Major Market Manipulation
I have been trading a crypto crossover pair on a demo account for almost 3 months now. Up until a month ago everything was going just fine. The first thing I started seeing was chart manipulation. The candles were no where near the bid and ask lines. Sometimes the bid and ask lines weren't even showing on my chart anymore, but yet the candle was moving just like normal so I never suspected anything until I went to take a trade or close one out and the trade wasn't where I thought it would be. When I discovered what was happening, I would have to close out of my account and log back in again so that the bid, ask, and candles were at the appropriate places. With in just a few minutes they were off again, so now I need to close down before I take a trade and before I exit a trade to make sure it is doing it at the price I intended. This started happening about the same time that they changed their account types to Basic, Plus, Royal, and Raw. I used to have an ECN account with a liquidity provider, but now I don't know what I have. I suspect from the changes I am seeing that I am now on a B-broker account where NCE handles the account in-house and trades against me.
About a week or two ago, my pair just stopped trading at noon. I contacted support and they did not know anything. They sent me on some wild goose chase that resulted in nothing. At midnight, the pair just started working again. I had checked different pairs and everything I checked was still trading. the only thing that was not trading were all of the crypto crossover pairs. I checked their website and my email and there wasn't one notification that they were stopping trading on these pairs for 12 hours.
Last Monday when I started trading, I noticed that my chart now showed prices with 8 digits after the decimal. I understand that this is how Crypto does this, but I am trading with a forex broker, not a crypto broker. For the 2 1/2 months there were only 2 digits after the decimal. This is really confusing on a MT5 account, and maybe that was their reason for doing it. I just don't know.
I have been trading on the weekends ever since I set up this account. I liked trading on the weekends because it was the only time when my chart was not being manipulated because the brokerage was closed on the weekends. However, this weekend, I was not able to trade at all, despite the crypto markets being open 7 days a week. Today, price hit my target point on one of my trades, but it didn't close out when it did because the broker did not allow trading this weekend. In fact my trade went into profit by $2500. However, when the market opened today my trade was immediately closed out, but not at the current price. They closed it out at the take profit price I had set so I only had a profit of $500, instead of the $2500 that I should have had. If the tables had been turned, and it was a stop loss that price had gone through by $2000. They would have closed that out at the current price rather than the SL price that was set. I have had that happen with other brokers. This is just another form of market manipulation. If this had been a real account, I would have lost out on $2000 of profit because of where they closed my trade.
In my opinion, this broker is playing both sides against the middle. If they want to treat Crypo pairs like they do in the crypto market. Then they use the Crypto price structure with 8 digits past the decimal. Then take profit and stop losses are taken at what they are set at, but then trading has to be allowed on the weekends, just like it is in the Crypto market so people can manage their trades. If they want to treat it like Forex, because this is a Forex broker, then the price should be listed at with only 2 digits past the decimal, take profit and stop losses should be executed at the current price when the market opens. If treating this like Forex, then the market would be closed on the weekends. It is not ethical to treat crypto trading on a forex account like crypto for some things and forex for others, whichever is most favorable to the broker. It needs to be one way or the other, but not both.
I might add that I did not receive any notification to any of these changes. They were all done rather sneakily. The only thing I was notified of was the account type changes.
I cant speak about deposits or withdrawals because this is only a demo account. However, that fact that I am experiencing all these things on a demo account, doesn't make me want to start a real account with this broker. I don't feel I can trust them. I will keep trading this demo account and if I see that these issues are no longer an issue in my trading, I may reconsider and open a real account. It really too bad that they had to start doing all these things. The first to months were perfect.
