Many traders aspire to operate in the market like professionals. Today, more and more companies are ready to help with this by offering training, albeit not for free. Our Financial Markets Online review is dedicated to one such platform. Here, users are offered numerous useful free materials and several courses that come at a hefty price. Is the training here worth the money? Can you trust the team behind this project? Find answers to these questions below.
Brief Overview
- 🖥Official Website: https://financialmarketsonline.com/
- ✈️Contact Addresses: 310 Harbour Yard, Chelsea Harbour, London, SW10 0XD
- 📞Customer Support: [email protected]; +44 (0) 203 982 6280
- 🔐Licensing and Accreditation: none
- ⏳Track Record: since 2018
- 🧰Specialization: market data, education
- 🤝Terms of Cooperation: from £100 up to £3,000 and more depending on courses
- 💰Additional Services: trading tips, news, etc.
Financialmarketsonline.com Examination
The official website of Financial Markets Online looks quite solid. Of course, in our opinion, the web designers could have put in more effort with the design, but it’s not fair to consider the chosen style a drawback.
Even the informational content on the pages is in good order. Naturally, the site has more promotional texts than informational ones. They beautifully describe all the benefits of training with the company, calling the offered courses among the best in the world. You’ll also find reviews from satisfied users with top ratings.
However, all of this is without real evidence. In six years of working with clients, they could have easily created a dozen or so examples of successful trading by students in practical sessions. Account statements demonstrating the practical value of the course materials would look great in these examples. However, it seems the owners and staff of the company agreed that baseless claims are sufficient to attract an audience. We believe this approach is far from ideal, but who has ever cared about the opinions of potential clients?
Company Contacts
On the Financial Markets Online website, you can find three groups of contact details, each containing an email and/or phone number for contact, as well as the address of the trading floor (if the location exists in the city). There are also feedback forms and callback request options. This is related to the courses being conducted in three cities:
- London.
- Manchester.
- Dubai.
It is worth noting that none of these sets of contact details include the actual company name (Financial Markets Online is more of a brand or trademark) or its physical address. Why this information is hidden from clients is unclear to us.
The company’s social media links are also in good order. Groups and channels exist and new posts appear regularly. However, it’s hard to call the company’s activity in these channels super active. For instance, since the YouTube account was registered in 2018, 294 videos have been posted. On average, this is one post per week. Interest in the posted materials is also fairly average. Over the same six years, all videos on YouTube have gathered a total of 144,000 views and brought the company about 2,800 subscribers.
Key Conditions
Financial Markets Online offers a wide range of options for those wishing to learn how to trade in the Forex/CFD market. Let’s start with the free materials available:
- Market news with an economic calendar.
- Glossary of terms.
- Forex trading tips.
The last of these could be practically valuable. However, the service team didn’t come up with anything original. Each of these tips is merely a loose retelling of similar advice available on dozens of other thematic websites. Honestly, this set of banalities is not even interesting to read.
The main product of Financial Markets Online is their Forex courses. The company currently offers four of them. The first, FX Fast Track Course, available in two versions: a 90-day free trial upon opening an account with one of the recommended brokers, and a subscription with a monthly fee of £100. The company calls it the best course for market beginners. The training program includes:
- Introduction to trading.
- Developing trading plans.
- Setting up the terminal.
- Comprehensive course with mandatory testing.
- Materials on trader psychology.
- Access to daily webinar broadcasts.
- 100 hours of additional practical training, etc.
Although the volume is quite substantial, the company does not show the contents of the comprehensive course or the duration of the program. Essentially, the listener is buying a pig in a poke, which may not suit everyone.
The second is 3-Day Forex Masterclass. Financial Markets Online promises that upon completing this three-day course, the listener will become a “profitable trader.” Looking at the program, we doubted this. The course materials cover everything important and necessary for market participants, from testing the listeners to studying five (FIVE!) strategies. And all this in two working days, as the third is reserved for trading practice. In our view, it is impossible to study at least half of the topics (such as Price Action, reversal patterns, candlestick patterns, or scalping) in one day each. And this is just 15-20% of the content. What level of comprehension can listeners achieve?
Moreover, this intensive course is quite expensive—£3,000. We would never agree to pay this amount for three days of training, the content of which is impossible to fully grasp.
