Rogue Trades on IG Trading Accounts used by the Link-2-Success service

On Friday the 16th and on Monday the 19th the IG broker processed Rogue transactions on the accounts used by signal providers for our linking service.

 

This was corrected on Tuesday which left most of the accounts with huge positive balances and only 4 were negatively impacted and these effectively had a margin call.

 

As far as we can tell our investors were not impacted by these rogue transaction as the Receiver processes them correctly to investor accounts.

 

This however leaves us with many accounts with inflated balances.

ACTIONS FROM THIS UNFORTUNATE EVENT

 

1. The negative accounts can no longer be used for the linking service. If you are following any of the the negative accounts please ensure that all trades related to accounts are manually closed if they have not been closed by the receiver and please select another account to follow. The negatively impacted accounts with followers are:  linkpr1, linkpr4, 1klink162c, Link8p

 

2.Positively impacted accounts will continue to trade but in the long run will be converted to new live trading accounts when there are no open trades in the future. The impact of rogue trades will be removed from the equity balances used by Expert4x to report results so that reported results will look like these rogue trades never happened.

 

3. When new live accounts are introduced (In the place of existing account) the trading record will be made available to users of the linked service to assess the risk and performance of the new accounts that will use the same settings as the old accounts initially.

 

4. A table showing the adjustments to current trading accounts will be posted on this page when available.

Rogue trades are easy to identify on the FXBlue service which is a copy of the actual traded account.

  1. The are generally much bigger than other transactions

  2. They have 0 pips in the results

  3. They do not have a closing price

Below is an example of such trades.

Below is a copy of the email sent to users of the Linked-2-Success Service on 18 May after a Major IG Broker Account Software Glitch

Hi Everybody

 

This information will only impact traders who have used live accounts to actively link to our Link-2-Success service.

 

On Friday, May 16th, the IG Broker experienced a glitch in their trading software. Many of our linked account traders use IG Broker accounts.

 

In a nutshell, sell transactions resulted in huge gains, while buy transactions triggered margin calls on the trading accounts. These transactions have been reported in the FXBlue Links, and most accounts show gains that have almost doubled the account balance. Only a very small percentage of accounts experienced margin calls or low equity.

 

This has further been illustrated in this YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/iuHcqAmdyyg
Luckily, it appears that these rogue transactions did not carry through to the client-linked accounts, so the client accounts did not experience the full impact of these huge transactions. That is because the Receiver Robot only reacted to existing open transactions.

 

There were 20 accounts that experienced positive gains. These accounts will continue to be linkable, as strategies always assume that lot sizing will be based on the minimum account balance required on the linkable list. The accounts experienced a $250,000 gain, which distorts all trading ratios and statistics. We will in future correct the trading statistics shown on our linked account service page due to the rogue amounts. There will be a continuous difference between FXBlue results and the results on the Linked service page.  For details of these adjustments, please view this link: xxxxx

 

It does, however, mean that the negative trading accounts have become untradeable as equity has become negative, and there is no money in the account. Only four accounts were impacted by this, and if you have been following those accounts, please ensure that all trades for those accounts have been closed. If not, please close them manually.

 

These accounts with negative or low equity and that will no longer be available in the future are:

 

  1. Linkpr1
  2. Linkpr4
  3. Link8p
  4. 1klink162c

 

We will only be able to tell if this software glitch has been fixed on Monday, the 19th of May.

 

Over the next few weeks, we will be converting some of our linked accounts to Real-funded accounts to reduce the likelihood of this type of event.

 

I hope that this Broker Software glitch has not negatively impacted you.

 

Kind Regards

 

Alex
Expert4x
The table on the right represents the adjustments required to correct for the rogue trades that have occurred.

 

In the Link-2-Success information the amounts shown will be removed from the equity balance shown by FXBlue accounts.

 

Over time new Real linkable accounts will be created using the same strategies as the original accounts that were impacted by the glitch. Trading will then move to these new accounts. The transfer can only occur once there are no open trades on the original accounts. This process will take time.