4evermaat
2nd Lieutenant
- Messages
- 2,702
I initially decided to work with a client that opened a forex trading account with DirectFx Au as part of a trading contest where you can win additional trading capital as an allocation from the TopTradr bi-weekly contest. But you could only use brokers that they partnered with (only DirectFx at the time). I was convinced to give them a shot despite some reservations about them possibly being a [naughty] market maker.....until I started noticing several discrepancies:
1) Chart prices consistently did not match terminal/market watch prices:
It appears bid is always 0.6 pips and ask is 0.7 pips wider than the chart. So you get "instant slippage" of up to 1.3 pips when you try to execute based on chart analysis. The spread is always 1.3 pips wider than 'advertised'. Even if you use EA and set it to monitor market watch prices, it still creates accounting issues when the order is misaligned on chart vs terminal prices. What if there was an execution issue and a screenshot needs to be sent? Even if you trade manually, especially from the chart it would be difficult if not impossible. But there were several of these instances where I was supposed to be executed, but was not and I couldn't figure out exactly why. I have one screenshot:
I attempted to ask why this was the case with inDirectFx chat support and they claimed that the charts are a "...trend indicator, not a market entry tool" and "...the chart is indicative, we can not have different feeds for the chart; only one....it is an operations limitation...." But I still couldn't understand why they would volunteer to have 2 different price feeds showing 2 different prices ? How does showing [fake] prices that always appear better than they can actually be executed at promote fair execution or is otherwise in the best interest of clients?
I thought these excuses were inadequate so I went to a couple of different brokers and ask them if they would stream 2 different prices to chart and market watch, and why they would do it that way. Here is an example of a different Australian broker who correctly has chart/terminal price feed matched perfectly:
Along with notable chat session. "....I don't see why we'd want them to be different. Everything wouldn't correlate time-wise then..." I agreed fully with this:
2) Staff operates odd business hours. DirectFx seems to almost all operate out of Chicago, IL, USA, but I didn't find this out conclusively until shortly after the trading account was opened. I honestly don't care if you outsource to Antarctica, but they should be able to cover all account-related requests during Australian business hours. The broker is regulated in Australia and reports an Australian business address. I did attempt to discuss this with chat support and the excuse was that "We have quite a few people that answer live chat....there would not be a difference talking to someone in the Australian office...."
I didn't see the full negative effects of this until the withdrawal requests were submitted (see below).
[Continued in 2nd post.....]
1) Chart prices consistently did not match terminal/market watch prices:
It appears bid is always 0.6 pips and ask is 0.7 pips wider than the chart. So you get "instant slippage" of up to 1.3 pips when you try to execute based on chart analysis. The spread is always 1.3 pips wider than 'advertised'. Even if you use EA and set it to monitor market watch prices, it still creates accounting issues when the order is misaligned on chart vs terminal prices. What if there was an execution issue and a screenshot needs to be sent? Even if you trade manually, especially from the chart it would be difficult if not impossible. But there were several of these instances where I was supposed to be executed, but was not and I couldn't figure out exactly why. I have one screenshot:
I attempted to ask why this was the case with inDirectFx chat support and they claimed that the charts are a "...trend indicator, not a market entry tool" and "...the chart is indicative, we can not have different feeds for the chart; only one....it is an operations limitation...." But I still couldn't understand why they would volunteer to have 2 different price feeds showing 2 different prices ? How does showing [fake] prices that always appear better than they can actually be executed at promote fair execution or is otherwise in the best interest of clients?
I thought these excuses were inadequate so I went to a couple of different brokers and ask them if they would stream 2 different prices to chart and market watch, and why they would do it that way. Here is an example of a different Australian broker who correctly has chart/terminal price feed matched perfectly:
Along with notable chat session. "....I don't see why we'd want them to be different. Everything wouldn't correlate time-wise then..." I agreed fully with this:
2) Staff operates odd business hours. DirectFx seems to almost all operate out of Chicago, IL, USA, but I didn't find this out conclusively until shortly after the trading account was opened. I honestly don't care if you outsource to Antarctica, but they should be able to cover all account-related requests during Australian business hours. The broker is regulated in Australia and reports an Australian business address. I did attempt to discuss this with chat support and the excuse was that "We have quite a few people that answer live chat....there would not be a difference talking to someone in the Australian office...."
I didn't see the full negative effects of this until the withdrawal requests were submitted (see below).
[Continued in 2nd post.....]