This is a timely update of ibfx - I've been trading with them for about eight months now, and everything was great, while I was loosing! But once I began to make a little dough, it's like someone flipped a switch or something - all the sudden I get repeated off-quotes, requotes & trade context is busy. Last week I had four positions open that began to move against me and what do you know - repeated off-quotes, requotes & trade context is busy! Imagine that. Its like someone pulled the plug or something. I lost about a grand that week, thanks ibfx. The really horrible part is that after I had rebooted a couple of times, triple checked my internet connection, prayed, cried and screemed, I finally called them on the phone ( in retrospect I should have done that first! word..) & had them manually close my trades. They admited that their trade server was down. They did reverse one trade from the time I was on the phone(-$300.00) they gave me back $16. But they said that they would not reverse the other trades because their journal didn't show I was attempting to close them. Stay with me now...the journal is on their trade server (yeah, the server that was down...) the story goes on but the long & short of it is that they wiped me out and I have virtually no recourse, I know for sure I'll never give them another red cent as long as I live, and neither should you!
After some research I found they were fined by the NFA for the same behavior in the past. Appearantly the whole scam is profitable enough to pay the fine and continue fleecing their clients. I can't wait for somebody to file a class action lawsuit against ibfx & todd crossland in particular, I would love nothing more than to get these theives in open court, hint, hint.
In a nutshell - imho yes, they are still stealing from their clients and no they don't appear to be capable or desirous of changing, even after being fined, really.
So I wrote an EA that uses windows functions to ping the server ip, and records the result to a data file, ( as a technical analyst the results were interesting to say the least) I have determined that this is not an isolated incident - just the one where I caught them red-handed! You can have a copy of my EA, I'm making it freely available, as long as you don't work for ibfx. ibfx can have it for $1,000.00, thats the amount they stole from me last week.
So thats what happened to me, and I have earned the right to make a couple of suggestions for would be ibfx clients:
1) Don't trade with ibfx if your expecting to be treated fairly.
2) Ping their trade server, for your own defense (it goes down a lot)
3)Don't trade with ibfx if you want a stable platform, the platform can never be more reliable than the trade server, period.
4)Be sure to check with the NFA for previous violations.
5)Don't trade with ibfx if you value your account equity.
6)If you get hung in a trade, Call them to manually close the open trades first, then reboot & so-forth
7) Oh yeah, Don't trade with ibfx unless you want to get fleeced
8)If you suspect problems get my free EA to document the servers unreliance.
9) in case I forgot to mention it Dont Trade With ibfx, there are much better market makers out there. And in reality thats what they are market makers not brokers. They clearly have only one purpose to separate you from your money, sooner or later but always.
I give em 1 star, simply because there is no lower rating available.
Notice the huge spike up?Its absent on 2nd chart.
