As promised, the article below. We shall make an analisis of it in future posts
How to choose the right broker?The most common and most important question for every trader!
Every broker is good – until you won’t make some substantial profit. At that point you will ask
yourself whether you chose the right broker because your broker will not pay you the profit or
because you will suddenly experience some very strange behaviour when trading. From this
point on your account will be 'flagged' and the broker will turn on all add-ons and applications
which will trade against you. And there is more! A lot more!
First filter: If the broker is not ECN/STP then they will trade against you.
We call such brokers
the market makers. Just read their agreement which you have to sign when you open a trading
account with them and
you will find that they are a counter party.
With your acceptance of their
agreement you actually agree that they will trade against you.
When you trade with them you
are playing with numbers only and you do not trade on the market at all. If you win – they lose
and that is why they will not allow you to make any serious profit.Unfortunately these days you can find that few of those bucket shop brokers are starting to
offer ECN trading too: It could be real but we can’t believe them. 99% possibility is - with their
ECN platform they are NOT on the market either. Have they stolen enough money from the
traders and can change their ways? NO! They invented one more way to steal your money only!
2. If a broker is offering funding through electronic payment processors like Liberty Reserve,
Money Bookers (and similar) or e-gold even – it is not real. There is no market in the world
where you can use electronic money to buy stocks or trade with options, futures or forex. All
these markets recognize hard cash only. A real broker will not risk the time and unknown and
unpredictable costs to exchange that funny electronic money for real money.
A real broker has
to deposit real money and nothing else to their liquidity provider to cover the margin.3. Avoid brokers who offer financial bonuses. It is stated in every agreement that nobody can
add or withdraw money to/from your account. So how can they add funds to your account?
They will not add a penny. They will only change the Balance number on your trading account.
But those are numbers, not money: Don’t forget – you are not on the market with such brokers.
You just play a game with numbers against your broker.
Let us say you have some experience with forex already. And now think: have you ever seen an
offer for a financial bonus from any of the real, already recognized safe and reputable brokers?
No? Of course not: They are in business between you and their liquidity provider. They live on a
tiny part of spread or commission and not from scamming retail traders. So there is no place for
3 or 5 or even 20% of bonuses on every deposit.
Under the same category there is also the too low spread or even zero spread: Those scammers
are not on the market so they can give to you whatever spread, even zero. Because they do not
pay a commission to a bank, they do not hold your deposits with liquidity providers. Have you
ever heard of any free bank service? No? Of course not! Bankers are the richest in the world
because you are paying them all the time! And it is the same with liquidity providers who are
paid from spread too so zero or extremely low spreads on the real market do not exist.
And a
real broker has to live on some part of the spread/commission too. The conclusion is very
simple: Spread on eur/usd below 1 pip is a fairy tale or scam.
Your broker has a fixed spread? For sure it is market maker then and they manipulate price. On
real market spread is changing every second! Spread depends from trading volume: Bigger is
volume – lower is spread. So logically – fixed spread doesn’t exist!
4. If you are already trading and are constantly receiving error messages like ‘requote’, ‘wait’,
‘trading context is busy’, ‘quote is accepted’, ‘request is in process’ and so on – you are trading
against a classic scamming broker. These errors do not exist on the real market with real
liquidity providers. Every liquidity provider tries to execute any transaction instantly and as fast
is possible: there are simply always a few traders on the other side who are trying to open an
opposite position from you. The part of retail trading is still so small that lot size we trade it
seems maybe big for us but in reality on that $4 trillion daily turnover – means nothing. So – if
you are receiving the above mentioned errors it is because the software of the trading platform
looks for the worst price which can be delivered to you, nothing else.
Your broker doesn’t allow scalping? Or you have to place SL & TP order 5 or even 10 pips away
from market price? They have dealing desk and they trade against you hard!
Your broker doesn’t allow Expert Advisors (EA)? Or your EA is working properly on demo but on
real account does not? Run away! Your broker is scammer and they will steal your money!
5. Why is there such a small number of ECN/STP brokers on the market? The answer is simple:
95% to 98% of all retail traders are losing only. So if you decide to open a brokerage company
– which form will you choose? Why would you choose the hard way of looking for liquidity
providers, one where you even have to deposit $10 million on their account just so they are
willing to give you their feed? On the other hand, when you are one of those thief brokers you
just need to make a nice web page and buy a license from Meta Quotes… and you are in
business! Whichever math you do – the payouts to those 2% of winning retail traders can easily
be covered with 20 or 30% of the losers… and the rest of the deposits are pure profit for bucket
shop brokers.
6. EVERY broker is good until the retail trader is losing or he/she is trading with a small account.But what happens if you make some significant profit with one of those scamming brokers?
Below you can read about the experience from only one good trader; we do not want to bother
you with many examples. Should we publish all the stories we know from the successful traders
– you would realize that there is no broker – market maker – who will pay you out if your profit
is a little bit bigger.
7. We know you have one more question… Most of the brokers who scammed our successful
trader from article 6 are regulated by NFA or FSA or any other regulation bodies… How is it
possible that those brokers did not pay out the profit? This thing about the regulation is just one
big misunderstanding: if a broker has a NFA number that does not mean any security for your
funds at all. Regulators do not deal with your money! Brokers are just members of NFA under
some number and all they have to do is accept some rules from these regulatory bodies, which
does not mean they will pay out your deposit or profit. And if broker – market maker – has a
NFA number – it will still be your counter party and it will trade against you. And if a broker
disappears tomorrow or goes bankrupt – the regulatory will not pay a cent. The brokers know
that almost nobody will take legal action against them because it is too expensive, especially if
the retail trader is not from the country where the broker is registered.
There is more… but these few filters and facts that we have mentioned above are so obvious
that every beginner can recognize them easily. We hope you now know that only ECN/STP
broker and brokers with direct access to interbank liquidity are the right choice if you want to
protect your money!
