Forex Blog

MasterForex existed on-line since 2006, but being very similar to other MT4 Forex brokers it has never received such traders’ community attention as their competitors (e.g. LiteForex or FXOpen). As its rivals MasterForex accepts WebMoney, e-gold and wire transfer for deposit/withdraw operations, trading from $1, MT4 platform, CFD trading and a flexible leverage. Unfortunately, like many other MetaTrader brokers it’s not registered with NFA, CFTC or FSA and resides offshore on the Seychelles. But for starting your way in Forex this is still a good broker, because of its trading conditions that are very easy for the newbie traders.

NorthFinance and WestCapFX recently stopped accepting new Forex trader registrations and are now officially redirecting new members to a very new but employing an aggressive marketing strategy Forex broker — FxPro. It looks like the company behind NorthFinance and WestCapFX decided that it would be better to consolidate their business and offer one «universally good» broker rather than two different decisions for two kinds of Forex traders. Personally I think that FxPro is quite interesting broker, but it still looks too new and untested for me, thus I can’t yet recommend it to every other trader. As for NorthFinance and WestCapFX — I had to remove them from my broker list, since they are no longer registering new traders.

I’ve upgraded the Forex broker rating system to make it more cheat-proof and to make it show more relevant rating score for each broker. With previous system I had to deal with hundreds of fraudulent votes (both in favor of some brokers and to lower some brokers’ rating). Current system should be much better than the old one and I hope the rating will be more accurate now. Unfortunately, all previous votes have been lost due to the systems’ incompatibility, so you’ll have a chance to rate your favorite/hated brokers again.

Sorting by name (I don’t know why I haven’t added it before) has been also added to general broker list, so now you can sort it by four different properties.

The same functionality has been added to the Russian language part of the site, which has also received its broker review system.

I’ve added a very new Forex broker to the site today — Forex-Metal. Its website is still very raw and there is not very much information about this broker on the internet. But I thought that it should be listed because it has one rare feature — it supports both MetaTrader 4 platform for trading and PayPal payment system for deposits and withdrawals. It also supports WebMoney and wire transfers for billing and also offers CFD trading (as almost every MT4 broker). Of course, this broker is still very new, it’s not regulated and it has no reputation, but it may be an interesting opportunity to start trading Forex. Anyway I don’t recommend depositing too much funds in Forex-Metal before it becomes more reputable.

An interesting Forex broker reached my attention recently — DeltaStock. It’s a Bulgarian registered brokerage company, which is operating on the on-line Forex market since 2001. DeltaStock also offers CFD, metals, commodities and stocks (only Bulgarian companies) trading. It offers both fixed and variable spreads to choose from and both downloadable and browser trading platforms to trade. I think that this broker would be quite interesting for the Bulgarian Forex traders and those outside Bulgaria who are searching for some good trading conditions.

A new Forex broker was added to the list of PayPal Forex brokers on my site today — GFS Forex & Futures. Apart from having the long name and accepting PayPal as one of the funds transferring methods this broker can boast being a registered member of NFA and CFTC.

GFS Forex & Futures offers a custom Forex trading platform — OperaFX Pro. To start trading with them you’ll need to open either a mini account with the minimum of $500 or a standard account with a minimum of $10,000. Leverage is 1:100 for standard accounts and 1:200 for mini accounts.

FxPro is a relatively new MetaTrader Forex and CFD broker, which I’ve found out recently. I’ve seen the ad for this broker on some cable channel and decided to check it out on-line. Not many Forex brokers advertise on TV nowadays, so I was kind of interested. What I really didn’t like a lot about FxPro was their website — speaking flash marketers isn’t something I expected from the good user-friendly website. Some of the site’s links didn’t work for me (FireFox 2.0.0.12) as well. They also have some funny preproduction artifact in the Trading Terms section:

FxPro has no minimum or maximum restrictions for deposits or withdrawals
NOTE: Query the above information with earlier reference US$ 100 Minimum

The broker itself is rather interesting — it offers 1.8 pips spread on EUR/USD. That’s a record for the fixed/non-ECN spread for real MetaTrader 4 accounts as far as I know. FxPro also accepts PayPal payments, which is quite rare for the MT4 brokers. It’s also registered on Cyprus and is regulated by their SEC. The minimum account for this broker starts with $100.

A German banking institution Varengold Wertpapierhandelsbank AG started the on-line retail Forex broker this year — VarengoldBankFX. It’s one of the few MetaTrader retail brokers maintained by the major banking institution. They support mini Forex accounts, but the minimum positions size is twice as much as usual 0.1 lot. CFD and metal trading is also available (CFD is not available to U.S. citizens). Unfortunately, like with many other institutional Forex brokers, wire transfer is the only accepted method of deposit and withdrawal.

I had to remove Boston Trading and Research form the my Forex brokers list, because judging from their website BTRFX is no longer a retail broker. Now they offer managed Forex accounts and are performing quite well (according to BarclayHedge). Personally, I wouldn’t trust them too much, because they don’t seem to be registered with any U.S. or international regulator. According to some Forex related forums’ posts (babypips.com and kreslik.com) their management is unclear and they don’t look very honest. Anyway, if you are feeling lucky you can definitely try investing with BTRFX managed fund as their returns are quite high.

It started eleven days ago on the ForexFactory forum, but I’ve read it first about a week ago on a TalkGold forum’s thread titled “Mt4 Brokers Are All Scam Brokers By Definition”. Of course, I’ve got interested in this topic because I’ve been trading on MetaTrader brokers’ accounts for almost two years and I have never thought of them being a scam “by definition". That made me read both of the threads thoroughly.

Here is the main problem that is pointed out in those threads. Back in February 2006 MetaQuotes announced a 5-day test of the Virtual Dealer Plug-in on the demo trading server. This plug-in was designed to imitate “real dealer work — random time of answer, requote etc [sic!]“. Eleven days ago a post on ForexFactory forum shows a part of some document’s scan describing plug-in’s functionality, including such things as “automated moving up the Limit & Stop Level and Freeze Level according to the preset list of news time”, “disabling (setting, modifying, deletion) of pending orders during news receiving”, “Max Losing Slippage”, “Max Profit Slippage”, etc. Thread starters and many other forum participants believe that this plug-in is being used in all MetaTrader 4 brokers on real trading accounts and that’s what making all such brokers the cheaters. The fact that MetaQuotes deleted all threads about the Virtual Dealer Plug-in on their forum added even more confidence to those traders.

So, what now? Personally, I can say that there’s no actual proof that this plug-in is used on real accounts on any of the MT4 brokers (I am not saying all). I am almost sure that this plug-in (or its newer version) was used during the Automated Trading Championship by MetaQuotes (this competition was for demo accounts). Another point — even if this plug-in can be used on real accounts and is used there by some of the MT4 brokers, it doesn’t imply that all of them are using it and are outright scams.

What will happen when more traders will read about this problem? Those, who thought that the MetaTrader brokers are evil, will definitely become more sure in their belief, those, who didn’t mind before, most probably won’t mind this problem too.

What should you do in this situation? I don’t know, but I’ll continue to trade with the brokers I’ve been using for a long time now, if I find that they hunt my stops or have a high slippage in their favor I will immediately switch to another broker. But I don’t think that it’s a good choice to leave a broker, with services of which I am currently satisfied, just because of some suspicious plug-in’s existence.