Forex.com Review

Forex.com

GAIN Capital Holdings, Inc. it is the parent company and own the brand name Forex.com, which is one of the biggest US-based financial brokers offering online trading services. It is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK. GAIN Capital Holdings, Inc., is a publicly traded company on the NYSE and as per financial data for Q3 2016 it has total assets of USD1.5 billion.

Trading instruments consist of 50 currency pairs. 10 global indices and commodities.

Slippage

The broker claims to build ‘a deep liquidity network of banks’, thus it provides ‘tight spreads in most market conditions’ and it had ‘an average execution speed of 50 milliseconds’ in 2015. However, the website informs that under certain circumstances (high market volatility, low liquidity and system availability) the executed price may differ from the one, available at the time when order has been submitted. That means slippage exists.

Trading cost ?

Forex.com offers an account intended for active traders called Premium Account. It lowers trading costs by up to 15% and there is an interest rate between 0.5% and 2% on account balances. The minimum deposit for Premium account is USD10,000.

With Forex.com clients can choose between its own FOREXTrader platform and well-known Metatrader 4. FOREXTrader has some nice features such as 1-click trading, advanced order types (OCO, If/Then, Trailing Stops), advanced charting, news and economic calendar. MT4 provides autochartist (a tool that automatically recognizes the market’s pattern) and free expert advisers. Both platforms have PC and web-based versions as well as applications for iOS, Android and Windows mobile devices.

Account types

The minimum deposit requirement is USD50. The maximum leverage is 1:400 applicable in forex trading and this could increase the risk of loss. And moreover, there is no negative balance protection so clients could owe money to the broker. Stop loss orders are not guaranteed and during the price gap will be executed at the first available market price.

The company is the the counterparty to all client’s orders and doesn’t process all of them via ‘Straight Through Processing’ (STP). Furthermore, it can combine orders from different clients for execution as a single order. Forex.com acts as a market maker and this could lead to potential conflicts of interests with customers.

Acquisition and USA market

In February 2017, the parent company GAIN Capital reached an agreement on the acquisition of the US client base of FXCM Group, which was pulled out of business in the USA.