RESOLVED Case# 2013-098 | Tradetowin vs www.avatrade.com

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Tradetowin

Private, 1st Class
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39
Original FPA Traders Court Submission:

I am submitting the case against: www.avatrade.com

My Case is: Ava cancelled profits of 9188.54 on two accounts I have with Ava. Acct# 5548639 and Acct# 5554121

I have two big concerns with this. Firstly the trades were not cancelled right away rather about 1 month after the trades were executed, most were opened and closed on July 4th, and the cancellations came on July 31st. The other issue I have is with account #2, I actually submitted a withdrawal request for the whole account balance before the trades were cancelled. Which makes me believe that they received the withdrawal request looked at the profit I've made and decided to take some of the profit off.

Most of the trades in question were opened for over 40 mins. There is something really wrong with Ava cancelling trades opened for so long. No way that these trades were off market for so long. Ava is not adjusting the trades as one would expect any legitimate broker to do, but is rather cancelling them and after a very long period of time.

New thread in the Scam Alerts Folder:

Review is submitted by E.G. on 08/12/13

The company was first contacted about the issue on 07/31/13 the last contact was on 08/11/13

Details: Your EA that you are using is specifically trading in a way that breaches our terms and conditions. You were not the only trader using this EA on our platform and so we have had to remove all profits from it. As an arbitraging EA which we specifically prohibit, we had no choice in the matter.

There is nothing we can do more with this matter and we are not going to refund any profits made from the EA. I do recommend that you file a complaint with the relevant bodies if you are not satisfied. We do have all the evidence we need to present to any regulatory body if it is requested.

I do understand that this would be most upsetting to you, but unfortunately as I mentioned, this EA was trading illegally and so this decision comes from the management of our company.

Regards,

Josh Brown
Senior Account Analyst

Please forward your emails to complaints@avafx.com

or complaints@avatrade.com

There is nothing I can do about it I just pass on the messages from management.

Regards

Josh Brown

Company representatives' emails: <J.Brown@avafx.com>
<complaints@avafx.com>
<complaints@avatrade.com>

 

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Does Ava have any prohibition of news trading or scalping in their terms?

Can you please explain how the EA worked?
 
News trading is not prohibited in their T&C, the only reference I could find is this
"
6. ... AVA retains the right to limit the amount and/or total number of open positions which Customer may acquire or maintain at AVA, and to increase margin requirements in advance of earnings or other news or events, with or without notice, either before such events or retroactively or at any other time that it deems at its sole discretion. Orders must be placed allowing sufficient time to execute and to calculate margin requirements. Profits deriving from a transaction shall be added to Customer’s account as additional margin, as long as the transaction is open, and upon the closing of the transaction, as an addition to the available balance for withdrawal. Losses deriving from a transaction shall be deducted from Customer’s account.

19. ... Customer acknowledges and agrees that due to market volatility and factors beyond AVA's control, AVA cannot guarantee that an order will be executed at the level specified in Customer’s order. In such an event, AVA will close the transaction at the next best price. If, before Customer’s offer to open or close a transaction is accepted by AVA , AVA's quote moves to Customer’s advantage (for example, if the price goes down as Customer buys or the price goes up as Customer sells) Customer agrees that AVA can retain such price improvement for its own account.
"


The EA I use is not a fully automated EA. It works in the following way.
1. I place a trade as soon as news releases come out(this part is manual or triggered by news trading software which clicks either buy or sell)
2. The EA replicates my BUY/SELL instruction to several forex brokers
3. The EA manages the positions in the seconds right after the news release by placing protective stops.
4. Once the market absorbs the news and prices settle I manage the positions manually on most occasions and decide whether or not to hold the position for longer in anticipation of a further move or close out the position right away.

To clarify, I have software that gets me the news very quick and gives me a buy or a sell depending on how I've pre-programmed the triggers. There are several services like this out there, even one that the FPA offers for free now(I believe called FNG), which I don't use. This is no secret, and I am not the only person out there who uses such software.

