Global forex broker Admiral Markets has made an announcement, addressed to all its clients with “older” accounts on the AM-Live trading server. The announcement contains a number of changes aimed at providing up-to-date trading conditions to obsolete account types in order to improve our quality of service and provide better compliance with the current regulatory requirements and those upcoming with MiFID II.
The complete text of the announcement reads as follows:
Starting from trading session opening on Monday 2 October, 2017, the trading terms of our flagship Admiral.Markets account will be applied to all trading accounts hosted on AM-Live server. Details of these changes are listed below.
N.B. Clients with Admiral.Markets (ex-Pro) accounts on the AM-Live server – some technical changes will be applied to your accounts as well, please check clause 2 to avoid missing important information related to your account.
1. Changes on the Admiral.Classic Accounts
1.1. Expanded Range of Markets
The range of available markets will be greatly expanded. Instead of the current 20 instruments, you’ll get access to the full list of Admiral.Markets instruments, with all supported FX pairs, CFDs on indices, commodities, single shares, bonds and cryptocurrencies!
You can find detailed information about each of these instruments in the Contract Specifications section of our website.
1.2. New Margining Model
The margining terms will be switched to the tiered margining of the Admiral.Markets account, under which the provided leverage will no longer depend on the account’s balance and will be determined only by a position’s notional value in account’s currency.
What Are the Benefits of These New Margining Terms?
More confidence while trading, as the margin value for your current positions will no longer increase all of a sudden once your balance reaches another tier. Under the new terms, you will be in full control of your leverage rate as you control the size of your position.
More effective use of your funds for trading without decreases of potential exposure once you’re bound to a lower leverage rate due to an increase of your balance. Under the new terms, your potential exposure will always grow along with your funds and vice versa.
More freedom while trading due to the fully independent margining of different instrument types, which provides you greater flexibility in terms of combining different trading strategies on the same account.
Enhanced protection against negative balances due to a leverage rate of 1:50, which will be applied to positions opened during the pre-close hours on Fridays and before trading holidays, with the intention of minimising the potential impact of price gaps.
Traditional, straightforward margin calculation (please see our margin calculation examples).
1.3. Replacement of Instant Execution With Market Execution
The obsolete execution type, inherited from older generations of MetaQuotes software – Instant Execution – will be gone for good. Instead, all instruments (including those currently available) will be enabled for trading in the Market Execution (STP) mode.
What Are the Benefits of Market Execution and Straight-Through-Processing (STP)?
No requotes – your requests will be always executed at the available market price, with no requotes technically possible even on a fast market.
Our Volatility Protection settings will be made available under the terms of Market Execution, in order to help you manage acceptable slippage, get protected from price gaps and other typical issues connected to market volatility.
Transparent execution quality – you can make a general assessment of the execution statistics of our major instruments on the Execution Quality Statistics page, or precisely calculate the slippage-related costs on your own by using the record the amount of slippage to order’s comment field feature of the Volatility Protection service.
Faster order confirmation – your requests will be processed by our STP execution engine, which works at superior internal speeds.
Best Execution – courtesy of our system design – i.e. your orders are always filled at the best available price in a controlled manner, in compliance with MiFID requirements, confirmed by numerous technical audits carried out by several of the ‘Big 4’ auditors.
We’ve invested a lot of resources into the development of our STP engine and technical infrastructure over past number of years and strongly believe that the resulting execution quality, which is additionally enhanced by supplementary solutions, such as Volatility Protection, provides a reasonable tradeoff between the ‘precision over execution’ priority of the Instant Execution model (which comes at the cost of re-quotes) and ‘execution over precision’ priority of the Market execution model (which comes at the cost of slippage – which we’re trying to minimise with all the abovementioned measures).
Please note that the changes will also affect open positions and pending orders and therefore Market Execution mode will be applied to them from the opening of the trading session on Monday, 2 October, 2017.
1.4. Removal of Minimum Distances for Placement of Pending Orders
Limit/Stop levels which restrict placement of pending orders closer than a certain amount of points to the market price will be completely removed, so you will no longer be limited on your decisions regarding the distance for placement of Take Profits, Stop Losses or other pending orders relative to the current price.
1.5. Increased Pricing Precision
Existing instruments will be switched to ‘5-digit’ pricing, i.e. the minimum tick size will be changed from 0.0001 to 0.00001 for EURUSD; and from 0.01 to 0.001 for USDJPY, etc. This change will decrease the minimum spread values.
1.6. Removal of the Limitation of the Maximum Spread
Such limitations simply don’t work under the terms of Market Execution because all requests are always filled at the market price, which cannot be influenced by the spread settings on the platform side.
1.7. An Increase of the Maximum Order Size
The maximum transaction size will be increased to 100.0 lots for Forex instruments (it’s currently at 50.0 lots), allowing traders with bigger deposits to trade more conveniently.
We really hope you’ll appreciate the above changes and enjoy the terms of our flagship Admiral.Markets account, which have been continually polished and improved since the discontinuation of the Admiral.Classic offering. This account is designed to deliver the best possible trading experience.
2. Changes to Admiral.Markets (ex-Pro) Accounts on the AM-Live Server
Please note that all legacy instruments of the former Admiral.Pro account on AM-Live (i.e. those with distinctive -Pro postfixes) will be placed into the ‘Close Only’ mode on Monday 30 October, 2017.
At the same time, you’ll receive the full range of Admiral.Markets instruments without the postfixes, including the latest additions – such as CFDs on European shares and cryptocurrencies. For example, EURUSD will be added in parallel with the placing of EURUSD-Pro into ‘Close Only’, similar to all other instruments.
No trading terms will be changed in connection with the replacement of trading symbols.
Positions on the legacy Admiral.Pro instruments will be subsequently terminated, detailed in a separate prior notice, optimally in late December.
Why Is This Change Needed?
As you may have noticed, the most recent additions to our offering – such as CFDs on cryptocurrencies and other instruments – haven’t been added to the AM-Live server. This is due to the constraints of the MetaTrader 4 platform, which allows a limited number of instrument classes.
Most of the instrument classes are currently occupied with the legacy Admiral.Pro instruments with distinctive -Pro postfixes (e.g. EURUSD-Pro).
Considering the above changes on Admiral.Classic accounts (which are using instrument symbols without postfixes on the same server, e.g. EURUSD), there is one ‘golden solution’ which allows us to provide you with the full instrument coverage of the Admiral.Markets account: replacing the instruments with the -Pro postfixes with standard trading symbols and providing a full-scale Admiral.Markets offering to clients with legacy account types on the server.
So, we will close everything that has a ‘-Pro’ postfix, synchronise the list of instruments with the Live2 server and make them all available, for both ex-Pro accounts and ex-Classic accounts, thus enabling a fully supported Admiral.Markets offering for the entire population of the AM-Live server.
We thank you for your understanding and apologise for any inconvenience connected to the replacement of the legacy trading symbols.
Kind regards,
Admiral Markets