Funding Frenzy Promotion

When I funded about $2,000 to my FXPRIMUS account, FXPRIMUS had been offering "Funding Frenzy Promotion" which gives a customer a 100% credit. So I got my own $2,000 plus another $2,000 credit in my account.

In order to receive that $2,000 credit as a "withdrawable money," I had to trade a certain number of lots in 3 months period. In my case, it was $2,0000 / 6 = 333 lots.

Thanks to NumberOne, I made $5,000 from the initial $2,000 deposit. And, yesterday, I've just achieved to trade more than 333 lots in 3 months and FXPRIMUS gave me the $2,000 credit as a withdrawable credit. My deadline was August 10, so the time limit was only 1 week. I had never been able to trade such big lots in this short period of time without NO.

So, today, my fund has become $7,000. Woooow, I made 350% in 3 months!!! Thanks SOFX! Thanks FXPRIMUS!

Axi Turned to be Dubious

One of my most trusted broker, AxiTrader, has turned to be VERY DUBIOUS broker. Read the following thread carefully.

http://www.donnaforex.com/forum/index.php?topic=3346.0

They are gonna cancel your trades when you are profitable saying that there was an IT error. But the weird thing is they delete profitable trades only, leaving negative trades untouched. That's a BAD conduct.

Stay far away....

AxTrader Pro Ready

I don't know why Aussie people are so laid-back. When they say that the account would be ready in  a day, it will probably take a week.


Anyway, my AxiTrader Pro account is now ready, and I've already funded my account. They don't charge online credit card payment fee for your first deposit which is good.

Looking at charts for various currency pairs, I was really surprised. The spreads are probably the tightest I've ever seen in my more than five year trading experience. Looking good so far.

AxiTrader Pro

After a week, my AxiTrader Pro account is yet to ready. I've done a chat with a rep a couple of days ago, and they say it'll be ready in a day. Today, I've done the same kind of chat with one of them, again. How many times do I have to speak with them for the same thing?

A question that pissed me off was "AxiTrader Pro account doesn't offer micro and the minimum deposit is $1,000. Does it suit your trading style?" I replied "do I need to answer this question?"

Thank you, Axi, for worrying about my financial status!!! But please concentrate on your own job!!!

Looking for a Broker

Recently, one of my most favorite brokers, FXCC, has raised their commission drastically to the double their previous commission charge. By this chance, such high commission soaks up one-third or more of the profits made by my EA, which chases for only 5 to 15 pips. So I stopped trading with them and withdrew all my funds there. Be aware, their commission is now super high. I'm sure they will lose so many clients due to this crazy change.

Now, I tried to open an account with ATC Brokers that gets almost too good reputation here:
http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/public/review/www.atcbrokers.com

However, ATC Brokers forwarded me to FX Pulp website and fill the application form there. Knowing nothing about FX Pulp, I made some research on the net and found some articles that are not looking good:
http://www.forexpeacearmy.com/public/review/www.fxpulp.com
http://forexmagnates.com/fxpulpcrown-forex-ownership-saga-continues

I asked ATC Brokers their relationship with FX Pulp, and here is their answer.
---
Our main clearing house is FXCM, however FXCM does not accept clients from certain countries, for this reason FXCM put us in touch with a company called AECN FX, and a few clients that were unable to open directly with FXCM, they would open with AECN FX.

 AECN FX is an IB to FXCM, so clients still use our own MT4, same commissions and spreads.

 About 1-2 month ago, FX Pulp bought AECN FX, so overnight accounts under AECN became Pulp clients.

 I was not aware of Pulp history, I will look into this further.

 What I recommend for you is this; open an account through my second liquidity house, they are located in the US, hence the leverage is 50:1.

 If 50:1 leverage is acceptable, let me know and I will have new accounts send you the on line application link.
---

As I don't like 50:1 leverage and FX Pulp either, I declined their offer.

Finally, I've decided to give AxiTrader Pro account a try. I had once been a customer of Axitrader (standard account) and I really liked them at that time. With their standard account, although spreads are not so tight, pricing feed is very natural (probably no dubious plug-ins or bridges) and my EA had kept working fine there.

I have a positive impression about AxiTrader Pro account as they use the same liquidity provider with FinFX. I'm really apprehensive to use FinFX as they are not regulated, however, so many people says positive comments about FinFX. For me, if AxiTrader uses the same liquidity provider, that's much much better because Axi is regulated by Australian authority which is said to be very reliable.

A bit of downside is the minimum lot size of Axi Pro is 0.1 and no micro lots are allowed. This means your initial fund has to be relatively large. But I'll give it a try anyway.

Trading Point

I've been running Wallstreet Forex Robot on five different brokers, but one broker, Trading Point, reacts very differently. On Trading Point, WSFR opens a position at a very different level than that on other brokers and closes a position at a weird level. I've heard that some (or many) brokers use virtual plugin to make EAs useless. I don't know if Trading Point uses such virtual plugin or not, but WSFR on Trading Point opens a position where no other positions are found on other brokers, and also closes a position way too early or at a really crazy level where no such closing are identified on other brokers. So be aware when you intend to run an EA on Trading Point.

Alpari NZ flooded with error messages

I had been using Alpari NZ for the past several months, but today it started to get "Old tick" error messages again and again, almost every second.

It caused one of my EAs place 16 orders in about 5 minutes. I've closed all the position. I'll close the account and never trade with them.

This was the second time I got MT4 error or server problem. The previous one was EXNESS.

