Recently numerous brokers have been reluctant to pay profits to their clients. , Europe’s best Forex-training project in 2009-2011, have already counted 8 cases of non-payments to the Academy’s students. The other 4 cases aren’t made public as the brokers and the traders have compromised through intermediary of .
But is a broker always wrong in such cases? Not always. According to Evgeny Olkhovsky, a Canadian expert and a member of , Forex or any other market is the imprint of the modern society. Both brokers and their clients may use scam techniques and other dirty tricks to implement their get-rich-quick schemes.
For example, ’s forum members started a separate thread about whether the trader is right when demanding for $1 million profit earned on non-market quotes. It should be noted that most voters (fellow traders) called the idea absurd and ridiculous.
Non-payments: when brokers are right?
Market Leader addressed and some Forex brokers (those that are among the top brokers of the Academy’s rating) to find the answers to the following questions:
Have your clients ever claimed unfair profits? If so, how did you resolve the problem? What should and shouldn’t traders do in order to avoid such conflicts of interests with their broking companies?
Vladimir Novikov, the lawyer for Masterforex-V.org, assumes that most unfair claims are based on the fact that some traders are negligent when reading and signing client agreements with their brokers:
a) “Almost all the agreements read that during price gaps orders are executed at the price closest to the gap, not ant the price stated in the order. Many traders use pending orders or stop-loss orders. After considerable gaps (on news or at the opening of the next day’s trading session in the futures market etc.) traders get their stop-loss orders (that were placed a couple of points away) executed, say, 30 points away from the order price and start blaming their brokers for playing dirty tricks on them. Such claims are groundless – traders should be careful and attentive when reading and signing an agreement”.
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b) “Some brokers forbid scalping and high-intensity trading. For example, if the agreement says that a valid trade must last for at least 3 minutes but a trader closes his/her trade in 1-2 minutes, he/she won’t get the profit as the trade will be considered invalid”.
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The bottom line: “Always read carefully what you sign. If you cannot accept the agreement, choose another broker.”
Elena Avramova, traders-union.ru. “These days it is very difficult for a trader to find a trusted, reliable broker because most brokers compose their client agreements so as to disclaim responsibility while traders cannot get access to all the evidences (server logs etc.). That is why it is next to impossible for a trader to prove or disprove anything. Nevertheless, our Traders Union (traders-union.ru) successfully helps traders and brokers to compromise as no wise broking company wants to lose its image”.
Alexander Kovalchuk, EXNESS (TOP5 of ’s rating of FX brokers).
“Indeed, some brokers have recently refused to pay profits mainly to those who utilize scalping techniques, arbitrage and non-market quotes. To our mind, it is brokers who are responsible for their weknesses as they fail to provide quality services. Such brokers usually impose restrictions on traders instead of improving their services. However, we believe that this is a non-productive approach. In such cases brokers actually admit the existence of major problems with their trading servers. Obviously this leads to numerous conflicts and doesn’t favor the image of such companies.
EXNESS has chosen the opposite way by betting on constant software and hardware improvements. Our clients do not have software problems when using MT4 or MT5 trading software. We do not impose any restrictions on our clients’ trading strategies while offering the lowest spreads (0.3 pts and higher).
Those of our clients who use trading robots (trading advisors etc.) can make use of our free VPS-hosting service thus getting access to perfect trading conditions.
Another major advantage is automatic withdrawal of funds. At the same time this is a good solution to the problem of non-payments. Auto-withdrawal makes non-payments impossible.
We have been in business for over 3 years. Over the period we haven’t canceled a single trade made by our clients and have always withdrawn their funds on time.”
ICM Brokers. (TOP5 of ’s rating of FX brokers).
“Indeed, numerous brokers do not allow scalping. For example, our company guarantees fixed spreads and the absence of slippage. However, scalping is not recommended as our hedging department has difficulties covering such trades. In some cases such trades can bring losses to a broking company, no matter if these trades are winners or losers. That is why our company recommends using mid-term strategies. Of course we do not deprive scalpers of their profit. We simply offer them to switch to another type of account with market execution. These rules have existed for decades.”
Admiral Markets (’s rating of FX brokers).
“For many years we have seen many clients claiming their profits gained as the result of trading on non-market quotes. In such cases the profit is eliminated according to the client agreement.
Scalping, intensive trading and trading on news are some of the techniques aimed at getting purely technical advantage. That is why different brokers have different attitudes towards them, depending on their capabilities.
In order to avoid such unpleasant situations it is better for a trader to focus on the essence of financial markets instead of looking for software vulnerabilities.”
Market Leader and would appreciate it if you could participate in a survey. Please, visit the Academy’s forum for traders and investors and answer the following question:
To your mind, in what cases non-payments are fair?
