Happy to be of help :57:
Iāve noticed that the pace of posting is much slower now.
Is everyone kinda settled for the time being?
I have concerns about forexbrokerinc. Can anyone explain this to me, they offer these generous bonuses (loyalty and first time) which can go 20%-30% and up and while they cannot be withdrawn they can be traded with. Knowing that vast majority of traders lose money, there is no way in hell the broker would risk their own funds in such a way which would suggest this is a bucket shop operation. If a trader blows up his account no money is due but what if the trader makes a profit? Would they be willing to let someone withdraw profits? That is my concern with them. Letās say someone deposits $1000 and based on luck makes $10,000 anyone have experience withdrawing larger than average amounts of money from them? Their constant moving around and aggressive campaigns to entice US customers raise a red flag. I have an account with them but I am concerned about committing more significant money.
As for myself, I guess I am pretty much settled for the time being, Paul. However, the war against excessive taxes on tradersā profits will probably never end. Readers here have benefited from Robert Greenās tax strategies made available and referred to on this forum. Readers who have been kept up to date on Greenās additional efforts to further reduce tradersā taxes are aware of how they themselves can significantly help him. I think more traders should keep up to date on what Robert Green is doing to try to lower their U.S. federal taxes.
Can you actually lose the bonus to the market? I cannot find any information on this at all. It seems like their bonus is only a way of increasing leverage on an account (as they say it - āincrease your trading powerā). They do not seem to allow you to withdraw the bonus at all according to their terms and conditions for the various bonus types: Bonus Terms and Conditions
I had a bonus with [B]Tradersway[/B] and it was similar, but you could not actually have a drawdown that ate into the bonus. It is removed at this point. However, they do allow you to withdraw it as you trade by rebating it into your account balance at a rate of 50 cents per lot traded. Does [B]ForexBrokerInc[/B] do this by any chance?
I would strongly suggest finding out whether or not you could actually deplete your account into the bonus itself. If so, they are acting as a market maker without a doubt in my mind. They also had an affiliate program - the link is not available at this time according to the website: Affiliate login - which I found to be way too suspicious for my liking. However I shouldnāt comment on this further until I can find that information again.
[QUOTE=ātomd100;700271ā] Can you actually lose the bonus to the market? I cannot find any information on this at all. It seems like their bonus is only a way of increasing leverage on an account (as they say it - āincrease your trading powerā). They do not seem to allow you to withdraw the bonus at all according to their terms and conditions for the various bonus types: Bonus Terms and Conditions I had a bonus with Tradersway and it was similar, but you could not actually have a drawdown that ate into the bonus. It is removed at this point. However, they do allow you to withdraw it as you trade by rebating it into your account balance at a rate of 50 cents per lot traded. Does ForexBrokerInc do this by any chance? I would strongly suggest finding out whether or not you could actually deplete your account into the bonus itself. If so, they are acting as a market maker without a doubt in my mind. They also had an affiliate program - the link is not available at this time according to the website: Affiliate login - which I found to be way too suspicious for my liking. However I shouldnāt comment on this further until I can find that information again.[/QUOTE]
The bonus is only for margin. It does decrease and get lost in the market, but cannot be withdrawn. Iāve got a decent sized account with them from back when I was practicing hedging strategies and havenāt seen any shady things going on. The only thing I didnāt like about them were high commissions.
I have a concern over Tallinex, which I hope Paul may be able to help with. I am noticing that the demo pro usd account feed freezes frequently, for between a few and about 40 seconds each time. Never more than a minute, and I donāt appear to have missing data. I am running 2 Tally platforms, and they both freeze at the same time, whereas other broker platforms are fine. So it is not my pc, or my internet (which is fast). I am in the UK. My trading partner in the States experiences the same freezes. I have contacted livechatā¦ they have mentioned it to the tech deptā¦ but it is still happening.
This is worrying, and will be enough to drive us to use Traders Way for our live clients if this continues.
