Going offshore to escape the CFTC

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

I am so happy that i didn’t get to try them, i am so close to deposit some money

I have been watching this thread for many years, lost a few passwords and settled on becoming visitor. I have live accounts with Tradersway and LMFX, and since they are the only ones left on our list that offer 1:1000 I try to use them while we still have that option. 3 months ago during news with Tradersway, where an automatic order did not work, I made a profit of $180 combined in 3 separate live accounts which I should not have made if my take profit would have worked. However, they did not substract the extra profit. Overall I have been happy with them and have withdrawn steady profit over the year.

I also use LMFX however they do not charge commission on there premium account which has the higher deposit requirement of $50, so I do wonder if that means they are a market maker? And not ecn. However the LMFX indicators are more accurate then Tradersway in my experience. I have opened a Finpro account due to the good reviews I have seen in this thread. I do think we should monitor and focus a little attention on the deposit and withdrawal methods and fee changes for US resident with the remaining brokers bc it seems to me, hiking fees for wire transfers and hassling banks for doing business with these brokers is also part of the strategy to shut us out.

Thank you all for your contributions, there is no other resource on this topic anywhere else. Keep it up.

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That’s why i use Bitcoin for deposits and withdrawals. Have never had a problem.

I have withdrawn profit using bitcoin with Tradersway and you are right it is an easy process only problem I see with that right now is the fluctuations in bitcoin prices you can lose a bunch of money while you wait for the transaction to go through and finally get bitcoin converted into US dollar to use.

Okay just wanted to say that I did get a response for finpro trading which was wholly unsatisfactory they claim service times were 50 milliseconds in that range I pointed out to them that they were delaying our trades through a front-end aggregator most likely. Their attitude was pretty arrogant and condescending so I’m waiting for them to respond. What they did, during the course of their investigation, was to screw up one of the accounts that was fast and now made it equally slow with the other account. I requested they fix both accounts to execute much faster. So finpro trading support? … not impressed. They did not even bother to inform me that they were looking into the matter. Just messed up. I am putting a hold on adding money to FinProTrading until we get a decent support response.

Hyperscalper

I’m thinking you’re drastically over inflating the issue. You can either pay wire fees are pay costs associated with using BTC. That’s the reality with dealing with offshore brokers. You can’t have your cake and eat it too imo.

Interesting, are you using a trade bot? Is that why you need faster executions?

Hi Cryptosurf,

Well, I’m sure you know that SPEED does not guarantee winning at the
Retail Trading game. Along with speed, we also want consistency of
latency but, again, speed isn’t what makes money. It’s very difficult, for
example, to try to “chase” price with low latencies, and expect to win…

I’m developing trading over several different types of timeframe. And
one of those approaches does use BOTs, which I think of as “nibbling”
to exploit imbalances in relative Currency Strengths, or Order Flow
anomalies, where speed and precision are the keys to success.

Also, if I want a standard lot position in a Currency Pair, which is 100,000
units, I prefer to do that in several or even up to a dozen individual positions
which, taken together, give me a favorable VWAP. So, if you want to
close a dozen positions (which together constitute your overall position),
then that means closing a dozen or dozens of positions as quickly as
possible.

Closing them one at a time (with one instance of a MetaTrader terminal process)
would take 6 seconds, if closure time (which is a Market order) is 500 msecs.
If closure time is 100 msecs, then it takes only 1.2 seconds to serially close
a dozen positions. But I am using the NJ4X framework, which allows us to
allocate “pools” of MetaTrader 4 “terminal.exe” processes which are allocated
requests to execute “in parallel” or concurrently. This also helps improve response
times for multi-trade global positions in a single Currency Pair. (MT4 is synchronous
in its Order Processing).

Another big issue for me is that I use what I call “Virtual Limit Orders”. Basically,
instead of placing normal Limit Orders (which will trigger immediately), the idea
is to “simulate” a Limit Order which is “smart”. It will respect the pricing constraints
of normal Limit Order but, when Price is moving against and through the limit
price, it will NOT trigger until the “price run” is finished, and THEN it will trigger
using a Market Order. So this is a “latency sensitive” operation which almost
always gives “price improvement” over a normal Limit Order, and relies upon
“run length analyzers” as part of its behavior.

Having said all of this, if you followed down this far, Latency doesn’t Win in Trading,
all by itself. If your Analytics are no good, then Speed won’t save you !! So that’s
why low Latency and Consistency are so important, even though it is only one end
of the “trading spectrum” which does usually involve a BOT process inside the
Trade Manager. These are not EA’s inside a single MT4 terminal, because we
are using MT4 only as the “lowest layer” of execution, where “the rubber meets
the road” to give us broker portability. The BOTs are operating at a much higher
level, and can be much more complex than what can be written in MQL. Instead,
the BOTs are written in Java.

