Forex Brokers – What I Learned as a Broker Trading 5,000 Clients

I spent 10 years as a forex broker and traded thousands of clients, here I will give you a broker’s view of trading clients.

I will reveal who won, who lost, how we made money and how we treated them.

I joined as a rather green salesman and had no idea about the reality of forex and futures trading.

I was excited about joining an industry where millions were made and millions were lost by clients – It was very exciting!

The company

I was rather shocked at the reality which was:

Clients didn’t appear to win very often and the company based its balance sheet on commission to equity.

The view was that about 95% of clients would lose and they would do it all on their own, with no help from us.

The clients we liked (from a financial perspective) were the ones who made commission for the company and top of the list were:

Day traders:

They lasted for short periods, never won and made loads of money for the company.

If they believed it worked, let them get on with it and we would take the commission.

Shoot from the hip traders

The action men.

They loved the buzz, in and out all the time, trading the news and advice from gurus and with no discipline.

Again, they wiped themselves out and made us plenty of money.

The company did not dislike its clients.

We treated all clients well and did what a good broker should:

Help them with queries and made sure they got fast accurate executions.

We just let them do as they wanted and in most cases they lost – that’s simply the reality of trading.

The clients

We had clients from all walks of life, from retired people, to highly educated mathematicians and the few that did win surprised me.

The ones I personally hated were the ones I will refer to as “educated fools”

Cocky as anything and believed they had a divine right to win, because they were clever.

They would ignore my warnings, that they would not win with systems that were too complicated and tell me to mind my own business.

If I am honest, when they learned the reality of a wipe out, I felt a little inclination to say “told you so”, but never did.

Perhaps my favorite client was a retired lady, 81 years of age, who lived on a sheep farm in Australia.

A lovely lady and she taught me a few things, that I remember to this day.

She devised a system and showed it to me.

It was a simple buy and sell strategy and relied on holding big trends for months on end and you could learn it in a few hours.

Personally I thought it was to simple to work, but she built a $5,000 account to $39,000 in three months and had passed $100,000 in under a year.

She drew her charts by hand ( this was the late eighties) and didn’t have a TV and never read the papers.

Each day she would check her prices draw her charts and make her trades if she needed to.

A polite, humble trader, who was loved in the office by all.

We all had respect for the way she was our most profitable trader, even above some quite well known money managers.

We had many other clients.

Most lost and some won ( very few), but the ones who did win were humble, had simple systems, traded only when their systems told them to, had iron discipline and believed they were right.

This is just my experience.

I did trade a lot of people.

They from all walks of life and I learned very few won, but the ones who did, kept it simple, the ones who didn’t, had big ego’s, or liked excitement and traded with their emotions lost.