Note that IC Markets has begun to monitor this thread and is looking for quality feedback, so let loose with what you love, hate and wish were improved about the broker; it's all good as long as it's honest!
Hi, just my 2 cents,
I have been trading a DEMO account with this brokerage and I was wondering if many people experience what is called "variation trades" placed in their live accounts, I was looking forward to going live until I experienced this in my demo on 2013-10-25 and that is what kept me at my current brokerage. I have never come across this before. I can see a post left by Richard from Sydney Australia on 2013-11-1 in the review forum of having a $500 loss because of this so called "Variation", anybody else getting these?
I contacted their support and they sent an explanation that did not make sense to me, I will copy and past it here;
"The query regarding Variation –
The ‘Variation’ transactions have occurred on your account as a result of a different swap calculation setting being enabled on certain currency pairs. This occurred instead of the normal swap credit/debit being visible on the position after the rollover today at 23:59:59 platform time.
What is variation?
During the rollover process the profit of all trade positions for a symbol is recalculated using the current prices, after which the financial result of a position (floating profit + swap) is added or deducted from a client's account in a separate balance operation. After that the position profit and swap are cleared, and the position open price is set equal to the current market price.
This simply means that the position is not closed and reopened, it is simply marked to market and any open P/L + swap is debited or credited with the reference ‘variation’. Overall this does not have an effect on your account balance as it is just a mode of calculation.
This setting has now been disabled ( as you would have noticed that subsequent trades did not have ‘variation’ calculations) and will not be used in the future. We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused you."
The bit about not effecting account balance is what puzzles me, I had two trades open in drawdown, 1std lot and a .5std lot which were closed out for a losses one for Euro1700 loss and Euro500 on the other, and then automatically two equal size trades opened at the close price, in which I closed one some time later for near breakeven and left the .5 lot trade run until it came back into profit of around Euro400. And another thing is "This setting has now been disabled" so is it enabled when one is live, which is a scary thought! I should have followed it up with support but since I am live with another broker and this was just a demo I did not, but still looking to find a new brokerage.
Just wondering is this common with this Brokerage, I like everything else about them, well except the larger spreads that happen on the day changeover on gold, which could be avoided by not having placed pending orders before changeover and closing positions, besides that would have gone live but this scared me off!