Developers who want to do this should seriously consider using the NJ4X.com
framework, which is licensed at a very reasonable cost. You’d need to be a Java
or a C# programmer to use such a framework, and it’s not designed for “arbitrage”
but it can then simultaneously connect to multiple MT4/5 brokerages. Where this
has value for me, is that I create a Master/Slave structure, where Trades in the Master
account are immediately reflected in a handful of Slave accounts, with the lowest
possible latency. The Slave’s responses depend upon quickly detecting the positions
of the Master, and then immediately replicating those individual trade positions in
ALL of the Slaves, in parallel, within a multi-threaded process, via the NJ4X.com
API framework. Just a fast version of Trade copying, but it allows me to
create some money for associates, as a “side effect” of Trades in the Master
account. The Slaves “scale up or down” the Lot Sizes of the Master account
but, otherwise, they replicate all positions.

All of this happens across 28 Currency Pairs, so we can have a situation where
we have trades in ALL pairs, each of which has multiple-entries; and also trying
to replicate all of that into Slave accounts… Again, latency and consistency is
needed but, in the case of Slaves, they may be in a different broker than the Master, with
its own pricing and latency characteristics…

hyperscalper

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With Tradersway the minimum fee for withdrawing using wire transfer is $150+whatever your bank charges($35 in my case), and with LMFX they don’t charge any fees for the wire withdrawal on there end, which is good bc LMFX does not support bitcoin deposits or withdrawals and neteller, skrill and all others like them do not service US customers.
Tradersway does support bitcoin deposits and withdrawals and it’s taken 4-5 days for the bitcoin to show up in my wallet from Tradersway. I figure some may find it useful to know what the costs are as they decide on a broker.

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4-5 days? Never had that experience, more like 4-5hrs at most once initiated.

Yeah, if it took that long, probably too small bitcoin miner’s fee was used in the transaction. Similar thing happened to me last year when I liquidated my Profiforex account (no longer on Clint’s list). Took 3 days to receive. Turns out the jackasses put ZERO miner’s fee. These days you try sending a transaction without the fee and it’s going nowhere forever. Anyway, some of these brokers may have been slow to catch on to include a proper size miners fee.

So are you using TurnkeyForex.com directly or are you using FinProTrading.com which somebody recently said was an IB to TurnkeyFX ? We are finalizing choice of broker, and not sure that should be an IB. Any thoughts or advice on that? Both of these brokers use the MT4 srv file: TurnkeyFX-Live.srv . What we’re looking for is “no B.S. support”. Advice gratefully received, please … :slight_smile:

hyperscalper

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Hi

After few months of testing LMFX, FINPRO, TW, and Oanda( i know do not hate me, but we had to try them just to see) with our EA that trades around the news.
We had our EA running for few weeks on all the brokers(LIVE FEEDs) listed above on VPS recommended by HyperScalper from Amsterdam.

LMFX rejected orders 50% of the time(off quotes error). We took our money and ran quick.

Finpro was not bad in the beginning lots of ticks. Then they started freezing around news 1 min, 2 min, one time during fed meting 45 min. We are also done with them.

TW we have had accounts with them for over 6 months. They still have those 10-15 sec freezes during huge news only, and they had those incidents where the prices were incorrect, but still not bad in comparing with the other brokers. We are keeping accounts with TW for now.

Now Oanda. I have to say so far we are pretty amazed with them. They used to be bad around the news and their spreads would go insanely high.
Now we got better fills with Oanda than SHITPRO I mean FInPro.
And Oanda does not freeze at all around the news. We decided to keep accounts with them for now. I will keep you posted, this might change in few weeks.

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Hello @HyperScalper

I have been reading about FinPro and TurnkeyFX and the potential relationship between them, so I have done some research on them over last week. Here is what I found

TurnkeyFX.com (its NOT turnkeyforex.com but TURNKEYFX.COM) seems to be the parent company of FinProTrading, so essentially its owned by TurnkeyFX and they are using finpro to offer services to retail clients while TurnkeyFX only deals with institutional clients. Turnkeyforex.com on the other hand looks like an IB of either finpro or of turnkeyfx (they kept the similar name to create ambiguity)

Here is how I came to the conclusion that FinPro is in fact turnkeyfx:

Website address on FinPro’s MT4 is that of turnkeyfx.com and not that of turnkeyforex.com

Contact Address of TurnkeyFX is the same as FinProtrading (79 college road)

