcomes profitable traders like you. As you mentioned yourself, you have been able to withdraw profits from your trading account with us in the past without any issues. Furthermore, with the particular case you brought up above, both our internal investigation and the ombudsman’s external investigation reached the same conclusion that the problem was with your bank in Mexico, and not FOREX.com.
Well, as a matter of fact the first place where I learned about this rule is in a You Tube Chanel called InstituteofTrading, here’s the link:
This guy has worked in the financial industry so I think he knows what he’s talking about.
As I already explained; my experience with Forex UK is that when I was losing the customer service was fantastic and I never had any problems withdrawing money. But as soon I begun earning profits the customer service change for the worse and withdrawing funds became a nightmare. This is my objective description of the experience.
On 2017 I ordered 5 wire withdrawals and of them only 1 arrived on the first try.
In principle I would not give a dam if my broker takes the other side of my positions as long they don’t get in the way whenever I start earning profits. And is a real pain in the ass to trade at your top level if you cannot be certain that your funds, your investing capital, will arrive promptly whenever you order a withdraw. I don’t know if would go that far to call this sabotage but what is certain is that I no longer trust them.
And yes, I can sense a Conflict of Interest here.
My advice to any all novice traders would be to start your trading experience with a practice account, and stick to practice accounts until you have 3 months at least of profits. If you decide to open a real account take very small positions, learn how to trade real money loosing small. Use most of your real money to take courses and buy books that will give you a real edge on the markets. Finally, get a mentor who is already a profitable trader. I had to learn everything by myself and it wasn’t easy.
Now regarding the missing withdrawal; six months have passed since the missing £870.00 debit card withdrawal.
The Financial Ombudsman Service investigation (Our ref: 20346045) is still open. On the 8th of June I got an email from the investigator Dan Mason stating he had been in touch with Gain and asked them to send him further information. They’ve gone back to their technical team to explain in more detail the payment process, he hopes this will shed more on the transaction and where the funds have gone. I’m still waiting for Mr. Mason to contact me again with the outcome.
I’m not letting these funds go. I earned them legally on the markets and I already have a legal team in Britain and in Mexico in case the situation doesn’t get resolved. I don’t know where the mistake was made but will be a matter of time to find out.
I’d like to shut down my Forex UK account as soon this gets resolved, on the meantime I will leave 1 GBP balance. I’m already trading with another broker.
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Hello Forex.com!
So I created an account about two weeks ago. Sent in the documents. It said I would hear back in two business days. I didn’t hear back in a week. So I contacted the support and I was told that my address document was an image file and not a PDF so it was rejected. I never got any correspondence telling me that and I had to contact myself to find out the status. I uploaded an image file because your system was only accepting PNG and not PDF. Anyways. So then I sent the PDF in an e-mail as support told me to do that. I did that. I was told I will hear back in two business days. Been a week again and still no response. To be very honest, this whole experience is making me wary of using Forex.com as my broker. If I am having this much trouble just to get my account active, I wonder what’s going to happen later on if I run into actual issues.
Also, if possible, please do tell why you do not advertise the Commission account as much as the Standard account? All pricing and fees advertised on the website is for the Standard account. There is almost zero information available on the website for Commission accounts, like what spreads I can expect on the Commission account and I have to create a LIVE account just to check the spreads (can’t even see that on a demo account).
It would be really helpful if you can just show me the spreads for the Commission account like every other Commission account broker does.
Thank you very much!
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A touch alarming that MOST Brokers will not use Live spreads / feed data inside their Demo accounts… Unfortunately Forex.com is not the only Broker influencing this way…
Sort of defeats the purpose of the “Demo Account” experience… doesn’t it…
I haven’t checked out demo of a lot of brokers, but the ones I did check out seemed to be transparent about the spreads. You can get some idea about spreads on the websites of most brokers (at least the ones I’ve come across) except Forex.com. For some reason, they seem to hide the commission account spreads and the only way for you to find out the spreads are if you create a live account and verify it. Seems strange to me. All you can learn about the comm account spreads from the website are “EUR/USD as low as 0.2” - THAT’S ALL.
Hi @e_castillon,
We apologize for not responding to your June 30 post sooner. We must have missed the alert when the post was initially made. We only noticed your post today after more recent posts were made in this discussion thread.
Unfortunately, despite multiple communications you have had with our customer service team, there still seems to be some confusion. As you noted yourself, the Financial Ombudsman concluded that the withdrawal problems you raised in case 20346045 were the fault of your bank in Mexico.
You are welcome to withdraw your funds from your FOREX.com trading account at any time, and we are happy to review the proper withdrawal instructions with you again to avoid further errors with your bank. A member of our customer support team will email you the instructions again along with contact details you can use to follow up with us to address any questions before you make your next withdrawal.
Now regarding your additional comments about the so-called 90-90-90 rule, your latest response confirms what we suspected. We asked you the following:
Then you responded as follows:
As we mentioned before, you can’t believe everything you see on the internet. As you have now confirmed, your source for that so-called 90-90-90 rule is a company that’s in the business of selling it’s own trading courses, and unfortunately, the approach they have taken is to make claims about client profitability that are easily proven false.
