Forex.com Review: It does what it says on the FXing tin, obviously

Forex.com Expert Review

Forex.com is a mecca for forex trading. The domain name itself means that you are under no illusion as to what it’s all about. Every time I meet up for lunch with forex.com we always chat about how much it is worth as just a web address, regardless of the trading capabilities and global appeal it has (they are one of the few currency trading platforms allowed to operate in the US as well). Anyway, if you’re wondering if you should trade forex should you do it with forex.com, in this review, I tried out the platform features and put some live trades on for 24 hours to give you an overview of if they are the right forex broker for you.

Forex.com Review

Name: Forex.com

Description: Forex.com is one of the largest forex brokers operating globally and owned by NASDAQ listed institutional broker StoneX. Forex.com offers traders access to 5,500+ assets including 80+ currency pairs, thousands of stocks, popular commodities, indices and cryptocurrencies (pro accounts only in the UK). Pricing is competitive especially for those on their RAW spread account or active trader program.
69% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.

• Visit Forex.com

Why we like Forex.com:

If you are a forex trader, then Forex.com’s trading signals, platform and trading performance data make it one of the best platforms for currency trading.

Pros

• Trading Signals
• Post Trade Analytics
• Forex Specialists

Cons

• Limited Market Range
• No DMA

• Pricing
  (4)
• Market Access
  (3.5)
• Online Platform
  (4.5)
• Customer Service
  (4)
• Research & Analysis
  (5)

Overall

4.2

Comments Rating 0 (0 reviews)

Ratings Explained

• Pricing: Bread and butter is forex trading so pricing is paramount.
• Market Access: Lots of currency pairs and access to other markets as well.
• Platform & Apps: Really intuitive app with charting pop-ups for market visuals
• Customer Service: Local offices (with London HQ) for global support.
• Research & Analysis: Lots of trading signals and post-trade analytics

“For FX sake”, I thought to myself when I decided to write a review about a forex broker that offers access to the forex market for forex traders because on the surface, that’s what forex trading platforms do, so I din’t really think I’d have much to say. I’m not normally a fan of forex trading becuase, a. I’ve never had much success at it and b. I find the nuances of intra-day technical analysis too complicated.

I’m a sort of old-fashioned trader, I like to look at the market and think it’s either overvalued or undervalued and in my mind anyway, that is easier to do when looking at a company’s share price, an index or even a commodity. But for some reason, with forex trading, I’ve never really got the hang of it.

Having said that I have dealt currency for about 20 years now, but more as a broker rather than as a trader. And I know that the currency markets are not only hard to understand, they come with all sorts of complexities. For instance, I used to do some prime brokerage for institutions that would hedge their currency exposure when buying aeroplanes. So we would do deals like buying 50m EURSEK, then roll it forward for delivery in 2 months’ time. A massive headache when trying to market it up. Or dealing in GBPEUR, or was it EURGBP? I remember once, marking up (or down) a forward the wrong way. It would have been a €20k error, but fortunately, the dealer didn’t know what they were doing, so we styled it out. At one point, forex trading for me was a big income generator, but also the type of business I hated most. It was so bad at one point that the broker next to me refused to pick up the phone if he knew it was a big FX trade coming through. He’d get all red and sweaty and pretend to be busy filling another customer.

I was, in fact, so frustrated with how opaque pricing was in currency trading, that I decided to start up my own currency brokerage specialising in high-value currency transfers £250k upwards) and undercutting everyone. It was called Berry FX, you can still see the demo on Youtube. Basically, personal service with the best rates anywhere ever. But alas, I am a better marketer than a salesman, so I now just let other currency brokers compete for clients by trying to offer the best exchange rates.

But you don’t really care about that. You want to know what I think of Forex.com.

24 Hour Test

I thought I’d try something a little different with this review and have a bit of fun with it. So I took forex.com out for a 24-hour test drive around the City of London, putting some real trades on whilst going about my business to see if I could make any money.

SMARTSignals

I started out at the Bank of England with £10k on account at 11:30. Lunch was a few minutes walk from the tube station, so I took the opportunity to put some trades on using Forex.com’s SMART Signals. I’ve used these for years; back in 2018, they were known as GetGo; it was a stand-alone forex trading app. When I reviewed it back in 2018, I said back that it was the future of forex trading signals but are they still?

There are a couple of things that make these signals better than the rest.