Phone number of TurnkeyFX is +44 02 8091 3467 (as given in the footer of the website) and phone number of finpro is +44 20 3289 3467 . Take a close look at the last 4 digits of the phone number, they are EXACTLY the same :wink:

Here is how I infered that turnkeyforex is not the parent company

  1. The back office of Turnkeyforex is exactly the same as that of another broker vtsgold.com
  2. FinPro has more account types and account currencies than any one of these brokers (obviously is they were an IB they can not have more account types or the account currencies than their parent broker)
  3. FinPro offers Bitcoin direct integration which neither one of the others offer
  4. If you compare published commissoin on all these websites, FinPro tends to have lower commissions
  5. Support hours on FinPro is 24 hours while that on these websites are NOT

I also read on TurnkeyFX website that they have FCA approved liquidity BUT they dont cater to reatil clients. So I think the way they are structured is that turnkeyfx.com does not take reatil clients but have the required licenses and act as a B2B provider and FinPro is their entity that flows that over to the retail clients.

Now, these are just an observations and not a confirmation by either finpro or by turnkeyfx so I will leave that upto you to make the judgement call :slight_smile:

@HyperScalper , Just a side note and based purely on my own experience. I personally think FinPro is far better than any other broker I have ever tried and the biggest reason why I say that is their client support. They are always available and always willing to help.

Sometimes, there can be things lost in translation (for example you can say Hello is 10 different tones ranging from cute to arrogant BUT you can only write Hello in one tone). Also, between many support agents, it is possible that the support agent that you are dealing with is different from that of mine. You might want to ask them to get on phone with you and they will call you back. BUT please DO tell them that you are going to be very Technical on the call BECAUSE not many clients will have the kind of experience that you have and you wont be easily satisfied if they dont have a super technical guy on the other side :slight_smile:

I dont intend to be their brand ambasador but I speak from my experience and in the world of messed up forex brokers, they definitely are doing a very good job.

I also have been looking at other forex brokers expecially the one who does BTC denominated accounts and has the same or better spreads than finpro. I’m currently testing a few of them and will share my findings once I have more experience with them.

Hello Marcin, I hope you are aware that Oanda is a market maker and they clearly state that on their website. So essentially your gains can be their losses (there is definitely a conflict of interest). Have you tried any other broker outside of these three ? Please share your finding if you have for the benefit of all members of this thread

Thanks for looking into all of this.

Website domain names can easily be changed, of course.

EDIT: OK, I accept that FinProTrading.com is the “retail arm” to
liquidity provided by TurnkeyFX (non retail). Your thorough analysis
convinces me of that.

Downloading the MT4 platform from either FinProTrading.com or
TurnkeyForex.com (TurnkeyFX.com offers download, but link does
not work… seems an old website…) yields TurnkeyFX-Live.srv
as the MT4 server file, which is the same backend service.

This, despite the fact that their customer facing chat at TurnkeyForex.com
said they have nothing to do with FinProTrading.com.

So, are both of these IB’s which are using TurnkeyFX’s backend services?
EDIT: So I am guessing that TurnkeyForex.com is an IB to TurnkeyFX.
The MT4 TurnkeyFX-Live.srv backend.

By the way, we are seeing “decent” turnaround times for Market Orders
in MT4 in the 125 millisecond range, most of the time.

hyperscalper

Very surprised that you are reporting FinProTrading (TurnkeyFX-Live.srv)
experiencing “freezes”. I’m only talking about the 28 major Forex pairs,
and have never seen anything resembling “freeze” on FinProTrading.com’s
backend (TurnkeyFX-Live.srv) in MT4.

You don’t say what instruments you are looking at here… Helps to be
specific :slight_smile:

hyperscalper

Thanks for that info !

You don’t say what your EA is trading here, and I can’t square your results
against what we see from FinProTrading strictly on the 28 Major Forex pairs.

And, of course, for Live trading, the Lot Size of an Order will greatly affect the
probability of getting an Off Quote Rejection from a Liquidity Provider, very
much especially during New Event Scalping ! I mean, if you’re trading 10
Standard Lots, say, and are getting Off Quotes events, I’d say that would be
"normal" during News Event Volatility…

Maybe give us more info on what Instruments you are trading, and just how your
EA gets involved during heavy volatility ?.. For my own News Event Trading, I look
at the SLOPE of the Currency Strength Valuation indicator Trend Lines lines
in the hours or days prior to the event,
and take positions PRIOR TO the News Event before the Volatility, so good pricing
is still available. Clearly Liquidity Providers will widen spreads during News
Volatility, at least.

hyperscalper

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What broker are you seeing those kind of turnaround times with ? It seems as good as it can get unless you are cross connected with brokers server over a LAN because that is the only way I think you will ever consistently hit lower than 100 ms latency