Nile and Numbers

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I used to compare brokers on a single advertised number and then wonder quietly where the balance had gone. Writing the charges out in the order they actually land fixed that.

There are five, and only one of them is the number in the advertisement. Conversion on the way in, charged before I have placed a single trade. The quoted difference between buy and sell, paid on entry. A per-lot charge, where the account carries one. An overnight financing amount for every night a position stays open. Then conversion again on the way out.

The first and the last are the ones I never counted, and they never appear on a fee schedule because they are not presented as fees at all. They are margins built into an exchange rate, which makes them easy to miss and easy to underestimate.

The whole thing fits on one line for a single position: the quoted difference, plus the round-turn per-lot charge, plus the overnight amount multiplied by the number of nights held, plus both conversions. Adding the last two terms changed which account type looked cheapest for the way I actually trade.

Which is the real point. The cheapest account on paper and the cheapest account for a shilling-funded trader holding positions for several days are not reliably the same account.

Full breakdown: The five costs, in the order they land

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A position I left open across a few days came back with a number I had not put there. It was small, but I could not explain it, and anything I cannot explain in my own records bothers me more than the amount.

What I had missed is that holding a position past the daily rollover point applies a charge, or occasionally a credit, depending on the direction of the position and the instrument. It is not a penalty and it is not hidden. It is simply not visible anywhere on the chart, so it never entered my notes.

Two things I did not know before I looked them up properly. It is charged per night, so it scales with how long I hold rather than how much I trade. And once a week the weekend nights are applied together on a single day, which is why one row in my statement was several times the others.

There are account arrangements where this works differently, and whether one applies to me is a question for the account settings rather than for a forum. Either way it now has its own column in my notebook.

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Adding a column to the record sheet this week, because the thing I have been tracking was the wrong thing. I was logging withdrawal request dates and arrival dates and treating the gap as the broker being slow.

Nearly every complaint about a broker being slow to pay turns out to be a step that was skipped weeks earlier. Three things gate a withdrawal: identity checks finished, the route matching the one used to fund, and enough free margin. I had been tracking none of them.

The first one is the quiet one. An incomplete profile does not stop a deposit. It stops a withdrawal. So the account behaves perfectly for as long as money is going in, and the gap only reveals itself at the one moment it is inconvenient. Finishing identity checks long before they are needed is not diligence, it is just moving the step to a day when it costs nothing.

The second: money returns by the route it arrived, up to the amount funded, before anything above that follows. This is an anti-money-laundering requirement rather than an arbitrary restriction, which is worth knowing because it means there is no support conversation that changes it.

The third is arithmetic I had not been doing. An open position ties up margin. The balance can look sufficient while the free portion is not. So the number to check before requesting is free margin, not balance — and if the amount matters, close or reduce first.

New columns, then: verification status, funding route, and free margin at the time of the request. Three fields that turn "it was slow" into a reason.

The full write-up is on my site.

Exness withdrawals from Uganda: what stalls them

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This is a notebook rather than a blog. I keep it because the things that decide whether trading from here works are administrative, and none of them are written down anywhere useful.

The entry that started it: I funded an account and the amount that arrived was smaller than the amount that left. No hidden fee, no mistake. The account was denominated in one currency and I paid in another, and the margin on that conversion was taken quietly at the moment of transfer. It appears on no fee page because it is a rate, not a line item.

So the columns here are the date, the method, the amount sent, the amount that arrived, and the date the money was actually usable rather than the date the platform said it had gone. After a handful of entries those five columns tell me the real cost of a funding route, which is something no comparison page could.

One habit I would keep above all others: finish verification on a quiet day, long before anything depends on it. Every stalled withdrawal I have read about traces back to a step skipped at signup.

The reference version of this lives on my own site.

How to find out which funding routes apply to your account