Residence, Regulation, and Company Management Structure
IFX Markets Inc. is registered in CFTC and is a member of National Futures Association. It is a US subsidiary of a London-based international market maker IFX Markets Ltd. IFX Markets Ltd is regulated by the Financial Services Authority and has a permission to do business throughout the European Union.
IFX Markets' Ltd head company, IFX Group plc, has been on London Stock Exchange since 1965.
Addresses of US, UK and Chinese offices are stated.
No managers of the company are mentioned. The management structure is not obvious.
Company's Market Position
IFX Markets Inc. has an official status of Brokerage Firm in accordance with the legislation of the USA. IFX Markets Ltd is a marketmaker.
The company offers a traditional set of client accounts: individual, incorporated (joint), corporate and trust.
The company trades in one lot 10 000 units of leading currency, a minimum deposit for opening a trading account is $500.
Trading accounts can be in any of 12 currencies.
Types of Services Offered
The company trades 27 exchange rates. Credit leverage 100:1 with an opportunity to decreasing on demand of a client. Spreads of 2 pt. for EUR/USD, USD/JPY and 3 pt. for other majors is declared. During the output of global news expansion of spread is possible. The rates of exchange are quoted by stream method (without queries of a dealer), the maximal volume of transaction is limited to 50 million units of trading currency. The transfer of the opened positions to the next day is made on traditional rules of SWAP.
It was impossible to find the exact sizes of spreads for all currency pairs. There was nothing about the size of minimum margin (level of liquidation) or rates of SWAP either.
Each transaction is charged for every full lot. Payment rates for a transaction are stated. It is $1.25 on the English version of the site, and $0.625 on other supported languages. Payment rates for bank orders are stated too.
Individual trading accounts can be opened online from the site, other types of client accounts can be opened by completing several real forms. You can deposit money with a bank order and cash checks.
Traders Support
Information for beginners can be found only in the English version of the site. People who get interested refer on NFA Online Learning Program and NFA Publication "Trading in the Retail Off-Exchange Foreign Currency Market - What Investors Need to Know".
You may open a 30-days demo-account.
Invitations on different shows and seminars of the third party firms and organizations are also placed on the site.
There is a short FAQ section which is meant for solving mainly technical problems.
It is possible also to contact with company's support crew by telephone line or e-mail.
There is no analytical, fundamental or news support on the site.
The Trading Platform
The company offers both JAVA and Windows versions of trading platform which executes basic informative and trading services. Judging by a description on the site, the trading platform does not support graphic analysis. «IntelliCharts» by FXtrek.com, Inc is used for this purpose.
Site Design and Ease of Navigation Comments
The designers of the site didn't bother themselves, because the whole design is very simple and navigation is just primitive. Though all the texts are brief, not all of them are translated into 7 languages. Probably the non-English versions were done separately, because neither their registration nor maintenance is similar to English version.
Disadvantages
- The company claims to be a part of a giant corporation, but has a primitive website.
- The structure of the company is not mentioned, there is no complete information about term-of-trades and thus, it is impossible to calculate the cost of trade.
- There is no analytical support.
- Information stated on the site changes, accodring to the language.
