• Please try to select the correct prefix when making a new thread in this folder.

    Discuss is for general discussions of a financial company or issues related to companies.

    Info is for things like "Has anyone heard of Company X?" or "Is Company X legit or not?"

    Compare is for things like "Which of these 2 (or more) companies is best?"

    Searching is for things like "Help me pick a broker" or "What's the best VPS out there for trading?"

    Problem is for reporting an issue with a company. Please don't just scream "CompanyX is a scam!" It is much more useful to say "I can't withdraw my money from Company X" or "Company Y is not honoring their refund guarantee" in the subject line.
    Keep Problem discussions civil and lay out the facts of your case. Your goal should be to get your problem resolved or reported to the regulators, not to see how many insults you can put into the thread.

    More info coming soon.

Problem Crunch time! My case with ICMarkets

I am having an issue with a company
Rahman, you know as well as myself that those spread graphs were taken from myfxbook. I used them as a reference rate. We cannot collect data from them from March 2015 although you are welcome to try. That data is available to anyone and you could have and should have collected it yourself when the stop out occurred if you were so convinced something wrong happened at that time. Our support staff who you dealt with didn't collect it at the time and this is reflective of their inexperience rather than them not willing to cooperate or hide facts from you.

Anyone reading this thread should visit the myfxbook page provided through the link below to see how USDCAD spreads widen during news. A comparison can easily be done with our competitors at the same time and it will be seen that we are not unique, all brokers spreads widen during the news.

Real IC Markets USDCAD Spread | Myfxbook

We have provided tick data from our platforms and our data is as good as any of our direct competitors here in Australia. You are yet to provide any data suggest that our rates differed from our competitors.
 
In the other cases I have checked on here the trader will contest that the broker was wrong because of reasons x, y, z. In this case you are saying we are wrong because of something you cannot prove and that is perfectly reasonable, logical and that has happened on several other occasions on your account at IC Markets. I cannot see how this stop out is different to any of your other stop outs.
 
Rahman, you know as well as myself that those spread graphs were taken from myfxbook. I used them as a reference rate. We cannot collect data from them from March 2015 although you are welcome to try. That data is available to anyone and you could have and should have collected it yourself when the stop out occurred if you were so convinced something wrong happened at that time. Our support staff who you dealt with didn't collect it at the time and this is reflective of their inexperience rather than them not willing to cooperate or hide facts from you.
Anyone reading this thread should visit the myfxbook page provided through the link below to see how USDCAD spreads widen during news. A comparison can easily be done with our competitors at the same time and it will be seen that we are not unique, all brokers spreads widen during the news.
Real IC Markets USDCAD Spread | Myfxbook
We have provided tick data from our platforms and our data is as good as any of our direct competitors here in Australia. You are yet to provide any data suggest that our rates differed from our competitors.

Ahhh okkk…so at last a public acknowledgement that ICM Support staff…i.e. Tony Phung, Elena Bushueva, and Support Team Leader Sung Choi…are not experience enough to collect the critical and essential charts to show me. So, ICM have inexperience personnel to look into and to solve their client’s (don’t forget I was a client too) problems and issues all these years???? No wonder there have also been so many “inexperience” replies to ICMarket other clients issues and problems.
Most (maybe all of them…will have to check back) emails were with copy to you, Angus Walker - Head of Trading Desk and ICM CEO Andrew Budzinski and yet you, with vast experiences in the forex brokerage business (ICM started in year 2007) knowing that ICM have inexperience Support staff, including inexperience Support Team Leader, would not intervene and instruct ICM inexperience staff handling my case back in early Mar 2015 to go retrieve those critical and irrefutable tick charts to prove to me once and for all that the widen spread on that particular date & time happened on other ASIC regulated brokers too and not a conjecture of ICM insistence that such an event did exist?

You seem to forget that I am a Trader and NOT a broker and so have limited knowledge of some aspects of the brokerage business…e.g. where to get comparison tick charts of different brokers if I suspect my bucketshop broker pull a false spread on my trading account. By the way, I forgot to thank you for showing me how and where to get comparison tick charts should my present brokers pull a false spread widening on my account.

