Hello fellow traders,
Beware IC Markets!!
I want to report a dirty trick played by IC Markets, which is the broker that I have been using so far for the last year. I have already posted a negative thread about them but I have found out something else. I will definitely drop them after this experience. IC Markets has tight spreads but I have reason to beleive they slow down retail traders' order and they provide not accurate charts.
I am connected to their MT4 New York server so from Europe I have a latency of about 110ms. Furthermore I have been told that from the moment they receive the order they take 150ms seconds to excetute it to the exchange, so I am quite slow, in total 260ms late. I have testes on demo a simple scalping strategy that is based on moving avarage cross EA that showed to be profitable, then I decided to test it live. What happened was that IC Markets slowed me down and provided me with slightly different charts. In a day trading I have suffered a slippage of 11.9 pips which in a scalping strategy like mine is the difference between life and death. I also noticed in the real accout more trades were opened, this implies that they really quotes different prices from live and live charts are somewhat late or misrepresented so the indicator respond differently. My strategy had a stop loss of 5 pips so it was not super tight. I have reported everething in the attached images. As you can see the demo accout is profitable while the real accout is really in loss. I have noticed that in some trades I got a slippage of 2.5 pips. For the whole day I got more than 10 pips slippage. I have reason to beleive that IC Markets slow down its users connecting them to a different server and in the meantimen their partner in London, the flash boys at GSA Capital (https://www.gsacapital.com/ , who are IC Markets partner) place an high frequency arbitrage trade to profit from your entry and once they have done thier dirty trick IC Markets quotes to you a different price. Consequently they are kind of market makers, they do what they can to profit from you. I have read that many brokers have an High Frequancy Trader division to requote their customers' bets. This should be illegal.
I discourage you to trade with IC Markets. They attracted me becuase they have low spreads and because they advocate to be good for scalping but the reality is that they play really dirty tricks and are against you. Probably renting a VPS in NY would sort a bit my problem, but if when I place an order they connect me to another server to slow me down the trading is impossible. I am tryng to gather enough information to send everything to the regulator and hopefully they will audit them. Unfortunately at the moment I am still looking for a more professional broker I will hopefully find one.
Here below you can find the proofs of the demo accout and real accout with the same strategy (which I backtested and is profitable) but the results are extremely different.
Trade safe out there, we are small smart fish among big sharks.
Bye guys.
Pietro
Beware IC Markets!!
I want to report a dirty trick played by IC Markets, which is the broker that I have been using so far for the last year. I have already posted a negative thread about them but I have found out something else. I will definitely drop them after this experience. IC Markets has tight spreads but I have reason to beleive they slow down retail traders' order and they provide not accurate charts.
I am connected to their MT4 New York server so from Europe I have a latency of about 110ms. Furthermore I have been told that from the moment they receive the order they take 150ms seconds to excetute it to the exchange, so I am quite slow, in total 260ms late. I have testes on demo a simple scalping strategy that is based on moving avarage cross EA that showed to be profitable, then I decided to test it live. What happened was that IC Markets slowed me down and provided me with slightly different charts. In a day trading I have suffered a slippage of 11.9 pips which in a scalping strategy like mine is the difference between life and death. I also noticed in the real accout more trades were opened, this implies that they really quotes different prices from live and live charts are somewhat late or misrepresented so the indicator respond differently. My strategy had a stop loss of 5 pips so it was not super tight. I have reported everething in the attached images. As you can see the demo accout is profitable while the real accout is really in loss. I have noticed that in some trades I got a slippage of 2.5 pips. For the whole day I got more than 10 pips slippage. I have reason to beleive that IC Markets slow down its users connecting them to a different server and in the meantimen their partner in London, the flash boys at GSA Capital (https://www.gsacapital.com/ , who are IC Markets partner) place an high frequency arbitrage trade to profit from your entry and once they have done thier dirty trick IC Markets quotes to you a different price. Consequently they are kind of market makers, they do what they can to profit from you. I have read that many brokers have an High Frequancy Trader division to requote their customers' bets. This should be illegal.
I discourage you to trade with IC Markets. They attracted me becuase they have low spreads and because they advocate to be good for scalping but the reality is that they play really dirty tricks and are against you. Probably renting a VPS in NY would sort a bit my problem, but if when I place an order they connect me to another server to slow me down the trading is impossible. I am tryng to gather enough information to send everything to the regulator and hopefully they will audit them. Unfortunately at the moment I am still looking for a more professional broker I will hopefully find one.
Here below you can find the proofs of the demo accout and real accout with the same strategy (which I backtested and is profitable) but the results are extremely different.
Trade safe out there, we are small smart fish among big sharks.
Bye guys.
Pietro