Ah yes. Good ol' CBFX, who spent much of last year louding trumpeting themselves as a solution to the problems when dancing with the retail shops.
Their slogan, the repeating mantra on their emails I recall
"Trade with a bank not with a broker"
And then...
They get bought up by IFX.
So much for the revolution.
By charging an actual set commission, the idea was that you could rest assured that CBFX would not be trading against you because they were taking their pound of flesh upfront rather than sneakily tipping prices against you at entries and exits and having incentive to see you hit the skids in the manner certain aggressive counterparty sites (many believe).
If you are a scalper,
it seems that several who have successful trading regular successful very short term trades have had the size of their commissions increased. Thinking about this,
if this is to pay for the hassle of hedging an individual forex punter's trades, it is at least comforting that their business model involves hedging at all; rather than trading against you regardless and simply hitting you with a funbag of tricks (magical spikes, hairtearing delays and comedy requotes) until you stop being successful or just go away.
If you are a position trader,
you would surely prefer the backup of negative balance protection (as offered by most of the shops); this is after all one of the real usps of FX (unlike several other popular areas of trading). Negative balance protection brings certainties and security especially when employing higher leverage and greater contract sizes. The best hard stop.
Fills and slippage usually fine but forget guarantees.
Execution speed you are paying for conspicuously (see above)- fair enough.
IFX eating up CBFX; refco eating up FXCM and ACM.
A chilling new trend... what did it remind me of?
For a while I couldn't remrember then it struck me...
Ladbrokes, Coral and William Hill eating up the smaller bookie shops.
Nothing new under the sun.