So, here we are then and, without those critical and essential tick comparison charts, how can we have irrefutable proof that my account was stop/wipe-out by a wide enough spread which happened only at ICM side and not anywhere else?
And to compound the problem, ICM have assigned inexperience staff to handle my (and other ICM clients too) issues/problems (past & present) which obviously puts the authenticity of what they have been feeding me/us as untrustworthy and unreliable.
Now that opens up a whole different can of worms!
 
In the other cases I have checked on here the trader will contest that the broker was wrong because of reasons x, y, z. In this case you are saying we are wrong because of something you cannot prove and that is perfectly reasonable, logical and that has happened on several other occasions on your account at IC Markets. I cannot see how this stop out is different to any of your other stop outs.


Now that we have established and confirmed by a most senior personnel from ICM that ICM do employ inexperienced staff, perhaps there might be other “inexperience staff "carrying inexperience activities at ICM like as in the following case ASIC vs Enfinium (forex broker):

ASIC was concerned Enfinium failed to have adequate risk management systems, in particular, controls on its Meta Trader 4 (MT4) trading platform and a plug in device known as the 'Virtual Dealer.'
A function of the Virtual Dealer is ability to add a trade execution delay of between 1 to 10 seconds. An execution delay added by the Virtual Dealer could disadvantage clients to the benefit of the broker, if markets moved against the client during any period of delay.
ASIC's investigation found that during 2010-2013 (Relevant Period), the Virtual Dealer had been changed on 271 occasions; however Enfinium kept no records of those changes.
Certain Enfinium employees had 'Manager' access with special rights for administering MT4 including editing and deleting clients' open positions which, according to the MT4 Administrator User Guide was potentially dangerous.
ASIC was concerned Enfinium's risk management system was inadequate because:
g. Enfinium did not maintain records which recorded the configuration of the Virtual Dealer
h. Enfinium did not monitor the use of the Virtual Dealer, or persons who had access to the Virtual Dealer
i. there was no training for persons who had the ability to modify the Virtual Dealer
j. employees of Enfinium had access to enter, modify, close and delete orders on MT4 without secondary authorisation
k. there was no monitoring of trades placed through 'Manager', and
l. the Virtual Dealer and 'Manager' access were not identified as risks in Enfinium's risk register.


This is getting more educational than a solution to my simple issue with ICMarkets!

Incidentally, I have email exchanges with Metaquotes and the person was most helpful and educational and even wish me "good luck with your broker" :cool:
 
Last edited:
Out of curiosity, I checked back on account 317165 All History (attachment) and….wow & Lody-lord….I seems to have lost quite a numbers of clams on this one ICM account (I think I have 5 or 6 of them with this broker) alone.

Now, on ICM own admission, that they do employ inexperienced staff, it makes me to wonder how many of the other 13 odd account stop-outs (on this account 317165 and many more stop-outs on other ICM accounts too) were not my fault but some inexperience ICM staff tinkling away at their back-office to cause some of those account stop-out?

Could be all because of my fault, but that does make me to wonder!
 

Attachments

  • Account 317165 All History up to 13-Aug-2015.jpg
    Account 317165 All History up to 13-Aug-2015.jpg
    233.2 KB · Views: 3
Last edited:
Ahhh okkk…so at last a public acknowledgement that ICM Support staff…i.e. Tony Phung, Elena Bushueva, and Support Team Leader Sung Choi…are not experience enough to collect the critical and essential charts to show me. So, ICM have inexperience personnel to look into and to solve their client’s (don’t forget I was a client too) problems and issues all these years???? No wonder there have also been so many “inexperience” replies to ICMarket other clients issues and problems.