We have yet to find any reliable study behind the “Rule of 90/90/90”, but people continue to mention it on forums as if it was a proven fact. Unfortunately, this so-called rule seems to be nothing more than another example of people misrepresenting statistics and spreading these misconceptions to others: Divorce Rate: It's Not as High as You Think - The New York Times
In the US, forex brokers are required to report client profitability stats to the CFTC every quarter, which is approximately every 90 days. Below are the stats FOREX.com reported to the CFTC for the past year:
For the calendar quarter ending June 30, 2018, there were 34,000 active non-discretionary
trading accounts of which 38% were profitable and 62% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending March 31, 2018, there were 35,139 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 28% were profitable and 72% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending December 31, 2017, there were 33,885 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 33% were profitable and 67% unprofitable.
For the calendar quarter ending September 30, 2017, there were 34,138 active non-discretionary trading accounts of which 32% were profitable and 68% unprofitable.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NOT NECESSARILY INDICATIVE OF FUTURE RESULTS.
Hi @jas0992,
It sounds like the emails from our account services team are getting blocked by your email filters. Please make sure to add the FOREX.com domain to your list of safe senders. Our customer service team is available 24 hours a day during the trading week, so please feel free to contact us via phone or chat for an update on your account status and to have the latest details emailed to you again after you adjust your email filters.
Hi @jas0992 and @Trendswithbenefits,
While we won’t speak for other brokers, we can confirm for you that FOREX.com demo accounts display prices available to our live account holders. In fact, we want our demo users to get the most out of their demo trading experience: Demo = win , live = loss
That said, it’s important to understand that our demo accounts are currently set to display the most common pricing model used by our clients, and the vast majority of them trade on the all-inclusive spread model with no commissions.
Our spread plus commission pricing model is still relatively new, so you can expect to see more details about it on our website after we finish making updates to the relevant web pages. We value your feedback about our demo accounts and will see if we can update some of our demo servers to display the commission pricing instead of the spread only pricing.
I don’t believe my Gmail filters are a problem. I don’t think Gmail completely blocks an email from coming through unless maybe the sender is a known spammer. Your emails should’ve at least landed in the Spam folder, if you sent any. I am getting emails from Forex.com domain fine, be it automatic emails sent after I create a ticket or your newsletter. I just don’t get anything regarding the live account application.
Hi @jas0992,
While it may seem odd, in our experience sending thousands of emails per month, that is the most likely explanation. Otherwise, why would you have had problems receiving emails from our account services team on two separate occasions?
Our account services team uses different email addresses from the ones used for automatic emails and newsletters like you describe.
Attention US Traders*
Due to recent volatility in the currency markets and margin increases made by CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange, the NFA has mandated an increase to the minimum margin required on all Turkish Lira (TRY) and South African Rand (ZAR) currency pairs to 12% and 7% respectively, no later than 6pm ET on September 24, 2018.
To comply with this new rule, we will begin making these changes across all trading platforms beginning approximately at 5pm ET on Monday, September 24, to be complete by 6pm ET. This change will affect all new and existing positions and remain in effect until further notice.
We strongly encourage you to review your account to ensure all of your open positions will be adequately margined once the higher margin requirement takes effect.
If you wish to add funds to your account, the fastest way to do so is by logging into MyAccount and funding via debit card.
Please let us know if you have any questions or are unsure of how this change will impact your trading account.
This change only affects clients trading with FOREX.com’s US entity. Our clients trading through FOREX.com entities regulated outside the US are not affected.
Dude or Dudette, man you couldn’t pay me enough to do your job. My hat is off to you. Now you will hear the incessant whining about the margin rates going up on the Rand and Erdojuan. Look ya’ll I have moved money in and out of my forex.com account with no issue. I also set up an account with them, no problem. Also they are not hiding anything about the rates.
Finally, what do you want for a simulator, its only there for you to learn the platform, it is not a virtual simulation of live trading, it is probably on another server, it was with PFG. Nobody ever goes in to their broker and says, hey I want a Currenex Demo so I can learn how to trade. Ya’ll should give FOREX.COM a hearty thank you that they provide the sim for you to learn on, and not charging you for the bandwidth and server space.
Hah, and people wonder why I got out of the IB business. FOREX.com, if you want to have Jess delete my rant, no problem. To everyone else, my views do not represent FOREX.COM or GAIN Capital, neither am I an employee, or representative, just a client, and I stayed at a Holiday Inn Last night.
The Ever Wondering About This Group Of Humanity VIPER
2 Likes
Hello,
Why do the FX pairs show up with “pro” after their symbol name? There are a few without the “pro” but I can’t trade those.
See images for comparison.
I had tried to use some charts from another copy of MT4 but they showed the wrong symbol.
I’ve got a Canadian MT4 demo account.
Thanks,
Robin
2 Likes
Hi Robin,
Thanks for your question.
A suffix at the end of a Symbol name on MT4 can be used to differentiate between pricing tiers. Note how the “pro” symbols you can trade have lower spreads than the non-pro spreads you cannot trade.
You can update your MT4 charts to display the symbols you can trade with the correct suffix.