Now in the case with Ava. The news I traded at the time did not require a trigger as the news in question was a speech which I listened in on and decided as I heard bullish/bearish comments. So for all intensive purposes I placed those trades manually and my EA simply copied my signal to a few different MT4 platforms. Heck if I was only trading on 1 platform I would've clicked the buy button on the platform without the help of my EA.

One thing I find confusing in Ava's email that I pasted above, specifically this "You were not the only trader using this EA on our platform and so we have had to remove all profits from it. As an arbitraging EA which we specifically prohibit, we had no choice in the matter." This is impossible, while others might be trading news, this EA is only mine as I have customized it over many years and I have not given it nor sold it to others. Perhaps Ava means that others traded the news at the same time as I did?!?
 
Looks like AsstMod managed to get them to make one comment so far. Let's see if he can keep them talking.

Were the trades on the 4th and 31st both on speeches or just one of them?

Which commercial EA was used for some of the other news trades? There are some claims that one specific news EA didn't just spike trade, but (unknown to users) deliberately tried to overload MT4 servers.
 
I have received a form that Ava wants me to sign so they can release my trading records to the FPA. I will be getting this to Ava shortly.

Were the trades on the 4th and 31st both on speeches or just one of them?

On the 4th it was a speech and on the 31st it was a regular news release. The EA works the same whether it is a speech or a news release, generally speaking I will have a better chance of getting a good fill if it is a speech as I might get up to a few seconds before the market moved, where a regular news release will only give me less than 1 second tops.

There is only one EA that I use as I mentioned before. I am not going to go into too much detail about how it works, it does send multiple orders sometimes as it is programmed with the intention to get a larger position built, for example rather than just sending 1 order for 5 lots the EA will send many small orders and try to build the position up to 5 lots, very often I would say 90% of the time I won't get 100% of my orders filled which is fine as volatile times are tough to get good fills. The idea behind this is to at least get a partial fill on a news release and make some money rather than waiting to get the perfect 5 lot fill which might never happen.

I am completely aware how trading around news works, I have been doing it for a long time, having started out as doing it manually with Felix back in the day before the SNW days, then SNW came etc. I could see a scenario where my EA might've sent many orders(not sure the exact number of maximum tries that my EA will attempt before I get a fill). However my intention is not to overload a server, heck If I knew how to overload a server to make a profit do you think I would be here arguing and not overloading other brokers' servers lol. I have not written the EA completely myself I have had bits and pieces put together by hired programmers at times to make additions/changes. So excuse me If I can't give you exact specs of how the EA works.

I think it is irrelevant how the orders were sent in. I have attempted to trade on many occasions using the same method on Ava, but they seems to be questioning only this particular batch of trades that made the most money. With news trading I will often go for long periods of time without getting a trade filled, That time however I was quicker and was able to get a fill on several pairs. If I knew how to hack their servers won't it make sense that I would get fills all the time?!

As I keep saying and I will keep saying, I am fine if the trades were cancelled within a reasonable time, as it has happened to me in the past. A broker has found wrong pricing and then corrected my entries within hours, happens often with news trades, it has happened to me with HotForex as well as LQD markets and other brokers, and that is simply part of the news trading business. As far as I know AVA isn't prohibiting news trading.

However when it takes a month to cancel profits I have a problem with that. No matter what way I chose to trade whether manual or with an EA I expect any errors to be detected within a reasonable period of time. I am never happy to see "pricing errors" which are another game brokers play. Perhaps that is too much to ask of some these days(hint AVA).

One last thing I want to say - if Ava had cancelled these trades within 24 hours I wouldn't be here at all.
 
I do agree Ava needs to cancel quickly or not at all. Waiting until a month later is a little too much like the dreaded "compliance audits" that were the hallmark of the worst bucketshops.

Which news trigger software are you using?
 
These days I use, Oracle(Dustin Pass's service), I used to subscribe to SNW as well but at some point Oracle was faster at some news releases so I cancelled my subscription with SNW. Plus I get a great deal on Oracle as I have been using it for years(Oracle used to be called RSS I believe)
 
I've been having an email conversation with a representative from AvaTrades over this issue.

If I can't make any more progress soon, this will be moved to Open Cases.
 
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