Rahman, all companies and industry hire inexperienced staff. In the world of forex these staff start in support most of the time and then work their way up. The staff you have referenced all had more than enough experience to deal with yourself. None of them could have foreseen the drama that would unfold because the information we provide to all clients and that I have reposted on this thread wouldn't be enough to satisfy you. Experience would have taught them to extinguish a small flame before it spirals out of control. In other words, they should have gone the distance to appease our concerns at the start so that it never got to this point. Tick data has nothing to do with it.

As it stands the information provided by IC Markets and myself on this thread would win a case in FOS, I would confidently take it to court. What would you take to court? You can't take theories and ideas,you need evidence, something you still havent provided.

Most (maybe all of them…will have to check back) emails were with copy to you, Angus Walker - Head of Trading Desk and ICM CEO Andrew Budzinski and yet you, with vast experiences in the forex brokerage business (ICM started in year 2007) knowing that ICM have inexperience Support staff, including inexperience Support Team Leader, would not intervene and instruct ICM inexperience staff handling my case back in early Mar 2015 to go retrieve those critical and irrefutable tick charts to prove to me once and for all that the widen spread on that particular date & time happened on other ASIC regulated brokers too and not a conjecture of ICM insistence that such an event did exist?

Again, our support staff have more than enough experience to deal with support related queries on the front line.

So, here we are then and, without those critical and essential tick comparison charts, how can we have irrefutable proof that my account was stop/wipe-out by a wide enough spread which happened only at ICM side and not anywhere else?
And to compound the problem, ICM have assigned inexperience staff to handle my (and other ICM clients too) issues/problems (past & present) which obviously puts the authenticity of what they have been feeding me/us as untrustworthy and unreliable.
Now that opens up a whole different can of worms!

Rahman, these are not critical to your case and again, you had the ability to get this data from the myfxbook website at the time.

You won't accept any of the information provided thus far so I'm going to provide trade confirmations from the bridge and Integral. This will debunk all the rubbish you just posted about virtual dealers.
 
Now that we have established and confirmed by a most senior personnel from ICM that ICM do employ inexperienced staff, perhaps there might be other “inexperience staff "carrying inexperience activities at ICM like as in the following case ASIC vs Enfinium (forex broker):

ASIC was concerned Enfinium failed to have adequate risk management systems, in particular, controls on its Meta Trader 4 (MT4) trading platform and a plug in device known as the 'Virtual Dealer.'
A function of the Virtual Dealer is ability to add a trade execution delay of between 1 to 10 seconds. An execution delay added by the Virtual Dealer could disadvantage clients to the benefit of the broker, if markets moved against the client during any period of delay.:


Out of curiosity, I checked back on account 317165 All History (attachment) and….wow & Lody-lord….I seems to have lost quite a numbers of clams on this one ICM account (I think I have 5 or 6 of them with this broker) alone.

Now, on ICM own admission, that they do employ inexperienced staff, it makes me to wonder how many of the other 13 odd account stop-outs (on this account 317165 and many more stop-outs on other ICM accounts too) were not my fault but some inexperience ICM staff tinkling away at their back-office to cause some of those account stop-out?

Could be all because of my fault, but that does make me to wonder!

By providing these trade confirmation we are dismissing any notion that we use virtual dealer.
 
Finally my explanation on why you were really stopped out, why this was done without warning and what appeared to be seconds.

Since I took over this case I have stressed that the cause of the stop out was because of the size of the gross exposure relative to the accounts equity. Wide spreads are not the cause, these are simply incidental. In other words the account was on the brink of blow up, it just needed a market event in the form of a rally in the USDCAD or spread widening to speed up the process.

Gross exposure is the total of long and short positions. In Rahman’s case this was 2.9 lots long and 3.1 lots short for a total of 6 lots open exposure on USDCAD. Gross exposure is important as the bid ask rates in the platform will determine the unrealised PnL on all open positions. This means that when spreads widen the long and short positions will become worth less and quickly diminish the equity in an account.

The 6 lots gross exposure is equal to 600,000 USD. At the time of the stop out Rahman’s equity was approximately $220. This means the exposure on Rahman’s account was 2727 times greater than his equity. Obviously this kind of exposure doesn’t give the account a fighting chance since it only requires a modest increase in spreads to send the account into negative equity.

