4xp.com is an online forex trading platform and this review is about how lacking their service was for me. Tried out the demo account at 4xp.com for a couple of days and left it for dead for 2 months. I am glad their support didn’t bother me to open an account. Here’s my experience.
I was looking for a better forex trading platform out there and came across 4xp.com (their website says "best of 2012") . The website looks pretty fancy and lacks the most basic of all information. i.e how much is the minimum margin. I decided to not to let this mistake give me a bad start with them. Their spreads are pretty much the same as other market makers out there. Finally thought of giving the demo account a try and registered with my email address and phone number.
The Meta Trader platform is excellent with all it’s wonderful features provided the company makes use of them. The quotes were faster than instaforex.com and looked very promising. Did a trade on EUR/USD and tried to close it after a while. Now came the ugly surprise, 4xp.com does not have any concept of re-quotes!
Let me give you an idea why I think re-quotes are important for me. Lets say I buy 1 lot EUR/USD at 1.23590. Now the value has increased to 1.24590 and I get quite a nice profit. When I want to sell my 1 lot, the market will not freeze up at the quote I planned to sell and keeps moving up or down. Lets say as soon as I hit "close trade" button the value of the currency pair fell to 1.15000. Now I am making a big lose. In this instance most other forex platforms would do a re-quote and ask for me for confirmation. basically asking me "The market went way below your initial price and do you want to sell at the current price?" which I would obviously say no.
So coming back to 4xp, when I hit "close trade" button, it took a couple of seconds for the transaction to complete. When I checked the account history I saw the reality that 4xp sold my lot for a lower price than when I hit the "close trade". Luckily it was a demo account and it was only lower profits. I could imagine myself loosing a EUR 1000 on gold/USD easily if this was the case.
Yes I could set the stop loss and take profit for my trade but why can’t 4xp guarantee my price when not using S/L and T/P? I know it’s not hard. Other companies are doing it for crying out loud. Well I thought I don’t want to mess with it anymore and never logged into 4xp again.
After nearly a month of my registration I got a call from a guy from 4xp. I was in India at the time of registration and gave an India phone number so yeah the guy called from their Indian operations center. Usually I don’t remember about stuff I use for once and moved on with my life. So initially I didn’t know what he was talking about and I mentioned to him I am not into switching my trading platform right now and asked him to email me the details. Got the email and after a little pondering I figured why I gave up on switching. Replied the guy asking for details on how to open and account and how much is the minimum margin. On a side note lucky enough I was on my way to the airport to catch flight in India that day and I could answer the call. Came back to india and saw his reply asking me for my PAN number, Address proof and other messy documents but never mentioned anything about my second question "how much money". Told him I am an NRI and haven’t worked a single day in India or live there either and have only one "valid all over the world except in India" ID - my passport and ofcourse repeated my question "how much". He ask me for my phone number so he could give me a call and explain me the things I did not understand. I assume he was under the impression that I had no clue about what he said in his email and gave him my number. And no reply or calls till now.
I honestly appreciate your ethics of not bugging me with 2 dozen calls a day, but really? I just wanted a little more information and all you could do was ignore it? It’s just too bad I guess. Maybe the guy did me a favor. I wouldn’t know it I suppose.
Overall, if you can live with amateur support that feels like being operated out of some kid’s bedroom and don’t mind the idea that you might lose money on a transaction you know will make a profit, 4xp would be a good option. Yep that was sarcasm :)