Interesting question 'takestock'.
I don't think the same person who has made that money would make the same in reality for several reasons that first spring to mind:
1. People generally take higher risk with money that is not theirs.
2. There is additional incentive to take higher risk with some prize at the end.
3. Live accounts can be fed different data streams manipluated in many ways, not in favour of traders.
4. Why would a successful trader bother with a competition, and one that only has $500 prize money?
I signed up for that comp but when I looked at the winning board first thing Monday morning after it started, the winner was already at just over $50k. So this told me it is just another marketing excercise with figures that can easily be fudged anyway.
Diggs1
What's the reason for non DMA brokers? How much can they manipulate prices to benefit themselves. There must be laws that keep them inline?
As this market, particularly FX is largely unregulated there is good money to be made by drawing in amateur punters. Most of these non DMA brokers (market makers) have PDS statements to mostly cover their method of business operation, and they rely on at worst, resolving their practices via phone discussions with their retail traders.
Having said the above sometimes you find little difference between DMA and MM broking once you get into longer time frames.
I remember about 2 years ago getting wild orders filled through spiking action on an MT4 platform with a MM, later they said they have fixed the data and removed the spike. Hey I had my orders filled and made over $400 in about 0.5 of a second. I did not update my data and found this spike created a gap which was now getting filled.
In the end DMA is the best way to go, but I always have 2 platforms open at any one stage to correlate data. I would suggest this for anyone. Even SFE who effectively are providing DMA, do manipulate the prices. I use Commsec for my SMSF and gold contracts get very low on liquidity so SFE put up contracts to trade, which is what a MM is. They put up a standard 970 contracts from memory at a set price, if you try and buy any of these they remove them and my them further up, if you are trying to go long, which in my case I was. They get you to chase the price.
A little off topic but here is a great example of spiked MM chart for silver which shows gap filling:
On my other platforms and even a later opened account with the same broker does not show this spike. The good thing about this spike is gap filling is rarely done in one move so I am betting that silver will revisit the bottom of this spike.
Hope you find this interesting food for thought.
