Interview with Stanislav Vaneev, CEO of Grand Capital

Following five months without interviews of the important people in the Forex industry, I finally present you with an interview with Stanislav Vaneev — the chief executive officer of Grand Capital Forex company. It is listed on EarnForex.com since 2011, but they did not start to expand much into the English-speaking markets before recent times. Here are some of the questions about the company and the online FX industry:
How did Grand Capital start, and who are your dominant customers, demographically speaking?

Grand Capital was founded in 2006 in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the beginning of the 2000s, I became interested with investment: initially in realty and shares, and then in the Forex market. However, at the time Russian financial services market was all but non-existent: very few companies could offer reliable service. It was then when I decided to found my own company, which could meet the demands of individual traders and offer a wide range of instruments and affordable and high quality service. This is how Grand Capital came to exist. Nowadays, our company provides its services to more than 100 000 clients, the majority of whom are from Russia and CIS countries, but about a year ago we started to expand our operations to foreign markets – China, Indonesia, India, and the share of these countries in our customer base is constantly growing.

What are your main advantages compared to other Forex brokers?

Grand Capital is an established company; we are known and trusted at the market. Our company is in the TOP-25 Forex brokers in Russia. We are only starting to gain popularity worldwide, but it is just a matter of time. We have what it takes to appeal to traders – we’ve got more than 330 trading instruments – Forex, binary options, stocks of the largest companies of the world – Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., commodity futures and many more. Our traders can work using two trading platforms – MetaTrader 4 and WebTrader. We constantly have contests and promotions, which allow our traders to test all of our instruments without any expenses, and then decide whether they want to continue working with us. We also allow using trading robots and advisers. We develop many of our services ourselves and we get awards for them at various trade shows each year. Grand Capital has a number of prestigious awards: Best Standard and Micro Broker, Best Binary Broker in Russia, Best Forex Broker in China.

What do you believe is the single most important aspect when it comes to customer support?

The main thing is to love your customers. When you don’t just think about money, but wish to give your clients all the best instruments to earn, your clients will love you too. Our main job is to guide our customer in the world of finances – educate them, help them, not just earn money. If your customers are happy – your company will prosper.

From your data, what kind of trading strategies is mostly used by your clients?

Traditionally, scalping remains the most popular strategy. This is due to traders’ psychology: those who come to Forex market are mainly interested in fast returns and scalping allows exactly that: fast earnings, but in small quantities. Many scalpers automate their trading to be able to earn even on the slightest market movements. Positional trading of â€œbuy & hold” type is less popular – one have to be patient enough to wait for the results.

How difficult is it to operate a platform on ECN model?

ECN accounts in our company are based on MetaTrader 4 platform, so neither our customers nor we have any difficulties working with them.

How does your ECN account type popularity compare with your normal accounts?

ECN accounts are known to traders for their perfect execution and instant processing of requests, that is why they are popular among those who are long-time traders. According to our observations, average ticket on ECN accounts is always larger than on micro or standard accounts, although the number of ECN accounts is lower. It is due to the minimal deposit amount – it is $1,000 for ECN, while for those who want to try themselves at trading on micro accounts it is just $10. Not all traders know how to manage large sums of money and are ready for it, therefore ECN accounts are usually opened by experienced traders who already know what they will do with the large sum.

Many brokers reported huge losses and chased account holders with negative balances following the Forex market turmoil on January 15. How did you do after the Swiss National Bank has removed its franc cap?

Of course, it is difficult to anticipate such events, but even if you cannot anticipate it, you should be ready for it, and the main principle of any business should be the ability to resist stresses. I should confess – hardly anyone could predict this outcome. However, in the beginning of the year, a number of brokers have limited trading CFH pairs, and we were among them. Thanks to this decision, during that period neither our customers nor we were affected.

Do you still keep the restrictions on CHF currency pairs active or have you eased them after the storm seems to be over now?

We didn’t have any restrictions for CHF pairs. Only just before the drop we closed EURCHF trading, and it was less than for a week. When the situation stabilized we lifted the EURCHF restrictions and trading fully recommenced.

Where does the trading end and the gambling starts in Forex?

Gambling starts the same moment a trader deviates from theirs trading strategy, allowing greed and passion to overtake them. Professional trading always remains in the scope of risk-management and a successful trader always adheres to theirs trading strategy.

Is it difficult to stay inside Russia’s regulatory environment?

Forex in Russia only starts being regulated. Our company is a long-time member of nonprofit organization named CRFIN (Center of regulation of off-exchange financial instruments and technologies), which initiated the adoption of the Russian law concerning Forex market. We take an active part in defining regulation procedures in our country.

Lack of any legislation has long allowed unscrupulous companies to exist on the market and mislead customers. Clients of such brokers often lost their money. All of this cast shadow on diligent companies and the whole market. The legislation being enacted provides for protection of consumers from unfair brokers, allows consumers to defend their interests in the court. Although we are only in the beginning of this path, I am sure that in a couple of years we will be able to make our industry more transparent.

What regulation reforms can support or hinder the growth of the online Forex industry?

Customers need reliability and the mission of the regulator is to provide this reliability, monitoring companies’ activities. Nevertheless, I think that the main purpose of such regulation is to allow diligent companies’ access to market and to ensure proper relations between companies and their customers, while regulation of trading conditions, products, services should be done by the industry itself.

What innovations do you plan to implement to improve your brokerage services?

We have already implemented several innovative services. For example, WebTrader is a fully functional trading platform allowing to trade from any device without installing anything.

At the same time, we were implementing binary options in MetaTrader 4. In the very beginning, when binary options only started appearing in Russia, we understood the prospects of this instrument and decided that we want to offer it as a serious financial product. That is why we integrated binary options in MT4, keeping all the analytical functions of the platform, which are important for traders who wish to work seriously and get real profits. We provide both American and European options in the same platform so that a trader could try and master all the varieties of the market. By the way, for this product we got the â€œBest binary options broker” award as a result of an independent online vote at the annual trade show “Moscow Forex Expo Awards 2014”. Not so long ago we started providing binary options on LAMM accounts and they have already become one of the most discussed topics in the traders’ community. Very soon our clients will be able to use our latest service – PAMM-accounts, which will make our range of investment services even larger.

If you have one advice to the average trader that he can hold on to permanently, what would it be?

A successful trader is a trader who always tries to improve himself or herself. Of course it is important to work on your strategy. But if you can’t control your emotions, take rational decisions and keep yourself cool, even if you have a beautifully adjusted trading strategy, you may fail. Psychology heavily influences trading results. If a trader does not possess such qualities as attentiveness and discipline, they, being driven by fear and thirst for money, will probably lose their deposit. My advice to traders is as follows – improve yourself and success will soon follow.

Profit to everyone!

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