אווווווווו זה מענייין גם אחד המנכלים עזב
ob, , USA
A follow up to my review to address misstatements by Arthur and Karon.
I traded a LIVE account at Smarttrade for months. I traded profitably. I withdrew money, then I closed my account. So Karon, what is your basis for calling me a fraud? What incentive do I have to post a false review? If you are going to make an accusation like that, you should be able to back it up, and you can’t. And Smarttrade called my review “fake”? Well of course they did; the review was negative. I don’t see them calling any of the positive reviews fake…
To Arthur, well maybe what you say is accurate who knows, but how come you didn’t tell me all this when I was still a live client and inquired about it? I was told “it’s an IT issue.” WTF was that supposed to mean? You totally dodged the issue when asked about it directly by a live client. What would you expect me to think? And I don’t believe your explanation anyway. Why would an LP (liquidity provider) care about your execution delays and/or client trade sizes? The fact is LP’s make money on the spread, so they DON’T care.
I was profitable, so you took steps to defeat my trading (by lowering allowable sizes to 0.05 lots), to get me to leave. Simple as that. And if you are not a bucketshop as you say, then who is your LP? Care to share? I know you won’t because you don’t even HAVE an LP; you are a bucketshop. You’ll probably say “we can’t share that information”; …gee how convenient.
And by the way, it wasn’t just me either. I know of at least 2 other traders you did the exact same thing to and they were as upset as me; they just didn’t take the time to write a review here.
2012-03-29 2Star I traded with this broker for several months. I was initially attracted to them because they accepted US customers (I’m not sure if they still do). They offered higher leverage, and also CFD’s which are not available in the US.
I traded mostly CFD’s and did quite well, nearly tripling my account. But guess what happened then? One day, I noticed I could not enter an order size larger than 0.20 lots (2 mini lots). Anything larger than that, and the order window would gray out. Curiously, it was only for CFD’s (what I was making money on). On the forex pairs I hardly traded, all was still normal.
I inquired, and got some song and dance about it being an “IT department” issue, and that they would check with them and get back with me. IT issue, huh? Yeah right.
So I simply replicated the MT4 platform multiple times on my computer, so that I could still enter a larger size all at once (8-10 separate order windows of 0.20). That was a pain in the rear, but it still worked. Well guess what they did then? They further reduced the size I could trade down to 0.05 lots! That’s 5 MICRO lots; tiny tiny size.
Once again I got the same BS song and dance from them about how they were working to correct the problem. What a joke. So it went from normal trading, to 0.20 lots, to 0.05 lots all just by accident then?? That’s something the “IT Department” needs to look into? How dumb do they think we are?
These guys are nothing but a bucket shop market maker that trades against you. I don’t care how many times they paste the initials “ECN” on their website. That’s pure bullcrap.
They can get away with it I guess, as they are not regulated ANYWHERE. So if you have a problem with them, what’s your recourse?
Fortunately I did get all of my money out, so for me at least they weren’t a scam, so 2 stars vs. 1.
But since I was making a bunch of money there, they took measures to defeat my trading to get me to leave, and they did that successfully. Oh well, at least I walked away having made some nice cash
lindokuhle, durban, South Africa
Ive been trade with smart trade fx for close to a year now and I have blown an account trading with them(entirley my fault) but my concern is they never reply to my emails two in particular the first one being when i deposited funds and the funds never reflected on my balance ,second being where my platform stopped responding luckily I was albe to fix my platform but my first problem hasnt been resolved yet
Jay, USA, USA
Like Bob after several months of trading with no issue, I began to experience latency when placing orders. I never received notification from Smarttrade support alerting me to the fact that it was a known issue and they were working on it. I had to contact them and wait for a response.
I was told that they were having issues with their ECN provider and that they were in the process of switching providers and servers. My account was transfered to the new server and I was required to install a new MT4. After the move execusion was fast and I was once again trading without issue for a short while anyway.
To date they still have some bugs to work out with the new ECN as there are some issues with off quotes from time to time. Although Smarttrade claims to have excellent customer service, I beg to differ. They do a very poor job of alerting their clients to issues and their efforts to resolve them. If you speak to anyone in IT especially Arthur there is a lack of professionalism. He comes across irritated or generally unhappy with his job and has a condescending tone in his voice. Maybe the guy is just overworked and stressed out?
I recently sent an email to support about off quotes and it went unanswered. This is a first and I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.
I have never had issues requesting and receiving funds. Working with accounting and back office has always been easy and the folks are efficient as far as I can tell. They too have a problem being consistent in letting you know the status of your request.
All in all Smarttrade is an ok broker, they could be great but they need to improve on their customer service (especially tech support) and get the bugs worked out with the new ECN. The spreads are low and little to no slippage on execution.
Somebody give Arthur some vacation time and hopefully he comes back recharged and ready to go. I worked in IT for 15 years so I feel his pain, but you can never let your stress effect the way you deal with the clients!
Lee, ON, Canada
Smarttrade Fx was the worst broker ever!!!!!
They said they have ECN system, but that is totally crap lie.
They said that they have ‘improve’ ‘MT4′ system, which was crap, and totally scam to rip you off. I experienced several times that spread raised up to 25.0 witch was $250 spread!!!! WTF????
Warren, USA, USA
Unexplained fluctuations in the spread. Server issues, terminal losing connection multiple times with no explanation. TP levels not being triggered. Being stopped out although price is several pips away from SL, then given the excuse that there was a lot of volatility but the same order on another broker experienced no such stop out from volatility.
This company used to be good at one time. Unfortunately due to greed or lack of a good and honest liquidity provider, they have fallen off the cliff.
Stay away if you value your hard earned money!
Further Reading and Learning
MIGBANK.com Reviews: Unacceptable execution time. High spreads despite what is advertised. The demo server and the live server have very different data feeds so the demo is totally useless.
2PipFixed.com Reviews: These guys are a joke.
Be Careful with this broker. Their server down most of the times.
WindsorBrokers Reviews: This company is very dark.
XEMarkets.com Reviews: Very bad experience with this broke
