15.04 bst
The market has behaved very erratically today. I reckon somebody got some inside news of the poor data at 10.00 am NY time in advance. That explains the huge bounce from the lows after NFP.
At the same time my platform IG Markets simply stopped responding at the time of the 10 am data. I wanted to close my positions but the screen simply didn’t respond. I have a feeling this kind of behaviour is programmed into the platforms, to protect the broker and screw the trader. It cost me over 20 pips in EU, 10 pips in UJ, and 10 pips in GU by the time I managed to close my positions. Here is the final score:
USDJPY: closed long at 99.00, +173 pips
EURUSD: closed short at average 1.3125, -49 pips
GBPUSD: closed short at 1.5576, -3 pips.
The Zen of FX Trading 
Don’t trade with these so called CFD brokers. Their platforms are full of little tricks that stop you from trading during big news times. Go with MT4 or MT5. Much quicker execution speeds.
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You got it backwards. I am an IT professional and I personally know the innards of the MT4 software. They have a feature that allows the broker to manipulate the data-feed. It is one of MT4’s selling point to the brokers! All brokers are crooks, some less than others; with MT4 I know it first-hand. Perhaps the only solution is a bloomberg or reuters trading terminal, but then you pay for that too. So far only Dukascopy and Oanda have a clean record with me. Not to say that they don’t cheat, but I haven’t experienced it and the examples of these two I’ve read on the web are not fully convincing that they were deliberately cheating.
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Hi Zen. I’ve encountered the same issue with IG as well, but never at a time thats been totally crucial, though its always frustrating. If I know I’m close to placing a trade I often now switch watch lists just to make sure everything is active, and if not I log out and back in. I’d be interested to know if this occurs on other platforms. It might be worth switching? Well done with the USDJPY trade.
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I’ve had this experience with IG a couple of times in the past 2 years, but always at crucial times resulting in losses for me. I think I will switch to Dukascopy or Oanda soon.
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