1. They tell you the success rate
2. The signal is linked to an order ticket

When I was walking down King William Street to L’Antipasto to meet my contacts at Forex.com for lunch, I put a few traders on. First, I looked at the trades that had a historic success rate of over 50% and followed them. Then I looked at trading signals that had a success rate of less than 50% and traded against them. It’s a pretty simple strategy that generally works (not always, though). Used the classic stop/limit risk/reward ratio to of aiming for twice the potential loss as a potential win. Again, simple forex trading strategies. The market is not hard to call, but if you get a trade right, it often pays to let it run for longer, but if it’s wrong, close it sooner.

Trading Central

Then after lunch, on the way to my next meeting, I took a few moments on London Bridge, in the glorious sunshine with Tower Bridge in the background, to take a look at some of the other signals on forex.com, Trading Central. Now, Trading Central has been providing technical analysis to brokers for decades and provides a constant stream of manually and automatically updated trading ideas throughout the day to give traders an indication of where the markets may go.

It’s not as fluid as SMARTSignals, as you have to put the trades in manually, but still gives you a bit of stimulus. This is great for someone like me because I generally have an idea of what I want to do from eyeballing a chart (I did, after all, run a technical analysis division for five years), but it’s nice to get confirmation of your thoughts one way or another.

Execution

When you are actually trading there are some great other features on the app like:

• Swipe to trade: a bit like Tinder (so I hear – I’ve been married for 12 years).
• Chart on tickets: with a quick tap, you can bring up a chart when on the order ticket (to double-check)
• Working orders on charts: when looking at a chart, you can see your working orders and positions
• Position potential: as well as seeing what margin is required when placing a trade you can also see and set your stops and limits as a potential monetary amount instead of pips.

Post-Trade Analytics

Once you’ve done a bit of trading, you can review your trading history and see where you do well and where you can improve. This is a great feature as it can break down how well you trade by time of day, markets or volatility. You can also set up “Play Maker” if you have a trading strategy and want to stick to it. Obviously, you can’t get that sort of data in a 24-hour test drive, so I’ll have to revisit that another time.

Demo Account

Forex.com have a pretty good demo account, in fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between the demo and live trading platform. You get the same functionality and as trades are OTC, the same prices.

However, when I opened a demo account to test them, I already had a real account. So after I got my demo account login details, I clicked through to the “webtrader” portal (and this is quite funny or alarming, depending on how you look at it), my live account details were auto-filled in by Google Chrome.

Now, had I not been checking my email, to ensure that they had sent me through my credentials (as Interactive Brokers didn’t for some reason when I tested their demo account), I may not have noticed that I was logging into a live account. It could have been disastrous if I’d started ttrading away thinking it was paper money. Even more so as you get £10k in demo funds and I’d deposited £10k in my live account when I took forex.com on a 24-hour trading signal test drive around The City.

It reminded me of when a trader thought that he was trading on a demo account and put $1bn worth of orders through and then sued his broker because they voided his €10m profits. But, that’s unlikely, to happen to me because even on demo accounts I don’t get thank lucky.  And almost certainly won’t happen to you because why would you open a demo account after already having a live one unless you were reviewing it?

TradingView & MetaQuotes

I had a good play about with TradingView, as it’s now the go-to destination for traders. TradingView is a sort of social network for traders where you can view charts (they are excellent) and post trading ideas (a pinch of salt). As TradingView has grown, they have also become an execution venue too, so you can link your Forex.com trading account and deal straight from the charts. This shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for most traders as the charts on the Forex.com app and web-based platform are provided by TradingView (who incidentally are one of the largest financial-based websites in the world now).

You can also trade on MT4, if you are into that sort of thing…

Am I a Forexpert?

I did make money on day one, mainly thanks to putting on a GBPUSD trade that covered most of the losses from some of the other trades. When I used SMARTSignals five years ago, I also made money. Day two wasn’t so good, on my way to an investor show, I gave back a few pennies but still ended up on top. But I have to admit my traders were calculated guesses rather than heavily researched positions. I don’t like holding positions overnight, as day trading reduces not only your margin requirements but also increases the amount of sleep you get because you don’t wake up with cold sweats in the middle of the night worrying about Asian interest rates.

Overall would I recommend forex.com? Well, yes, if you are going to trade Forex and don’t know where to start, it’s a massive brand with global reach and owned by a listed brokerage with an institutional pedigree. As far as box-ticking is concerned, they tick the lot. Or should I say pip the lots…