Important Facts
- Regulation: SunbirdFX is the trading name of Sunbird Trading limited of Seychelles and appears to be a completely unregulated entity. Though they do apparently have offices in Ireland.
- Instruments: The offer 27 different currency pairings, as well as offering a limited number of commodities including Oil, Gold and Silver.
- Special Features: Nothing particularly unique about at the experience at Sunbird Forex.
- Leverage: Up to 1:100
- Minimum Deposit: $100
The Platform
SunbirdFX offers MetaTrader 4 & 5, as its primary trading platforms. Many will already know of the MetaTrade platform as it the leading platform for retail FX trading, with numerous brokerages offering MetaTrader to it’s clients. The Sunbird MetaTrader platform doesn’t differ much from the standard MetaTrader platform with Sunbird Forex allowing it’s customer to scalp and use Expert Advisors without any limits. Sunbird also offer the MetaTrader for the mobile allowing their traders to trade while on the move. This is a clever move by SunbirdFX as on the move trading is set sore within the next few years. While Sunbird offers the standard MetaTrader platforms as well as the mobile version there is no webtrader or standalone download platform to download. However this will probably not be much of a problem for many. Especially as Sunbird is one of the brokerages that offer support for ZuluTrade allowing their clients to use the ZuluTrade platform to copy others trades.
Special Features
There is nothing particularly remarkable or unique about the Sunbird offering however their are a number of things that traders might be interested in. For example the support for ZuluTrade, which I have mentioned already might attract some people to SunbirdFX. The fact that they allow unlimited scalping may also attract others, but apart from this there isn’t much unique about the offering from Sunbird.
Spreads
The Spreads on offer at Sunbird are floating and there website the quote both their target spread and average spread for each instrument. The average spreads vary a great deal with some being really quite competitive while others being wider than at many fixed spread brokerages. There is always a bit of a problem when interpreting average spreads, first you need to realize that the brokerage may not be being honest or is displaying average spreads from a favorable period of time. All in all though when it’s just down to spreads it appears that SunbirdFX remain pretty competitive with a number of bigger brokerages.
Customer Service
As I have already said SunbirdFX is the trading name of Sunbird Trading Ltd. a Seychelles based and unregulated operation. However it is apparent that Sunbird’s major customer service center is based in Ireland, though Sunbird do offer toll free numbers for those in other European countries such as the UK and Italy. I have seen a number complaints made about slow withdrawals at SunbirdFX, but it appears that Sunbird at least do there best to resolve these problems. Thus the customer service at SunbirdFX has a surprisingly good reputation considering the fact that Sunbird are an unregulated entity. I haven’t been able to find out much about SunbirdFX’s parent company Sunbird Trading Ltd. due to the fact they are an offshore entity, which is always a little worrying.
Regulation
A the time of writing SunbirdFX was a completely unregulated company with there being no financial regulation in place. A number of sources suggest however that Sunbird are going through the process of becoming regulated somewhere, however I have been unable to find any official word on this. While SunbirdFX has pretty good reviews regarding customer service etc, it is deeply worrying that the firm is unregulated as it means it doesn’t have to abide by many important regulations including client fund segregation and otherwise. It means you don’t also have some of the important protections you would have in place if you chose to deposit with a European regulated brokerage. For me personally this is enough not to ever deposit money with an unregulated brokerage as it will always be a very high risk move.
Overall, though SunbirdFX seems to have a number of points in it’s favor, the crucial fact that it operates unregulated is enough for me to advise people not to deposit their hard earned cash with the bank.
