I’m new to trading, Want to SpreadBet currencies as it seems the best fit for me. Signed up to TradingView and created a Demo Account with Pepperstone. Yesterday I entered a Buy trade on the hourly chart for EURGBP and within the hour my stoploss was hit. No big deal, I’m learning but I checked the chart this morning and it seemed my stop was hit then the market turned around quickly. It felt like the market deliberately dropped to my SL and then rebounded. I wanted to see what other Brokers prices were doing but that drop at that time was not there on their chart. It’s only a demo account so no real loss. Can anybody explain and should I not use Pepperstone?
The usual reason, and one that’s usually not visible on an individual broker’s charts, is that your broker’s spreads were just wide enough to trigger your stop-loss order. Brokers with tighter spreads might well have left the position intact.
But that doesn’t mean you will always lose more with broker A or always have safer positions with broker B.
There is a cpl of other little lessons on top of what Tom mentions.
Gbp/Usd - pound snapped up to prev hr1 high - EG snapped down to prev hr1 low
Lesson is good idea to put a SL outside recent hi/lo
Next lesson is why did this happen - the answer is UK Retail sales numbers were released early this morning and they were better than forecast - thus a knee jerk up on pound
Edit: reason why a knee jerk is that higher retail sales is regarded as inflationary thus diminishing likelihood of rate cuts - reality is the numbers are just a recovery from prev month’s record fall.
The difference with the charts would be forex.com and Pepperstone may have used a different liquidity provider.
This looks quite unusual due to the risk of people being able to have account with Pepperstone and separate account with forex.com and when discrepancies occur people could do an arbitrage trade knowing that normally the pricing should be identical.
This is one of the reasons forex trading is an extremely complex market to trade.
I used Pepperstone a couple of years ago as the spread was very competitive, and no problems occurred unlike IC Markets who twice triggered my S/L this year by more than one point, and could not provide any evidence. of why they triggered a four point price loss at that time.
As to demo accounts, most brokers probably relax the spread/points when providing the outcome. No big deal, there are worse things happening in life…
Also note that with many (most?) brokers, it is the bid and ask price that triggers stop losses. If you are long, you must close at the bid price which is lower than the ask. If this hits the SL, you are stopped out. A horror example of this is eToro, where the spread can sometimes be outrageous and you get stopped out even if no other broker is even close to the price. I got stopped out at insane levels several times before I realized…
