My broker is FXCM and for the most part my experience with them has been okay. When trading from home I use their charts, but when I'm away I use the iphoneforex.com website run by CMS for price data.
Last night (March 18) I was trading on my phone. I called FXCM and I entered a long EUR/USD position at 1.5647 with a stop at 1.5615. This was done at 17:50EST. After a couple hours the trade was doing good (or so I thought) so I called FXCM to move my stop up. They informed me that my trade had been stopped out. This really confused me since, according to the CMS charts on my phone, the price never came close to my stop.
I knew prices can sometimes differ by a little so I got onto a computer to check what FXCM's charts said. This is when I got even more confused. On the FXCM chart there was a very sharp 25-30 pip spike downward to 1.5612 at 18:37EST that did NOT show up on the CMS charts at all. So I called FXCM and talked to customer service.
What they told me is about what I expected them to say. They said they get quotes from a large number of banks, they use the "best" price available (best for them?), and that the downward spike was valid since "orders were filled." I wasn't accepting the explanation so the guy looked up the spike on a tick chart. He told me that the market was trading around 1.5638, spiked down to 1.5612 for a couple of ticks, then back up to 1.5638 and continued to trade normally like nothing ever happened. I had the trade audited and the person I spoke to in their auditing department looked up the trade on his Bloomberg terminal. He said that, while there were "very few" banks that actually traded at 1.5612 (which means there were many that did not), the price was still valid and essentially that I'm SOL. Had this very strange spike never materialized, it would have been a very good trade (60-120 pips profit). Instead I took a 32-pip loss. And like I said, the only independent price feed I have (from CMS) doesn't show the spike at all.
So now I'm left wondering what to do. I've been trading the EUR/USD cross exclusively for a couple years, and this strikes me as an extremely odd circumstance. I'm aware that forex dealers have bucketshop reputations, but this is the first time I've felt like I've personally encountered anything along these lines. I want to keep trading but don't feel like I can trust FXCM's price data.
Where would you go from here? Futures is the obvious answer but being able to check prices on my iPhone and place trades over the phone is one of the reasons I'm trading the forex spot market. What does everyone else think? Open to any and all advice. Thanks!
Last night (March 18) I was trading on my phone. I called FXCM and I entered a long EUR/USD position at 1.5647 with a stop at 1.5615. This was done at 17:50EST. After a couple hours the trade was doing good (or so I thought) so I called FXCM to move my stop up. They informed me that my trade had been stopped out. This really confused me since, according to the CMS charts on my phone, the price never came close to my stop.
I knew prices can sometimes differ by a little so I got onto a computer to check what FXCM's charts said. This is when I got even more confused. On the FXCM chart there was a very sharp 25-30 pip spike downward to 1.5612 at 18:37EST that did NOT show up on the CMS charts at all. So I called FXCM and talked to customer service.
What they told me is about what I expected them to say. They said they get quotes from a large number of banks, they use the "best" price available (best for them?), and that the downward spike was valid since "orders were filled." I wasn't accepting the explanation so the guy looked up the spike on a tick chart. He told me that the market was trading around 1.5638, spiked down to 1.5612 for a couple of ticks, then back up to 1.5638 and continued to trade normally like nothing ever happened. I had the trade audited and the person I spoke to in their auditing department looked up the trade on his Bloomberg terminal. He said that, while there were "very few" banks that actually traded at 1.5612 (which means there were many that did not), the price was still valid and essentially that I'm SOL. Had this very strange spike never materialized, it would have been a very good trade (60-120 pips profit). Instead I took a 32-pip loss. And like I said, the only independent price feed I have (from CMS) doesn't show the spike at all.
So now I'm left wondering what to do. I've been trading the EUR/USD cross exclusively for a couple years, and this strikes me as an extremely odd circumstance. I'm aware that forex dealers have bucketshop reputations, but this is the first time I've felt like I've personally encountered anything along these lines. I want to keep trading but don't feel like I can trust FXCM's price data.
Where would you go from here? Futures is the obvious answer but being able to check prices on my iPhone and place trades over the phone is one of the reasons I'm trading the forex spot market. What does everyone else think? Open to any and all advice. Thanks!
