Beware of FinFX!

TarryFaster

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Late last month, October 23rd to be exact, I opened and was manually managing a Sell trade on the EURJPY pair. A few days later, my wife hurt herself and I had to rush her to the local clinic and in the panic process, I overlooked placing a Stop on that trade. Of course, when I came back the Yen was rapidly going north and so I anxiously watched for it to stop and reverse … which it refused to do.

While I had a pretty good balance in my account, I decided to play it safe and add a few thousand. Now my broker for this trade was FinFX.fi and for a couple of years I had been mostly satisfied with them. Granted, they charged commissions on their trades, but their spreads were very tight. Another irritation that I had with them was that they used Moneybonkers/Shrill as their financial intermediary to make deposits.

For several years, back when they still called themselves Moneybookers and before they were known as Skrill, I had several dealings with them … and every one of them were bad. Events like simply not being able to login, misleading website directions, lack of ANY direct or rapid support, slow processing of payments, etc. In fact, one time I had one of their representatives attempt to walk me through making a deposit and she messed up my account so badly, that over the next few days they had to create a whole new account for me.

Anyway, back to making another dreaded deposit into my FinFX trading account. Once again, clicking on the FinFX link to Moneybookers/Skrill proved futile. So, I attempted to login to my Moneybookers/Skrill account directly and move the funds from my bank to Moneybookers/Skrill and then try to “suck” them from Moneybookers/Skrill into my FinFX account. However, after three failed attempts to login to Moneybonkers/Skrill failed, their login page told me that I was banned from future attempts for 24 hours! I attempted to get in touch with Moneybookers/Shrill, using several methods – email, chat, phone, etc., and all attempts never put me in touch with a human who could help.

I contacted FinFX and reported my difficulties with Moneybookers/Skrill, but they simply told me, in so many words, “TOUGH … that's the way we choose to do business!”



It is now about 3 in the morning and the dreaded solid pink bar started to bounce on and off in the bottom of my chart. Now I've blown enough MT4 accounts to know that it was get serious time and since I hadn't been able to make a timely deposit I was forced to rely on doing some hedging, as a last resort.

At that time, my account Balance was about $20,000 and when the pink warning began blinking on and off and not solidly on, my trade was negative by about $14,000 thus with an Equity of about $6,000 as well as a Margin of about $2,400. Using a lot size of 2, which was equal to my open trade, I opened up a buy trade in order to stunt the growth of my negative trade.

Almost instantly, my -$13,636.44 trade was closed! WHAT IN THE HELL HAPPENED? I was stunned and dumbfounded, to say the least! I immediately attempted to get in touch with FinFX, to find out what was going on. Their chat representative told me that since my Margin level had dropped below 100% (actually it went to 99.8%) and their policy was to close trades that dropped below 100%, the trade was closed – EVEN THOUGH I STILL HAD A CASH SURPLUS OF OVER $1,200! During the next few days, through several emails with their representative, they would not yield on policy decision and that I was to just take my loss (their gain), shut up and move on.

SS.jpg

I've since gone through FinFX's website and could find NO mention of their policy of closing trades that fall below the 100% Margin level. Certainly, I would have been more cautious or attempted some other solution(s) (not sure what), had I known what was at stake: $13,636.44 hard earned USD. I have no idea if there was any illegal action, here. Probably not. However, I feel that FinFX could have acted more ethically or less greedy and certainly shown more compassion and concern than their actions related.

I guess that the best I can do is pass along this experience to you, my fellow members of the FPA and hope that you will be leery in your dealings with both FinFX and Moneybonkers/Shrill. Oh, and speaking of Moneybonkers/Shrill, well yesterday – more than a week late – I received an email from them, and they were FINALLY responding for my recent request for help!


Terry Sneller
 
Good idea, thanks!

Their response:

"Dear Terry,

Thank you for your e-mail. We are sorry for your past troubles dealing with Skrill. Please note that we did contact you once we noticed that you had made an unsuccessful deposit and furthermore instructed you how to get hold on Skrill.

The reason why your account hit Stop Out is because you opened 2 lots’ Sell EURUSD position and in that instant your account ran out of margin (= your free margin hit 0 and your margin level % dropped to 100). Please find further details in the e-mail we sent you earlier regarding the Stop Out.

Regarding the margin requirements please see 12th section at https://www.finfx.fi/en/terms-of-use - Furthermore you can check the Stop Out levels at https://www.finfx.fi/en/finfx-trading-account-comparison"

--

My response:

1. They only replied to my complaint regarding Shrill/Moneybonkers BECAUSE (NOT once they noticed) I contacted them to relate the problems I was having making a deposit through Shrill/Moneybonkers. Even their response did not offer a solution, only indicating that they were not going to do anything to help me with my difficulties in making that deposit.

2. Again, my margin level only went to 99.8% which still left over $1,200 cash in my account. At that point in time -- with the initialization of the hedge -- there was not any chance of them losing money. Also, I have had my margin level go as low as 35% with other brokers (like Alpari), so in my opinion their level is unnecessarily (and surprisingly) high. As I indicated above, my hedging maneuver would have "frozen" my Equity/Balance and protected them (and me) even more from the possibility of ANY loss.

3. The links that they provided (above) are NOT accessible from within my account, ONLY outside my account. So FPA member, if you are going to trade with FinFX make sure that you memorize all of their policies BEFORE you open an account -- because they are not accessible to you once you start trading with them!

They say that they are "sorry" -- but not enough to even offer to adjust any part of my hard-earned $13,636.44 loss!

So, I still say, "Beware of FinFX" ... and Shrill/Moneybonkers as well!


Terry
 
Different brokers have different policies on hedged trades. Some don't count them against your available margin, some do.
 
If the company stop out level is at 100%, then there is not issue as your stop out level went below that. As Pharaoh mentioned, different brokers have different policies on hedged trades.

Different brokers has also different stop out levels, which is meant to avoid negative balance which the broker must cover. Some brokers have even 0% stop out level...
 
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