ATC Brokers and their PT Pro Platform

The website atcbrokers.co.uk is owned and operated by ATC BROKERS LTD. The company claims it is a premier brokerage firm providing online trading solutions within the foreign exchange industry to clients ranging from retail to institutional traders. ATC Brokers was established in the UK and is authorized and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) with the firm reference number 591361. Under the FCA regulation, ATC Brokers Ltd is obligated to segregate the money that retail clients deposit to prevent the use of client funds by the company for its own account. In the event of a default, the segregation of client’s funds will return the money to the clients. In addition, ATC Brokers is a member of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), which may be able to pay compensation to customers up to GBP50,000 per person. The company uses an ECN model that eliminates the main conflict of interest providing a neutral environment, it says.

The company product portfolio consists of over 50 instruments. Nearly 40 of these are currency pairs and the rest are commodities and indices. The average spread for the EUR/USD pair is 0.3 pips, for Gold it is USD0.16 and for DAX – 1.5 points. As an FCA-regulated brokerage firm, the trading leverage set to 30:1 for major currency pairs, 20:1 for non-major currency pairs, gold, and major indices and 10:1 for silver and other commodities. Institutional clients can trade CFDs on cryptocurrencies.

There is one type of account for all retail clients. The minimum initial account balance is USD5,000 or the amount equivalent in GBP or EUR. You will receive an ECN pricing model with variable spreads. At the expense of narrower spreads of the ECN pricing model, you will be charged a commission of USD6 per standard traded lot of 100,000 units.

ATC Brokers provides a platform called MT Pro that is based on the MetaTrader 4 (MT4) terminal. It offers all the features of the well-known MT4 plus a range of new features that improve MT4 performance and allow you to customize trade settings. You can receive various reports such as Profit & Loss (shows the development of account balance and equity over a specified period), \winners / Losers (shows the number of traders whose closed positions are winning and losing), Performance (shows the curve of profit/loss of the account as a percentage), etc. In addition, the MT4 platform is available on iOS and Android devices.

There is some contradiction when we read the FAQ section and the “Terms of Business” document. The FAQ section shows that ATC Brokers is not a market maker, and it uses the Straight Through Processing (STP) model to execute orders. This means the company is not a counterparty to each client order and transmits it to the liquidity provider(s). However, the “Terms of Business” document shows that the company will enter into transactions with the client as principal. That means that it is a counterparty on each customer order. The Order Execution Policy document informs that ATC Brokers may use one or more execution venues, which means that the company itself is not the sole execution venue. However, the execution venues are not shown and the doubt that the company can act as a market maker remains. The same document warns that orders will be executed promptly with rare opportunities for price slippage to occur. Stop loss orders are not guaranteed because they are sent to liquidity providers as market orders, which are subject to slippage. The company secures all retail clients for negative balance protection. However, the platform’s safeguards may fail, making it possible to create a negative balance during trading. In that case, the client should inform the company.

Overall, ATC Brokers uses the STP model and ECN pricing, but it may act as a market maker as well. It is based in the UK and regulated by the FCA. It offers the most popular platforms in the industry – MT4 and a plug-in called MT Pro. You must invest at least USD5,000 to open an account.