I've been reading conflicting things about them. Putting aside the fact that your funds would be unprotected with them, keeping in mind that they allow you to place your funds in any Swiss bank and still trade through them (thus they should be just as safe as if they were in a US bank), what do people around here think of them? Is it a true ECN? Or do they pad the prices?
I think that the best / safest broker is Deutsche Bank -- they have a guarantee on funds up to 1 Billion Euro -- now whether you are good enough a trader is something else At least you don't have to worry about your broker going broke!
Had an account with Duka a couple years ago. Largest trade I did with them was 5M GBP, at market & no slippage. I only closed the account out of concern for book depth irregularities, basically they were showing 0.5M at each price interval three levels deep. Shortly after I left, it appeared they fixed it. I'll probably take another look at them again when they get their bank license. Customer service, wires in/out, trade executions were all fine. Spreads were relatively equivalent to other ECNs, some issues during the quiet times, but again this was going on 2 years ago, pretty sure they added even more LPs since. I requested they be added to fxintel.com, curious to see how they compare to IB, MBT, & FXCM ActiveTrader these days.
Do we know for sure if they're using FXCM to provide price feeds and liquidity, or are they just licensing their platform because it's cheaper than building their own retail offering?
I have been with DC for a little over a year now and have no complaints. Very stable platform and consistent pricing . Regards
Yes, via a Java 'JForex' api and FIX. You can run your strategies within the JForex platform or directly using the api's. Also,there are back-testing capabilities within the JForex platform plus an optimization tool; however, this doesn't utilize any AI/genetic-algorithms, simply brute force. Hope this helps.