In the graph below you can see the bid/ask and unrealised PnL on Rahman’s account between 16:59-17:01, I have included a table in the top right of the graph so you can see the effect of the widening spreads from 16:59:50 to 16:59:51 (one second) where the account went from 284% margin level to a low of -36%. Over this second spreads increased from 2.8 pips to a max of 7.5 pips.

If an account goes from 284% to -36% margin level in a second then it is not reasonable to expect the platform to provide a margin call warning before any kind of stop out of open positions occurs. Both would have to happen at the same time to prevent the account going into a large negative and the client owing the broker money. Case in point would be the SNB drama in January this year.

View attachment 20619

Once the first liquidation occurred at 16:59:51 the server was correct in continuing to liquidate positions as the account had a negative equity and a growing used margin amount as hedges were unwound.

You've confirmed what I was just thinking but wasn't sure if I was reading it right or not!6 lots on a USD $5,500 account is just suicidal trading,you would have to be the luckiest trader in the world to be able to keep that account open.As a professional trader I can tell you that even two lots would be really pushing it with that margin,if you are so convinced that there was some shady dealings going on why don't you set up a demo account with the same margin for trading and 6 lots and see if you can keep it open again?
I guarantee you that 99 times out of 100 you are going to get stopped out,in fact in my book it will be 100 for 100!
 
This is a ridiculous thread,there is no case to answer here,6 lots on an account of not even USD $6,000 is ridiculously over-leveraged,there is only going to be one outcome and that is a stop out!
 
Rahman, all companies and industry hire inexperienced staff. In the world of forex these staff start in support most of the time and then work their way up. The staff you have referenced all had more than enough experience to deal with yourself. None of them could have foreseen the drama that would unfold because the information we provide to all clients and that I have reposted on this thread wouldn't be enough to satisfy you. Experience would have taught them to extinguish a small flame before it spirals out of control. In other words, they should have gone the distance to appease our concerns at the start so that it never got to this point. Tick data has nothing to do with it.

As it stands the information provided by IC Markets and myself on this thread would win a case in FOS, I would confidently take it to court. What would you take to court? You can't take theories and ideas,you need evidence, something you still havent provided.

Again, our support staff have more than enough experience to deal with support related queries on the front line.

Rahman, these are not critical to your case and again, you had the ability to get this data from the myfxbook website at the time.

You won't accept any of the information provided thus far so I'm going to provide trade confirmations from the bridge and Integral. This will debunk all the rubbish you just posted about virtual dealers.


“Rahman, all companies and industry hire inexperienced staff. In the world of forex these staff start in support most of the time and then work their way up. The staff you have referenced all had more than enough experience to deal with yourself. None of them could have foreseen the drama that would unfold because the information we provide to all clients and that I have reposted on this thread wouldn't be enough to satisfy you. Experience would have taught them to extinguish a small flame before it spirals out of control. In other words, they should have gone the distance to appease our concerns at the start so that it never got to this point. Tick data has nothing to do with it. “
Yes, and as a matter of course, fresh graduates need to start somewhere to climb up the corporate ladder. So, at ICM, even Support Team Leader (i.e. Sung Choi) does not have sufficient experiences????
What about yourself? You (and CEO Andrew Budzinski) received copies of my email correspondences to ICM Support staff and when ICM incompetent Support Team Leader ended his last email with:
Mar 25, 13:56
Dear Rahman,
At this point I have exhausted all the resources available to provide you with further information about your trades which includes journal logs directly from our trade servers, data on floating P/L, equity, margin levels at the time of stop outs as well as days prior. We have also mentioned that during the time of the stopouts there were key announcements, and it was this in combination of not having enough equity in your account that caused the liquidation to happen.
Perhaps it would be best if you could cite from any of the information provided to you, what you disagree with and I will see if there is any explanation available or further information required.
Kind Regards,
Sung Choi | Support Team Leader | IC Markets

…………and my parting reply:

To: Support Team
CC: Andrew Budzinski
Angus Walker
Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 1:23 PM

Hi Sung Choi,
Yes indeed, ICMarkets seems to have exhausted their explanation on how a trading account can suddenly get wiped-out without any margin call, followed by progressive forced closure of largest losing positions, and eventual stop-out.

