Not all forex brokers were born equal. Some will play dirty tricks to drain your account without being typical scammers. Here’s ascenario that happened to me and to many others.
This should ring all your bells. There is a solution: take your business elsewhere.
A scenario that can happen to anyone
Your make up in the morning, check out your forex account and discover that your open position hit the stop loss point and was closed by your broker. This can happen. The market moves 24 hours a day and your pair could have moved in the wrong direction.
When you look at the charts, you notice that the market was never at this point. Your position should not have bounced! A quick call to your broker and they tell you that they’ll check it out.
When they call you back, they say “Oops, that was an error. We’ve reinstated your position”.
The anger
On one hand you’re glad that you didn’t lose that trade,at least not yet. But then the anger starts boiling inside. If you weren’t on the watch, the money would be gone. You were on the watch, but you might have acted differently on the position. You wasted time on finding the error, the phone calls and the aggravation.
Then you forget about this specific position and begin thinking: what if they already did this to me and I hadn’t noticed. Will they do it again? (Probably so). Will I have to be alert all the time?
Such brokers do it occasionally to everybody. In many cases, there isn’t a big gap from the real market levels and the stop loss – such cases are harder to catch. They can spread the spreads in a creative way – creative for them and a loss for you.
Such brokers don’t live off the spreads, but on the money you deposit. They rarely pass on the deals – they just wait for the customer to lose all the account. And they find creative ways to “encourage” a quick loss of the account.
They don’t do it in their forex demo account – you succeed in demo trading, deposit money and then start losing. It isn’t always the trade psychology that brings you down – it’s the broker.
Solution
After you’ve calmed down, the solution is simple. Close all your positions with that broker, withdraw what’s left and take your business elsewhere. You deserve a better broker.
Don’t lose all your money in that account and blame the forex market. There are better brokers out there. Those who are more transparent are probably more reliable. Those who are gated should be suspected.
Like this post? Vote for it on Forex Factory.
Want to see what other traders are doing in real accounts? Check out Currensee. It’s free.