Okay so for clarity, letās say I have a 50% bonus added to my account. I deposit $500 and they give me a $250 bonus. Are you saying that I can hold onto a trade until it is gone nearly $750 in the negative (ignoring margin requirements)?
About 2 days ago I posted a comment here that within hours was deleted (censored) by someone. The subject involved helping Robert Green, the respected tax accountant. So I guess I bent some forum rule a little too much. I did use an 8 letter word beginning with p that normally is quite harmless and inoffensive. Maybe that word triggered some kind of reaction from someone. I of course support forum guidelines since chaos and abuse might result without common sense rules. I think most people would agree with me, though, that sometimes, in rare situations, making a rule a little more flexible if that flexibility can potentially financially benefit all traders is a good idea. For a moderator to not make an exception in the above situation, it seems, shows that he may have a certain amount of callousness and lack of respect for the welfare of traders. Everyone who has made many comments on this forum, to my knowledge, definitely does seem to be concerned about the best financial interests of traders.
I personally have benefited from Mr. Green so I was happy to see the post you made to the community. I remember seeing your post previously as well and agree with your comment above. However, maybe it was deemed as advertising or something, though I do think that the information should have remained for everyoneās benefit as it was with good intent.
Hi, Jikkie
I believe it was you that submitted a ticket about this, but I havenāt seen a reply to the questions raised. If it was you, Iād appreciate you getting back with the answers.
Generally speaking, however, there will be a short freeze at EOD as our LPs halt ticks to reduce spikes - this applies to live and demo accounts.
Weāve also had a huge increase in the number of demo accounts being created recently so, an overloaded server wonāt be helping the situation, and is the most likely cause of what youāve mentioned. On the positive side, we have a server upgrade scheduled for this weekend, so that will hopefully fix things.
Only one thing in your comment perplexes me - why would demo account freezes ābe enough to drive us to use Traders Way for our live clientsā when there are no issues with live accounts?
With every other bonus scheme Iāve ever seen, you can pretty-much guarantee the answer to be ānoā - unless youāve earned your bonus, you canāt use use it to offset trading losses.
Just to clarify a perspective hereā¦ adding any kind of bonus to a trading account is a bad idea (which is specifically why Tallinex does not do that) - not only does the practice skew the equity picture, itās frequently the unwitting cause of point #3 below.
As traders (who seldom read the terms of their bonus offer properly) eventually discover:
- attempting to use any portion of the bonus amount to offset floating losses, or
- withdrawals that reduce the balance below the initial deposit (on which the bonus was based), or
- blowing their account
ā¦all result in the immediate forfeiture of the bonus funds, so any qualifying volume traded up to that point is lost forever - along with the bonus money.
Thatās when the realisation generally hits that the ābonusā was really just a poorly-conceived way of faking some extra leverage, and the likelihood of anyone actually qualifying for the bonus was statistically negligible.
That realisation was the driving force behind the Tallinex bonus scheme, which maintains deposit and bonus records separate from the trading account.
This means:
a) equity is not distorted (this prevents EAs and careless traders from causing margin-call/stop-out because the free margin displayed is the real free margin, not āreal free margin + bonusā which makes people & EAs think more free margin is available than there actually is), and
b) thereās no need to fake extra leverage with bonus money as Tallinex offers high leverage anyway, and
c) there are no restrictions on withdrawal of funds
Regardless of how the account balance goes up or down (profits / losses / withdrawals / deposits / blowing an account), bonus amounts are never lost and neither is the qualifying volume already traded.
This approach means that every bonus WILL be earned eventually - itās just a matter of adding additional funds if required (which also qualify for bonus), and trading until the remaining required volume is reached.
Thanks, tomd100, for your comment. Since my last comment was not deleted, maybe I donāt have to ātiptoe so lightly around hereā anymore in trying to get out my message. In my censored posting I did mention an email address for Robert Green, so maybe that was the mistake I made. This forum website is probably hit daily with hundreds or even thousands of non-human, robotic visitors, some of which almost surely have bad intentions, so now that I think of it a ban on all email addresses is probably good.
