ActivTrades
The UK company ActivTrades PLC is a broker that offers online trading services in Forex and CFDs, started activities at the beginning of this century. It is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
There are more than 50 currency pairs, indices, CFDs, gold, silver, oil and other commodities.
Clients can use the well-known MetaTrader 4 and 5 (MT4 and MT5) platforms, as well as company’s own product called ActivTrader. ActivTrades’ platform is also available as an application for iPhone and iPad and offers one-click trading and advanced charting. MT4 gives some additional tools such as economic news, historic data center.
The minimum deposit for opening a live account is USD100 and the leverage could be as high as 1:400 but keep in mind that higher leverage leads to a greater risk of loss. However, there is negative balance protection and clients cannot lose more money than they have in their account.
ActivTrades claims to offer ‘some of the tightest spreads in the industry’ like 0.5 pips for EUR/USD and fully automated execution of deals (No Dealing Desk). However, the broker informs in the website that the actual execution of market orders may differ from the shown price, which means slippage exists. Stop loss orders are not guaranteed and under certain trading conditions they can be executed at a significantly worse than expected level.
ActiveTrades may act as a counterparty of the client’s deals and may not transfer all of them to its liquidity providers, or hedge some of them. That means the broker acts as a market maker, which suppose potential conflicts of interests with customers.
In 2011 the Financial Services Authority (Now FCA) fined ActivTrades PLC for failing to protect client’s assets appropriately. After that the company took steps to resolve this problem.