We are going in circles over this and getting nowhere but wasting both our time. I will just have to get some clarification in other venues.
Best regards
RahmanSL

…which clearly imply that I was not happy with the explanations provided by inexperience ICM Support staff to my issues. But then why didn’t you, Angus Walker with over 15 years experiences, would not and did not jump in to advice ICM inexperience Support staff on how to address ICM’s clients unresolved issues so that the unresolved issues can be, in your words:to extinguish a small flame before it spirals out of control. In other words, they should have gone the distance to appease our concerns at the start so that it never got to this point.”? Was it because ICM was hoping the unresolved issues would go away and be forgotten?
At that point in time, you could very easily defuse the issues with what you have so quickly provided me recently with comparison tick charts from different ASIC brokers to prove beyond any doubt that the spread widening on the USD/CAD did occur at the material date & time and my issues would have ended there and then and we would not be having this dispute in a very public forum. So, YES, the comparison tick charts from ICM and different brokers is very relevant and crucial to prove ICM’s claim that spread widening did occurred and not only within the confine of ICM back-office server.
Without the vital and crucial comparison tick charts from different brokers, ICM’s claim of spread widening is pure conjecture and supposition and, as such, to be treated as such.


By employing inexperience person to a senior position of Support Leader (Sung Choi), that clearly demonstrates ICM lack of professionalism and low importance & priorities to their client’s issues and problems.


As it stands the information provided by IC Markets and myself on this thread would win a case in FOS, I would confidently take it to court. What would you take to court? You can't take theories and ideas,you need evidence, something you still havent provided.”
I am not on trial here but ICM reputation and business ethics are. I have already asked you at least 3 times:
"Is that all you have for the irrefutable proof that widen spread on USD/CAD did occurred on the date and time which I have been asking for since 5/Mar/2015 from ICM Support (Tony Phung, Elena Bushueva, and Sung Choi), and then from you?
Do you/ICM have anymore "irrefutable" evidence and information to submit/present?

Once again, IF you are done providing irrefutable proofs and additional information in defense against my “lies”, then I will humbly start/submit my presentation.


“Again, our support staff have more than enough experience to deal with support related queries on the front line.”
Really? Yet on your own admission here, at this very public forum with over 1,000 views, ICM Support staff do not have the necessary experiences to adequately and, in your own post#51 & words: “Our support staff who you dealt with didn't collect it at the time and this is reflective of their inexperience..”

“Rahman, these are not critical to your case and again, you had the ability to get this data from the myfxbook website at the time.”
On the contrary, the comparison tick charts from ICM and different ASIC brokers are crucial to my issue. I/we know and cannot dispute that margin call, forced closures of largest to smallest losing positions and stop-out will occur when and if account level falls below the broker’s required margin level (in ICM case, it’s 80%). The crucial part is whether the spread widening did indeed occurred as ICM has claimed all along and, even more crucial, is whether the spread widening also occurred on other ASIC regulated brokers too and not only in ICM back-office server.
Without and in the absence of these crucial comparison tick charts, it all becomes supposition and conjectures by ICM.


“You won't accept any of the information provided thus far so I'm going to provide trade confirmations from the bridge and Integral. This will debunk all the rubbish you just posted about virtual dealers.”
ICM can provide whatever paperwork they like, but without any comparison tick chart with other ASIC regulated brokers to prove whether the spread widening did indeed occurred as ICM has claimed all along and, even more crucial, whether the spread widening also happened on other ASIC regulated brokers at the material date & time and not only in ICM back-office server.

“By providing these trade confirmation we are dismissing any notion that we use virtual dealer.”
Only ICM people know the truth to that.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top