Support Board

Currently we have 2 of our users who have accounts assigned to our FIX connection and they both have said there are monthly inactivity fees for March. Here is the transaction detail from one of them:

15/04/2016 14:43:20 Debit VAT: VAT Charge £ 8.35
15/04/2016 14:43:05 Credit VAT Refund: VAT Refund £ 41.77
15/04/2016 14:06:04 Debit API Fee: VAT Charge £ 41.77
15/04/2016 14:06:03 Debit API Fee: March API fee £ 41.77
15/04/2016 13:03:17 Debit Account adjustment: VAT Charge £ 41.77
15/04/2016 13:03:17 Debit Account adjustment: FIX Inactivify Fee March 2016 £208.87

If you will be imposing this fee, then this whole connection model using a single FIX connection with multiple user accounts assigned to it, is not economically viable. If these are these fees, no one is going to use it.

We were never advised of this. And we have been telling users the exact opposite that there will be no monthly fees because this is only common sense since they are not using the FIX connection directly. Instead there is only a single FIX connection being used by the Sierra Chart server.

The whole reason we change this connection model is for 3 reasons. The first reason, is to eliminate the monthly minimum inactivity fees. Previously we had this posted on our website regarding LMAX FIX:
"Inactivity fee from LMAX: If trade $12.5 million in Forex transactions per month, there is no fee. Otherwise, a fee of 150 USD for that trading month applies."

The second reason is we can provide enhanced functionality like long-term order fill history and server-side OCO and bracket orders.

The third reason, is there is a simplified connection using our own connection protocols.

We knew that we may be liable for the monthly minimum of 150USD which is now apparently 300 USD if there is not enough trading volume on the connection.

We are planning to make a larger announcement about this new connection, in the next week or so. We understand that you may also be posting some information about Sierra Chart on your website as well. And gradually we would expect there should be more than 100 users on it which will allow us to easily meet the minimum.

If we are liable for the 300USD a month if there is insufficient trading volume, that is fine with us and I can provide you billing details so that you can invoice us for that.

I politely request, that you immediately remove these inactivity fees from these customers using the Sierra Chart connection, and no longer charge them. Otherwise, we have to advise our users, that there was a major misunderstanding regarding this, and that we cannot continue with the service.

I believe these charges may have been imposed incorrectly. We need to make some updates on our side so that only the one FIX connection owner (Sierra Charts in this case) is liable for the fee if trading is below the volume threshold.

I'll speak to my CS team on Monday and have this ironed out and refund the clients where applicable.

One thing to note is that if a client who is part of the multi trading group decides to also directly connect via FIX to their account, they could also be liable to the fee if trading activity is below the threshold.

Apologies for the inconvenience here, we will sort this out on Monday and confirm the exact treatment going forward.