Time has come to EXNESS

I think this is a common fate for any bucket-shop broker. After I made my account 1800% from the initial deposit of $100, EXNESS has started something. These days, EXNESS MT4 disconnects very frequently and it's now beyond my acceptable level. It's simply risky.

Several minutes ago, my EA failed to close the position due to the connection problem. And this was the second time.

I think now is the time to leave EXNESS. Like I wrote on "About Me" section, every bucket-shop broker starts to block profitable traders. Happy days with EXNESS is over.

I'll move my money from there.

Pepperstone Razor

I've tried Pepperstone Razor ECN account on live. Although it offers extremely tight spreads like 0.5 to 0.8 pips on EURUSD, when you use stop trigger, it'll slip about 2 pips.

If you are relying on an EA that uses pending orders, Razor will not be a good option.

My Favorite Broker and EA

Having tried so many different brokers and EAs, I now like one broker very much. I think they are among the best in this industry. The beauty of them is that they never stop you no matter what kind of strategy you use. They offer no limitation in trading duration, and no limitation on TP or SL pips distance.

I don't like mentioning the name because I want them to keep offering this good trading environment. So I don't want them to be famous. As long as I'm one of few winning trader, they don't care.

Like this broker, I use one particular EA that majority of people believe uselesss or junk. But for me, the conbination of this EA and the broker is a perfect match.

But again, I don't like mentioning the name of the EA. I need to protect my trading environment. FapTurbo has one become very famous around the globe and it became a loser after several months because brokers had to protect themselves against Fap traders.

My bot is neither Fap nor derivation of it. It uses much less stop loss and much better winning ratio. So it's much more stable and safe.

About a couple of months ago, one guy named James Phuc from Vietnam sold me a derivation of Fap with very high price. But after a couple of months I realized it was Traxxon. If you happened to talk to him in person, never buy anything from him. He just changes the name and appearance of EAs and sells it to people. You can get the same thing with one tenth of the price he offers.

Luckily, I found a better bot and no longer use that modification of Traxxon. The EA I currently use is commercially available, but nobody believes it works.

Exness

I have been using Exness, unregulated Russian broker, for a while. But I recently realized that they have increased their spreads. Until recently, they are like scalper's heaven, but they probably noticed that if they kept providing such extremely low spreads, they would have to pay for so many winners that use scalping EAs.

Now, I'll have to change my EA on Exness.

Price Manipulation?

I would like to write about price manipulation.

Recently, I've gotten a very useful info from one of the brokers I use. A couple of days ago, I placed an order manually and set TP and SL. After a while, although my price had touched the TP, it didn't close in profit, but after that, my long position hit the SL when it's slightly above my SL level.

I took screenshots for both cases and sent them to the broker. They explained to me that the price information you see in Market Watch or the bar below Terminal window is Weighted Average Price, which means that the price shown on MT4 could differ about 0.3 pips from the actual price you get.

In other words, the price info you get on MT4 is slightly smoothed and it doesn't acurately reflect very fast, tiny fluctuation of the real price that brokers get.

This explained very well about the past experience I got with other brokers. If you were not happy with such filling of or non-filling of your position, then you would have to search for different brokers all the time because such up-to-0.3 pip difference can take place everywhere.

This applies scalpers only. Swing traders will not care such tiny moves.

Many slcalping EAs nowadays don't use hard TP and SL, and they place internally programmed TP and SL somewhere in the course of trading. They insist that such internal program was designed in order to avoid stop loss hunting. Yes, that makes sense, but by letting the EA close its position as if it's done manually, such EA can avoid such unwanted no-fills to TP or fills to SL.

I don't think brokers monitor every traders' trading activities all the time. So if you encountered similar cases as I did, just remember my post.

Shocking Fact about Forex Brokers

In the past, I had been an IB or Introducing Broker of a small forex company. The company owner explicitly said to me that they don't like winning traders and no broker likes winning traders.

I was like "Why? Traders win or not, you earn you profits from spreads, right?" He said no. At that point, I learned what the OTC or Over the Counter broker was. If your broker is offering Over the Counter trading service, then they are not  actually trading in the market. Many people might believe brokers actually deal currency pairs according to our orders. But it's not true. They don't have to make any deal in the real currency market. They just show prices to customers.

So why brokers can make huge profits? Because they collect money from traders around the globe and accumulate it in their bank. Because they know, as you know, more than 90 or 95% or even more traders lose, they don't actually need to trade for customers. Once one of the clients lose his money, then his deposit would become broker's profit. You see? Brokers eat up deposits and gets fat because they know everybody will lose!

Ok, now, suppose the situation is different. What if there is one winning trader? Then, yes, they have to pay for him from the broker's bank account. Because they are not dealing real money in the market, they have no way to pay him unless they pay from their pocket.

That's the reason no broker likes winning traders. This is a fact.

At that point, I suddenly understood why brokers tried to kick me out when I had been doing News Trading and kept winning. They love novice traders, losing EAs, and anybody who don't know how to trade. They even give you great amount of bonus when signing up, so that they can finally get more.

See? I quit to work with this f*cking broker with bulls*it owner. This broker prohibited scalping  because, according to the owner, scalpers would win. I had to keep saying to my clients like "excuse me, sir, you are doing scalping and your account may be closed if you don't follow our guideline." I was sick and fed up to say such nice comments to others (of course, ironically, because it can never be nice).

[EDIT on May 22, 2012: I had been misunderstanding the term, OTC. About four years ago, I was an IB of a broker and knew almost nothing about Forex, and my comprehension of market maker was misplaced with OTC at that time. The term "OTC" above should be replaced with "market maker."]