Forex Broker Regulations - Part One

What good is forex broker that you can trade and make money with, but when it comes time to take your money, they don't give it to you, because they don’t have it?

Forex Broker Bust Story. Refco was the biggest forex broker that was worth around $4 billion dollars. In October of 2005, Refco shut down its operations and every trader who had money with them got screwed big time.

Refco was regulated and for some time they were spending not only their profits but also deposits of their clients.
The amounts of money that traders saw on their trading platforms and the amounts of money Refco had in their bank accounts were different by $400 million.

So when the news hit the wire that Refco is running at such deficit, traders panicked and started asking for withdrawals. The only problem was that Refco was $400 million short of what it owed to traders.

There was a trial of course, and whatever assets the company had the court ordered to distribute among traders. I knew some people that had money with Refco. As far as I remember, after all assets were sold they got around 10% of what was owed to them. That means if person had $10,000 in his trading account, he got only $1,000 of it.

ZERO Spread Phenomenon

ZERO Spread Phenomenon

The ZERO spread phenomenon is a very interesting one and is only possible in non-centralized markets such as forex. Let’s discover how ZERO spread is possible in forex market.

In my opinion the goal of every honest forex broker should be to provide traders the best possible price available. The way they can do that is by choosing the best possible price from several different banks and from every trader on their platform.

So let’s say Bank A has price of GBP/USD as 1.9950/1.9952, and Bank B has price of GBP/USD as 1.9948/1.9950.

So what your broker does is it takes the lowest bid price from Bank A, which is 1.9950, and it takes the lowest offer price from Bank B, which is also 1.9950. Because bid is from one bank, and offer is from another bank, they can stay on your broker with ZERO spread without executing against one another.
Getting screwed on Stop/Losses. Let’s now discover why the stop/losses will get hit less often if you use a broker with natural trading environment.

Well…first of all, if the environment of the broker is not natural, it means that they constantly need to worry about the accuracy of their price.

Many forex traders trade during news, and when price gets very volatile during news, the forex broker with not-natural environment becomes afraid that the traders will take advantage of their price feed and will get filled on much better price than the real market price.

Because of that, the broker is forced to artificially raise their spread during news. It happens quite often that the spread is raised from 2 pips to 30 pips and sometimes more.

So if your stop/loss is 20 pips away, and the spread just got raised, even for 1 second, you will get stopped out on a price that you would never be stopped out on if you traded with broker that provides natural trading environment.

Every day is filled with many different news announcements, so if you do not have a broker with natural trading environment, you can get screwed on spread and stops very often.