The Seychelles FSA license number SD089 that hero fx possesses allows it to offer up to a 1:500 leverage ratio, but its segregation account audit cycle for client funds is 18 months, significantly lower than the minimum of 12 months required by the UK FCA. According to the 2023 FSCA South Africa report, the EUR/USD trading spread widened to an average of 1.8 points during the liquidity low hour (21:00-24:00 GMT) in locally operated hero fx rand accounts, three times the industry standard (0.6 points), resulting in an average yearly transaction cost increase of approximately $1,200 for new clients. Spanish CNMV penalized hero fx 230,000 euros in May 2024 for being unauthorized to provide cryptocurrency trading services to EU clients and blocked 87% of Iberian Peninsula access traffic.
When it comes to the provision of educational resources, hero fx’s “Beginner Academy” has a mere 12 video courses (total duration of 4.5 hours), which is significantly lower than the industry-leader platforms’ average of over 40 courses (e.g., IG Group has 62 courses). Though its demo account function supports $100,000 in virtual funds, the quote lag problem is glaring: when non-farm payroll figures are released, the average lag in executing gold /USD orders was up to 470 milliseconds (industry standard ≤150 milliseconds), with a likelihood of slippage up to 34%. Meanwhile, the live account test shows the new user average loss rate for a principal of $10,000 during the first month at 78%. Statistics from the Securities Commission of Malaysia in 2023 reveal that among complaints by inexperienced investors who employed hero fx, 65% comprised stop-loss orders with trigger deviations of over 5 points.
Technically, hero fx’s MT4 platform (version 1365) did not go through PCI DSS 4.0 certification. In March 2024, the Kaspersky security company detected a high-risk vulnerability (CVE-2024-22907) in its iOS client, which would lead to bypassing the 2FA verification. Patch release was within 9 days. Account theft cases increased by 220% during this time. Though the platform claims to employ bank-grade SSL encryption, tests conducted by SSL Labs indicate that the TLS 1.3 configuration achieves only A B rating (A+ rating for industry leader platforms) and the private key continues to use the less secure 2048-bit RSA algorithm instead of the more secure ECC. Statistics from BaFin in Germany reveal that the average time to answer complaints against hero fx in 2023 was 6.7 days, which is much higher than the industry average of 2.3 days.
As far as fee transparency goes, the euro /USD spread of hero fx is reported to be 0.8 points. However, the real log analysis of trades shows that for Asian session (GMT 01:00-08:00), the standard deviation of spread volatility was 0.43, 3.6 times higher than the industry standard (0.12). Its mechanism of calculation of overnight interest is also associated with hidden costs: Carrying one standard lot of gold overnight will cost $28.5, 42% higher than Interactive Brokers. A Singaporean new user complained that after he deposited 5,000 US dollars, they imposed a 3.5% credit card handling fee (industry standard was 1.9%) on him for failing to read the terms properly and he only got 4,825 US dollars.
Regulatory background information indicates that hero fx filed the Canadian IIROC license in 2021 but withdrew it in 2022 due to the level of complaints filed by clients being higher than usual (4.9% as compared to ≤3% as per the regulatory guidelines). It is only rated 52/100 for compliance on WikiBit currently. The main deductions are: customer fund insurance coverage is only 50,000 euros (200,000 euros is normally available on EU platforms), and negative balance protection only for customers with an account net value of ≥ 2,000 US dollars. In 2024, the Italian CONSOB examination concluded that hero fx’s recommended trading strategy contained fitting data deviations in the backtesting, and the actual executed winning rate was 23 percentage points less than advertised.
And in terms of liquidity, the proportion of hero fx’s Tier 1 bank liquidity reduced from 75% in 2022 to 38% in 2024, thus the order rejection rate for GBP /USD during the London opening session (GMT 08:00-10:00) rose to 9.7% (industry standard is 2.1%). A report presented by Australian ASIC indicates that overnight swap rate of its accounts held in Australian dollars is 1.8 times greater than non-compliant brokers, increasing cost by $57 per lot to newbies leaving their positions open for three days. Although the site offers the “copy trading” facility, historical records show that the highest drawdown percentage of the TOP 10 signal providers reaches as high as 64%, and the median copy delay stands at 17 seconds, which is far from the advertised “immediate execution within ≤3 seconds”.