Kudos to Steve and FXCM

Believe it or not, this post will be praising FXCM and one of their fine employees in the San Francisco office, Steve. And yes, I am serious.

For the amount of flack that FXCM receives I was truly amazed with the way they dealt with the following issue today:

During the middle of the trading day we had a signal from TAB to go short EUR/USD. The strange thing, however, is that instead of just 1 trade with the usual 4 minis being filled, there were suddenly 2 trades, only a few pips different than one another, and 8 minis! Knowing that TAB is a group that is always minimizing risks I found this puzzling and somewhat troubling. They essentially doubled our risk on an average trade.

I quickly emailed TAB asking why they had decided to open two, such similar trades. Before I heard a response from them I saw one of the trades vanish from my platform. I figured the situation had been resolved and there was nothing to worry about.

Unfortunately, the trade went against us and we, as the system always does, flipped our position. But wait, now I'm long 8 EUR/USD minis!!! After checking my history, I see that all 8 of the previous 2 short trades showed up meaning that the trade that I thought had vanished and had been remedied was actually still in the shadows.

I quickly got on FXCM's web live-chat support and began talking to a man named Steve. He listened to my issue and seemed to understand. He wanted to call me to clarify a few things and I told him to give me just a few minutes as I was leaving work.

Not long after I got in my car and headed home, the phone rang and it was Steve. He explained to me that tech support would be looking into the manner, but in the meantime they needed to close the outstanding duplicate trade. I gave him permission to do so and he did. He then said that they would need to "go through the audit trail" to determine if the issue was actually on FXCM's side.

"Oh great!", I'm thinking. It sounded like a typical, big firm excuse to make excuses why they can't bust my trades and compensate me for the losses. I had no choice but to agree and Steve promised to call me within the next couple hours.

I got home and started looking at some charts and Steve called. This was no more than 30 minutes later. He quickly told me that there had indeed been an issue with duplicate orders being sent and that my account would be credited to the amount of $192 and some odd cents. "This of course includes the added, auto-trading commissions" he said with authority. I was nearly speechless, not only was I expecting to have to fight with them to simply bust the trades that were mistakenly put on, but I thought for sure the commission would be a lost cause. His math was spot on and all I could do was thank him for being so quick to resolve the issue.

My only question for Steve was when it would be safe to start running the TAB EUR/USD signal again. He said that the tech team was investigating and working on it, but it should be no later than tomorrow. Again, he promised to call me with an update.

A couple hours later, Steve called. Although I couldn't answer the phone, he left a message informing me that the problems had all been remedied and it was now safe to start the EUR/USD signals from TAB. Again, I was impressed with the speed which this was accomplished.

I can't compliment the exemplary service I received from FXCM enough. This entire issue was solved within the matter of hours when I expected to spend weeks fighting about it and in the end, not being fully compensated for the errors. Again, thank you FXCM and if you read this Steve, a superior job well done!