Originally Posted by harvester

I originally learned about the company when they were Commerce Bank. I attended TradersExpo in Las Vegas where they had a booth. Their slogan at the time:

"Is your money really safe in a forex account - wouldn't it be better in a real bank??"

I found that a bit intriguing, and did some research on the subject. The idea of being able to fly to Boston and going to a teller to withdraw my account in cash seemed like a nice touch. They charged a commission, but once again justified that by saying that they were only a bank holding your money, and had no interest in the arbitrage, and other dealing desk monkey business that forex dealers like FXCM, Gain, GFT, and even Saxo does with your account.

In any case, I opened an account with them. I was happy enough with the execution of the trades. I was scalping, trading news and seemed to get reasonable performance. I just didn't care for the trading platform - very limiting compared to other platforms (however not sure what it is like today).

My main problem with this company was when IFX markets absorbed Commerce Bank. For most of the customers it seemed like a non-event including me. However, it was significant. One day I called IFX and was talking about my segregated account that I could literally fly to Boston and do a withdrawl on. I started to get responses like: "What are you talking about, you can't do that". "All the money is in one big account, and we are segregating it by internal account numbers per NFA guidelines". I mentioned that that is what I was originally told, and they said yes it was that way for while, but that changed when IFX Markets took over.

So in effect, the new IFX account was more or less setup like all the others that I heard them originally comparing themselves to. The only difference is that they still charge a commission. Their argument to that was their spreads are low. My response to that was most of the Metatrader brokers have the same or better spreads, but no commissions - and you get Metatrader also.

I immediately closed my account. I simply did not like their lack of transperancy about the changes. From my perspective, it was like a bait-n-switch play.

-harvester