Good Morning,
So this is my first post, Ive actually been around for around 6-8 months now. Went through the school have watched countless hours of videos on youtube ect trying to find where I fit in to all of this.
I have been looking around and trying various brokers. I have yet to find one that I just felt comfortable with and accepts US residents. I tried FXCM for the longest but then about 2 weeks ago I had 2 trades going and I was sitting there watching it. The price slowly moved closer to my stop loss until finally it just went right on by. Figured I would let it sit there because it was only a demo account to see what it would do. 24 hours went by and it still hadn’t closed it out. So I manually tried to close the trade. Wouldn’t let me, so let it sit over the weekend, Monday it wouldn’t let me, finally almost 5 days later it let me close the trade. The other trades didn’t hit their stop loss but it wouldn’t let me close those either. So that gave me a nasty feeling towards FXCM. I was using the MT4 platform on FXCM and forex.com at the same time and forex.com worked perfectly so I don’t think it was a PC/Connection problem. I like forex.com but every now and then it did some weird things with the prices that seemed odd to me, so I went online to see if others had the issue and to my surprise there were hundreds of post with people complaining about it.
Question 1: Anyone else have these issues with FXCM or any other gotchas I should know about?
Question 2: Anyone have a highly suggested broker that’s non trading desk and accepts us customers looking to get into a micro account?
I have looked around on the forums about question 2 and almost all of the recommended brokers either don’t allow US customers or I’ve had weird issues with.
Thanks!
I’ve used FXCM for a while and have never had those issues. Troublesome, to say the least. Jason Rogers frequents the site and is usually very responsive. If you can re-create the issue and provide screen shots he should be able to help you out. You can also email any FXCM service agent and they will reply. FXCM is very responsive to customers, if nothing else (even demo accounts).
I have also used Oanda. Lower spreads and no real problems. Navigating Oanda’s website and your account, however, is a like a maze. You can never seem to find what you are looking for. I’ve never queried them re service issues so do not know how responsive they are.
If you are trading a micro you really don’t need to concern yourself with a no trading desk, IMO. Your order should get filled just fine without any slip or problems at the quote. IBFX is, I believe, a no dealing desk broker that has a US subsidiary. I have never used them but many seem to like them. Might be worth a demo or micro to test them out.
Sorry to hear about your issues. Please let us know who you settle on and what, if any, explanation FXCM gives you. I would be interested in hearing what the problem was.
I will get some screenshots of the account positions which will show them how it went over the stop loss and never closed. I have tested a few dealing desk brokers and liked some of them but the general view I get from others posting concerning dealing desk is theres alot of room for shady business and I just dont want to be a newbie and get stumped out because of this. For example the forex.com when I was comparing it to the charts on fxcm they were not even close the price on forex.com would jump up to 100 pips for a split second then go back to where it was originally in the mean time closing out positions. Not accusing them of anything just seemed odd when it did it multiple times in the 2 weeks I was testing their setup. FXCM was great minus those few issues but those few issues worry me. If I get time ill also post the SN on here so you can see them.
You weren’t looking at the wrong screen were you, meaning you were waiting for the stop on the bid price but you had the ask screen on (or vice versa)? That is the only thing I can think of.
Had to reload the software on my laptop(did the trade on my main pc) the first one I found was alot worse but by the time it closed it was closer:
Order: 11764009
TP: 1.29804
Purchase Price: 1.29504
SL: 1.28981
Price when it finally closed: 1.28973
And who knows maybe 8-20 pip slippage is normal?
I normally trade on the 1hr or 15m charts, when I go into fxcm and go down to the 1mn chart right around that time there was a large spike of 60pips so that could be why it just totally skipped the stop loss so at that point maybe there’s a good reason it skipped it but then not to execute it for 4 days afterwards that’s scary to me.
No, 8-20 pips slippage doesn’t occur that I have ever seen. If there was a 60 pip spike on the 1 min when you placed your trade you may have just missed the price level by the time it routed through their servers and took your order (there will be a second or two delay on an actual account that doesn’t occur on demos, btw). That would be price moving at a sustained 1 pip per second and when price shoots like that so does the spread.
Still, you are correct. It sounds odd unless price was moving faster than your fingers could get the order placed. Once the price has been passed it cannot execute a close order at a certain price until price again hits that order level.
Sorry I can’t be of actual help – except for wild speculation. Check with FXCM and see what they say and let us know.
Here is a great link I just came by: 301 Moved Permanently
I think I may end up just sticking with Oanda I like the MT4 software so being as they have great reviews I may keep practicing with them for a while and try them out. John thanks for your time!
A small amount of slippage can occur and on the occasions where I had set a limit / Stop, and my order wasn’t filled I have received a credit from FXCM for the difference. In my experience this is seconds rather than days.
Hi silentcoast,
I noticed your post and wanted to jump in as well. First, I do apologize about any problems you experienced. It’s hard for me to say with 100% certainty what may have occurred without investigating on your demo while it was occurring, but I can tell you that there were technical issues with the demo account the end of last week and on Monday of this week. I suspect it may be related. There was a problem with old expired demos being reactivated which caused demo performance to slow down. The problem was corrected and you shouldn’t experience this anymore. This technical issue had no impact on live accounts.
As John mentioned, the best option is to contact customer support when you’re experiencing any issue, and we will investigate to fix the issue as soon as possible. Customer support is available 24 hours a day by phone or chat. I try to respond to any questions about FXCM, but a post may slip by if I’m not paying attention for some reason :34:
Jason
Jason thank you for posting when you certainly didn’t have to. That would certainly explain it and its good to know it didn’t cause issues on the live side.
I had similar issues with their demo server(s) and not being able to both open and close trades, getting messages with “context busy” or “no connection” when price was still ticking away in contradiction, and others. This went on for over a month. I opened new accounts, redownloaded mt4 into different directories (deleting the other ones first), rebooting, etc, and still the issues persisted. So sorry, but I went to Oanda over the weekend and all is running smoothly :57:
So far I’m not having any issues with Oanda and am starting to also test Alpari.