Profitability of Polish traders in the third quarter of 2018. ESMA helped?

Polish brokerage houses offering trading mediation on the Forex market presented the results achieved by their clients in the third quarter of the year 2018 (see results for the second quarter of 2018). This edition of the report is exceptionally interesting due to the fact that it covers two months in which the ESMA guidelines limiting the leverage to 1 already existed: 30 (from 1 August 2018). According to the European regulator, the reduction of the leverage was to have a positive impact on the reduction of losses generated by retail customers. Do you really see such dependence?

Pursuant to the KNF guidelines that came into force in September of the 2016 year, Polish DMs are obliged to report statistics on the percentage of earning and losing customers divided into asset classes. The data must be presented on the broker's site to 10 on the day of the month opening the new quarter for the previous 3 months.

Earning money on currencies arrives

The tables below present the results of traders, broken down into financial instruments expressed as a percentage, which concluded transactions with Polish brokerage houses offering Forex / CFD trading. In the fourth row, we also added a change in percentages in relation to the percentage earning from the current quarter compared to the previous one.

The largest (profit / loss) values ​​were determined with the blue color in relation to all brokers in the statement.

Forex

CFD for goods

CFD on indices

CFDs on bonds and interest rates

CFD per share

Cryptocurrencies

TMS Brokers is still the only Polish broker to publish statistics of its clients trading on cryptocurrencies. 77,7% traders recorded a loss while 22,3% he made a profit. The difference in the percentage of earning traders is -23,5% compared to the previous quarter.

Table summary

In the third quarter of 2018, all brokers recorded an increase in profitability among their clients on the most popular instruments - CFDs on currency pairs. The best results were achieved by BossaFX clients, slowly approaching the magic barrier of 50% and not much more (only 0,14%) ahead of traders from Alior Bank. XTB's clients were the worst, although the percentage of profitability increased by less than 2018% compared to the second quarter of 4.

On commodity instruments only in Alior Bank you can see the improvement of statistics. It is impossible to get the impression that it is this asset class that turns out to be relatively problematic for Polish traders. And here again the worst fell out clients of XTB, where as many as 66,5% of them settled the third quarter with a loss.

On the stock exchange indexes, more than half of the clients earned profits by trading in Noble Securities. It is a kind of record, because there were no such good results anywhere else, excluding CFD for interest rates and bonds, which are characterized by a very low statistical sample. Are stock market indices our native horse? The worst performers were clients of DM Alior Bank, despite almost 4% of recorded growth. Interestingly, as many as 4 brokers can boast over 10% increase in profitability among traders.

The results achieved on CFDs on bonds and interest rates always need to be improved slightly due to the small interest in trading in them by investors. Nevertheless, more than 50% of the clients of TMS Brokers and Noble Securities managed to earn them. Alior Bank noted a significant drop, where as much as 16,66% of traders more losses, thus landing on the last position ex aequo with mForex.

There are only three brokers in the CFD stock list. The traders with TMS Brokers can boast the most profit with a very similar result to XTB customers. The third, last place is BossaFX. It must be admitted, however, that these are extremely poor results compared to the rest of the instruments.

Lever down, upside down. Are you sure?

There are some dependencies in published statistics. The results achieved by traders trading on currency pairs (over 8%) and stock market indices improved (even by 13%). We can also see a deterioration of CFD results based on bonds and interest rates, as well as goods, ie instruments that were subject to the largest reduction in leverage.

Remember that in this statement, a smaller loss does not affect the net interest income, and losing money “slower” cannot be considered a victory. In addition, the statistics do not inform us about the average deposit and the number of active clients, which makes it impossible to determine what percentage of Polish traders decided to migrate accounts outside the EU (especially those with smaller capital, for which the leverage of 1:30 turned out to be insufficient).

The question, therefore, was whether the earners actually arrived, or if less experienced traders who used small capital ceased to be visible in the statistics. This, unfortunately, we do not know.

Order execution - time and slippage

Once again, a group of three Polish brokers presented additional reports that concern the execution of orders in terms of time of completion, and in the case of XTB in addition in terms of the scale of slips and average spreads recorded.

The standard time of execution in the third quarter of 2018 in BossaFX was 76 milliseconds. The term "client orders" covers both the conclusion of a transaction by a pending order at the market price, as well as the cancellation and modification of the parameters of these orders. In XTB in QXNUMX this year, the average order execution time was 59 milliseconds, that is about 17 milliseconds less than in BossaFX.

The Noble Securities broker announced that the standard time of performing client orders on the OTC market (ie the average order execution time under standard conditions) in the third quarter of 2018 amounted to 396.54 milliseconds, which is slightly better than in the second quarter of this year.

Slips when executing orders in XTB

XTB also provided statistics on slippage prices. In the execution of orders in the market mode on CFD 68.54 instruments,% of transactions were carried out with a price slippage equal to 0, 15.08% with positive, and 16.38% with negative slip for the customer. The broker also provided a statement of average spreads for all CFD instruments.

A new feature is the spread of spreads for five volumes:

1. from 0.0 to 1.0 flight,
2. from 1.01 to 5.0 flights,
3. from 5.01 to 15.0 flights,
4. from 15.01 to 30.0 flights,
5. from 30.0 flights up.

Foreign Forex brokers

Although the obligation to publish quarterly statistics is imposed by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority only on Polish brokerage houses, two foreign brokers - Admiral Markets and CMC Markets. How did traders using the services of these companies fall out? The results are presented in the tables below.

CMC Markets - the British broker for the first time presented the results of its clients on cryptocurrencies. A positive change in the trend can only be seen in instruments related to stock indices (a clear increase of 8%), while the rest of the asset classes recorded a slight decrease - from 1% to 3%.

Admiral Markets - This broker only provides information on 4 asset classes, but this quarter is extremely positive. A clear increase in profitability was recorded in all groups - from 4,6% to over 10%.

At the same time, Admiral Markets, as the only broker, regularly publishes detailed data on the execution of orders of its clients on-line.