Or so this website claims:
Easy-Forex
You’ll remember earlier this year the Savior wrote up a story on Easy Forex after an Israeli news broadcaster ran an expose on them:
Forex Factory - View Single Post - Proposed NFA Capital Requirement
In that story informants claimed that as introducing agents they only made money if their clients lost money. Well, in this soon to be published book from the gang at easy-forex-warning they claim this is how introducing agents are compensated:
Quote:
In order to ensure it's wining against their clients, Easy Forex rewards their employees and people working for it outside the company, according to the amount deposited minus the withdrawals of their clients.
To demonstrate this method lets take an example.
1. An Easy-Forex agent convinces a person to open an account at Easy-Forex to trade the account by himself or to authorize an account manager to trade the account for him
2. The customer deposits $100,000
3. The agent is rewarded a certain percentage from this deposition. For the discussion let's assume 10%. That is, the agent is rewarded $10,000.
4. The customer trades the money in the account or someone else does it for him and after a while he withdraws the money. At this stage there are three possibilities:
a. The account is balanced. That is the account holds $100,000 that the customer withdraws. In this case the agent that brought this customer needs to pay Easy-Forex back the $10,000 he received for the deposted amount.
b. The account is drained. That is the customer lost all the money in the account. In this case the agent does not need to pay back Easy-Forex anything. In this case Easy Forex gets the reminder minus the money given to the agent.
c. The account gained relative to the opening time. Say, the account balance is now $200,000 and the customer withdraw all this money. In this case the agent needs to pay Easy-Forex the $10,000 they gave him and another $10,000 out of his own pocket.
What happens in practice is that they don’t charge the agent immediately. The agent's balance at Easy-Forex becomes now –$20,000, and next month he needs to recruit $200,000 before making any money. From any point of view this money comes from this agent pocket.
What Easy-Forex is telling their agent is that they are partners in the company: They tell them you will make money from the customers you bring only if the company will make money from the client, but you (the agent) will lose money from this customer if we, the company, will lose from him.
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It’s called the “Net Deposit Method” and I must say this is all new to me. If it is true it is downright sinister. In fact, one agent provides testimony at the website in which he describes how angry an agent would get if their customer actually started making money:
An agent testimony
Quote:
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“I saw people with clients that made money for many months. They use to give him such bad service. Answer unpleasantly… There was a way of life in the company, a way of life… when a client was making profit they use to shout, the son of a bitch, move away form here. The guy is making profit, he is destroying my account. He is destroying my salary. Fly from here, go to a different company. They gave him bad service to force him to move to a different company because it was on their expenses. This is a terrible thing. Now, at the end, it didn't matter what happened. I could not…. I, in the last Yom Kippur, and after talking to Rafi, I couldn't. This thing bothered me for a year or so. I don't know how I survived there one year or so.”
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All of these testimonials apparently are related to Easy Forex’s Israeli operation. But is this kind of stuff going on in America too? Easy Forex is registered with the NFA and to date they do not have any infractions on file with U.S. regulators. But then again the more and more checking I do on these companies the more apparent it is becoming to me that the NFA has only skimmed the surface of retail forex (the fact that Robert Gray’s fake $50 million bond went unnoticed for months by regulators is still flabbergasting to me.)
In any case Easy Forex deserves particular scrutiny from the trading public over their alleged market making activities. Traders should seriously consider trading only with Dealers that are not in the market making business. The evidence against them is really starting to pile up.