The last two include:
- Online seasonality course. An advanced training program where participants are offered to study and use the seasonality of markets. The price is £829. The list contains nothing extraordinary that an ordinary trader couldn’t find and study independently.
- Advanced trading course. The program includes a standard set of materials for advanced traders, such as determining currency strength, trading based on fundamental analysis and market news, entering positions with limit orders, etc. Students can complete the course in 12-24 months, but Financial Markets Online modestly does not disclose the price of this training option.
The website menu also features a special course titled Advanced Diploma in Financial Trading. Upon completion, users receive a real certificate. The company doesn’t provide much detail about its program but promises personal mentorship for each participant. This is perhaps the most interesting training option, but its cost is also unknown.
This leaves us with a far from rosy picture. Market newcomers are offered the cheapest program (which can last almost indefinitely), and the material level corresponds to that. Advanced courses have a few interesting points, but the prices for participants are far from modest. And the creators of the service completely conceal the cost of the most attractive programs. Why is that?
Exposing Financial Markets Online
One remaining question is how legal and legitimate the company’s activities are. To answer this, let’s analyze the official data on Financial Markets Online.
We already mentioned that the official website does not provide the real name of the company or its registration location. The service mainly operates in the UK (it started operating in Dubai a bit later, opening a full-fledged trading floor for scheduled events).
Therefore, checking the databases of Companies House seems logical. However, as expected, Financial Markets Online is not listed on the register.
Although there is nothing illegal in the service’s activities, the lack of official registration seems rather strange. Adding to the doubts is the presented team. It seems these people are “on fire at work”: we couldn’t find any information about them, their social media profiles, etc. All mentions of the project participants are exclusively connected to Financial Markets Online.
And yet, we’re talking about a company that has been operating in the market for almost six years. According to the whois service, their domain financialmarketsonline.com was registered on September 28, 2018.
Moreover, reviews of the service also began appearing online in 2018. However, there are some interesting issues with these reviews. More on that below.
What Reviews Do Users Leave?
We expected that over six years of operation, Financial Markets Online would have gathered a significant number of reviews. In many respects, we were not wrong. There are quite a few publications about the service on the web.
However, we noticed something strange. Almost all the articles on thematic sites and social networks are written by project participants themselves (for example, James Bentley, Director & Head Trader, publishes under the nickname LiquidityFinder) or as part of link exchanges. It seems to us that the popularity of the “UK №1 Forex Education Platform” is somewhat inflated.
Even more interesting are the Financial Markets Online reviews on TrustPilot. Here, the service has amassed 442 comments, 95% of which are positive with the highest rating. The first ones appeared as early as July 5, 2018.
However, it’s hard for us to understand how the authors managed to write their opinion about the company that registered the domain for its website only three months later. Naturally, after getting acquainted with the creativity of such time travelers, we don’t have much trust in the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the service.
Conclusions
In our Financial Markets Online review, we tried to be as objective as possible. Nevertheless, our assessment of the service’s activities is not as unequivocal as that of TrustPilot users. Firstly, the company, for some reason, hides its name and accreditation (if they exist at all). Secondly, the programs of their courses, especially the three-day ones, raise many questions. Moreover, the cost of the most advanced courses is also concealed. Thirdly, online reviews of the platform’s activities are not entirely straightforward. Honestly, we would opt out of training here in favor of courses from well-known brokers, especially since most of these materials are freely available on those platforms.
Pros/Cons
- A variety of courses for traders of different levels.
- The possibility of receiving an official certificate after advanced training.
- The cost of most courses seems overpriced.
- The programs of some courses seem unrealistic to assimilate.
- The well-known platform uses dubious promotion methods, such as paid reviews.
- There are no user agreements among the documents for review.
- The absence of official registration, although not illegal.
Just finished the three-day course. What can I say – it’s a jumble in my head, there’s a lot of information, and no time to digest it. But I think the money was well spent.
I believe that training at Financial Markets Online is not worth the money or the time lost. I worked with one mentor, and it turned out I had almost more experience than he did. No one responded to requests to change the mentor, and they also don’t want to return the money. In short, it’s terrible. Look for other courses!
I spent a whole year on the FX Fast Track Course for beginners at Financial Markets Online. I got the minimum useful information but maximum real skills. The balance is not bad, especially considering that I understand the markets and myself in them much better. I recommend it.