Iāll be brave and say the p word. Petition. Iāll wait and see what happens now.
Compounder,
Too bad I missed your previous post. But you have a great idea to share insights on FOREX taxation. This can be a confusing issue. And as offshore traders, we also have access to non-currency derivatives. Iāve never seen a discussion anywhere on reporting gains/losses on spot commodities and CFDs.
Regarding tax treatment on currencies, I have visited numerous websites offering advice. And they say pretty much the same thing ā the main consideration is whether to report as Section 988 transactions (default) or elect Section 1256(g) capital gains/loss treatment. Section 1256 gets you the special 60/40 capital gain tax rate versus ordinary income rates for Section 988. Downside is the $3000 limit on capital losses. Any additional losses must be carried over to the following years. Also, I think once we elect capital gains/loss treatment, not a good idea to go back to Section 988 or the IRS can say weāre ācherry pickingā trading results.
But I have found nothing on the web regarding tax treatment for non-currency derivative contracts. The USA really has some bizarre regulations on these OTC products. Apparently, the SEC banned āCFDsā many years ago. But SEC jurisdiction applies to securities not commodities, so regulators felt it necessary to push additional legislation into Dodd-Frank eliminating margin trading on āOTC commodity productsā. Probably the closest thing to a āCFDā offered in the USA is One Chicago āsingle stock futuresā. Those get reported on FM 8949 (not FM 6781).
For what itās worth, I have been reporting currency trades as Section 988 (FM 1040, line 21), and individual non-currency OTC derivative trades on FM 8949 for the past few years, with no questions from the IRS. But reporting non-currency derivatives on FM 8949 was just my idea ā unable to find any guidance on that.
Is any of this contrary to what you have heard? Also, what is āpetitionā?
Thank you for responding. Yes, you are right, this time I did get a reasonable response. I was asked to let you know if itās better next week after you upgrade servers this weekend, and I will do that. Strangely enough today I only noticed one brief freeze, whereas yesterday I lost count there were so many.
The reason why we are twitchy about live clients, is that if the demo feed isnāt up to the jobā¦ why would we risk a six figure live account? Itās a matter of confidence. Unfortunately I personally am not in a position to fund an account with you myself, to test.
I will say that we would prefer to stay with you, we have clients who have opened their accounts, and will be ready to fund shortly.
The other concern we have is the spreads, but thatās an entirely different discussion, and can wait for another time.
Again, thank you so much for responding here. Generally speaking the level of communication with Tallinex is excellent.
Yes I agree. And I was looking for an answer of ānoā as anything else would just be a gimmick and would make it apparent that Forex Broker is a market maker (which I already believe anyway based on previous discussion).
Thank you for the excellent information you have presented here.
The Tallinex platform freezes happened frequently for me also. This was shortly after FinFX transferred their US clients to Tallinex and I had continued to use the original trading platform downloaded from FinFX. Then a fellow trader advised me to uninstall MT4ā¦ then re-install MT4 from Tallinexā¦ and most importantlyā¦ install the Talinex MT4 directly to the C:/drive. Do not use the default settings of intstalling MT4 in the program files directory. Create a new folder, for example: C:/My_MT4 and install the platform there.
Since taking this fellow traders advice several months ago, I have had ZERO platform freezes. Apparently, itās a āWindozeā OS issue.
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Thank you for this. However, my several Tallinex platforms are all Tallinex downloads. And yes, I totally agree about installing directly onto C drive.
There is a further post in the moderation queue on this topic. Today I have I think noticed only one brief freeze, yesterday there were many. I have been advised the problem is due to server overload and there will be an upgrade this coming weekend, so hopefully that will solve the issue
Thatās a very helpful piece of advice - Iād be extremely interested to know if it helps anyone else.
I was well aware of the Windows security issues when MT4 gets installed to the Program Files folder, but not that it could cause freezes.
Interesting, I didnāt have any platform freezes yesterdayā¦ literally, Iāve noticed no freezes since re-installing MT4 directly to my C: drive. I hope the upgrade solves the problem for you.