Author: Harry Napier
FBS Forex Broker: Reviews
FBS is a popular ‘no commission’ broker platform. It has acquired 15 million traders over the years (specifically, over the 11 years of its existence). It means that the full-time traders see the name all the time, be that in ad feed or in conversation with someone.
It also means there is a lot of impartial reviews about the platform, which enables you to see the hidden features and possible ruses before you start trading here. Well, you don’t need to go through the lot of them. It has already been done for this article.
The reviews leave an uneasy feeling. From the reviews on forexpeacearmy.com and trustpilot.com you can see that many active users are happy with the website, but the accusations of fraud aren’t scarce, more on that after a bit of company trivia.
What is FBS?
The platform allows you to trade on Forex, CFDs, in metals and shares. In short, it uses all the primary brokerage instruments. On the website, you can download both MetaTraders 4 and 5, and also their own FBS trader available for Android and iOS.
The website defines these points as the ‘benefits’ of working with them:
- FBS takes no commission for its services. Instead it, of course, utilizes spreads, which is still somewhat of a commission;
- Extensive education programs and support;
- No requotes
- Extensive account security
You can also write down a few extra benefits, like the deposit bonus of 100% and several account varieties (there is a ‘cent’ type that allows you to start small and see if you like the website). These benefits are troubled, however.
FBS reviews in 2020
On different review aggregators, an average rating range from 2.5 to 3.5 out of 5. It’s not a very good rating, Only 44% of the reviewers had an ‘excellent’ experience with FBS, while 21% said it was ‘bad’ (trustpilot.com, September 2020).
It’s also lower than the average for brokerage providers. On average, they have about 4/5, excluding the obvious scamming websites and frauds.
The problems people have with the platform
Such a low rating means a lot of people are obviously not happy with some of the FBS decisions and actions. Here are several problems users have with FBS, according to the reviews:
FBS seems to intervene in trading. A large portion of the reviewers are confident that FBS manipulates different aspects of trading, like the spikes movement or even their order placement. Several unhappy customers say that FBS placed orders on their behalf.
The motif could be to instigate a fake price surge, but it’s really impossible to say for sure without seeing the whole picture. It is a very common accusation, however. Easily half of the negative reviews are about such interventions.
The tech support is far from great. The usual complaints are about the unsatisfactory speed of replies from the support and also about the conspiring against the users. The members of staff can sometimes reply with meaningless sentences like ‘we need more information’.
And when you (on account of reviews) break through to them to talk about the issues you had, they can simply assume that you were hacked and end the conversation on that. Even if it’s not conspiring, it’s ultimately not helpful.
But there is evidence that it may be intentional. The users report about being blocked for unknown reasons. After contacting the support team, they were told that the users violated the terms and then ended the conversation.
The fees are too large. The platform attracts new users by promoting their commission-free nature. It’s true, FBS is a commission-free website. Instead it uses spreads, as mentioned before. ‘Spread’ is a pip-based difference between the selling price and the buying price. The selling price is obviously lower, that’s how the website makes money.
The problem is that the spread difference on FBS is one of the highest among the similar websites. However, this difference varies from one account type to another, so it’s up to the users to figure out if they like these fees or not.
The trading rules are pretty limiting. Once you complete your registration and try to jump into trading, you can suddenly realize you can’t trade in the way you’d hoped. That’s because the platform changes the way you can trade for the unknown reasons. Decide to ‘go short’, they can forbid you to ‘go long’, and vice versa. It’s frustrating.
The 100% deposit bonus that was mentioned somewhere above? It seems they limit you even more if you decide to sign up for it. For instance, you’re bound to only have 5 trades at a time, need to complete 20 trades a day, and so on.
All things considered, FBS makes a strong impression of the website that gives you all the promises in the world, but honors them in a specific profitable way, based on the reviews, of course.
The other side of the reviews
These cases of fraud by FBS have most likely happened, but the interesting side of all of it is that there are reviews that claim completely opposite. There are tons of reviews thanking FBS for their services and generosity, praising how fast they operate and so on.
There are still many reviews that scold the company for being a poor provider who sometime can’t even respond the commands properly, making people lose profit and investments.
Conclusion
The situation around FBS is dubious. It’s likely that the alleged scams were just errors inflicted by poor coding, but you’ll never know. In the end, it’s better not to start the account at FBS, but if you are an experienced trader who knows how to see when you’re being scammed and how to react to it, you can give it a try for sure.
