MerkelFX.com Review

Hi folks, just wanted to provide an update regarding the refund situation outlined below. As you can see, my original update was on August 6th, 2009. As of today August 19th, I still don't have a check from Brian Merkel. And remember, I have been waiting on this since July 2nd. Brian Merkel continues to tell me that he is having the bank issue the check each time that I contact him by email, but that he just cannot understand why the bank has not sent me the check yet. Several of my trading friends from FPA and the trading rooms and forums I am part of have been pushing me to open a Scam alert with FPA and with FXCM. This is something that I almost did in the first few days after I found out what Brian had done, but I am going to hold out a little while longer and see if I can get the refund, as all I want is my money back and if he does give a refund, then it is not a scam. Also, I am planning to post in a thread on FPA the entirety of the email string between myself and Brian so that all of you can see how patient I have been on this matter and so you can see Brian's responses for yourself from the very first email where I reported to Brian that he had traded my account beyond where he was authorized to. Also, I have contacted by several people asking me why Brian's website reflects a different (better) result for June than what I achieved and I have not looked into it in detail, but I will and I will post my statement here on FPA if necessary. Also, I have been contacted by some saying that Brian has achieved an unbelievable result in July to make up for what happened in May and June. I don't have any information on that, but will say that when you see my statement posted out here, you can then judge for yourself the amount of leverage that was used on each trade and draw your own conclusions. Lastly, if you don't think that FPA has some credibility in the trading community, just listen to this....today when I talked with FXCM just to inquire as to the process required to report fraud, I told them about this info on FPA, and they said that if I decided to file a complaint, then they would want the links to the FPA reviews that I posted as well and even that they want the voice mail that Brian sent me when we first got started...I was pretty impressed as I believed that FXCM would not care, but they did. They just told me that because I had signed the LPA, they could not get my money back even given that he had the 15% guarantee, but that they could end their relationship with him and prevent him from trading managed accounts there. I will give another update in a week or so and let you know if I have my check. I am now going to send Brian an email every few days that I have not gotten the check so that the lag in time diminishes.

2009-08-06 No rating Hi, I traded with Brian for the month of June. Unfortunately, I lost a little over 40% of my investment. I thought it was a good time to enter because in May he had a loss of 14% and given that his historical high drawdown was not much higher than that, I thought it would be a good time to jump in. But as I said my $10,000.00 investment was worth a little less than $6000 when the dust settled.

When I got started with Brian, he had a policy in place which stated that if a traders capital got into a drawdown of 15%, that he would immediately contact the trader to determine if the trader wanted to continue or not and that he would discontinue trading until he got approval from the investor.

However, I was never contacted when the drawdown had reached / exceeded the 15% threshold and he continued to trade my account until I lost 40%. Fortunately I went to check on my account and saw that I lost 40% and immediately contacted FXCM to ask them to discontinue the limited power of attorney on the account.

However, upon contacting Brian about this issue, Brian immediately agreed to return the difference between the 40% that I did lose, and the 15% that I would have lost had he called me (I would not have given permission to continue trading given the loss in the previous month because this would have totaled nearly a 30% total drawdown). Also, just as an FYI, Brian is no longer offering this 15% drawdown contact policy and removed it from the front page of his website in early July.

Brian agreed to send me a check for $2,819.00. He asked me to verify my mailing address for him. That was on July 2nd. According to additional emails that we have shared since then, he did set up for his bank to send me a check through bill pay, but that check was never sent for some reason. On July 28 he was resending it "right now" and said that I "should have it very quickly". However, I am still waiting as of today (August 6th, 2009) for that check to arrive.

I will provide an update soon on what happens with my refund.

The website has been having a lot of down time this week due to our web host having problems. I am in the process of changing to a new one. Please be aware that the site may not be accessible throughout the next couple of days.

Thank You,
Brian Merkel

Still seems like there are email issues or poor customer service. I was interested in this site but have not received answers to my questions that I submitted through the site and to the email address provided.

The dates in Jessica Vitale's review don't add-up!

Review Moderation Team Note: Jessica's dates are January, February, March, and April of 2008, with her current balance as of March 2009. Assuming that Brian Merkle was running this service from January of 2008, we don't see any discrepancy.

Hello everyone,
It has come to my attention that some of the emails I replied to may not have been received. Apparently there was a problem with the outgoing mail server. My email problems are now 100% resolved.

If you sent me an email recently and did not receive a response, please send another.

Thanks,
Brian Merkel

I opened my account with MerkelFX on Jan 17th 2008 with $40,000. The original plan was to go in together with a couple friends but they all pulled out. It ran into some trouble pretty quickly, in February I got a call from Brian informing me that my account had received a 15% draw down and he needed my ok before he would continue trading it. I found it surprising that he would ask permission like this, but I did like that he did it. He explains it as kind of a permanent stop loss on top of everything.

I was pretty worried about continuing but he assured me that this is a very rare occurrence and he was confident the losses would be recouped quickly. I gave him the ok to continue trading my account. By the end of march my account was almost at 48k. At the end of April I was at 72k. As of right now, my balance is currently over $135,000. I never expected gains like this were possible.

This is by far the best investment i've ever made. My friends absolutely hate me everytime I forward the weekly reports out to them. I highly recommend this.

I really appreciate the availability of brian, always willing to answer my questions very promptly. My managed account is up over 100% in about 6 months.

I opened an account with Brian in last october with $22,000. Right now my account balance is just over $36,000. I have no complaints about his service. The gains have been amazing and his customer service has never let me down. Never a missed email or phone call. I'm glad to see him expanding his business and I wish him the best.

I've been having some problems with the web server so I decided I would leave my contact information here in case your unable to access the site.

MerkelFX
2281 Spahr Rd
Xenia, OH 45385

Email: support@merkelfx.com
Phone: 937-478-9667
Fax: 928-447-1223

Google Talk: support@merkelfx.com
AOL Instant Messenger: merkelfx
Yahoo Messenger: merkelfx
MSN Messenger: support@merkelfx.com
Skype: merkelfx
ICQ: 364883402

Great returns since I started with MerkelFX midway through last year.