Just as we are entering the last quarter of the year, I am expecting at least a few brokers to publish data on their performance during Q3. After all, transparency of operations is a key factor for establishing a company’s reputation, and with the fierce competition on the forex market, good reputation is golden.
Unfortunately, however, only a few of them do so and Russian-based EXNESS is one of the brokers who appear to be quite open about its operational metrics. On the broker’s official site there is a page dedicated to statistics, broken into years and months.
A quick glimpse on the data from 2012, though, gets a red light to start blinking in my head. Take a look yourself:

Judging by the numbers, EXNESS seems to be doing quite well. Too well, as of that matter - almost too good to be true. Approximately 8,000 new accounts opened in each of the months of Q3 is quite the impressive achievement – especially having in mind that the broker is not amongst the largest ones on the market. There is, of course, the possibility that these numbers are just made up.
As there is no other way to verify the details published by EXNESS, I figured I would compare them to a couple of other brokers.
The first one I picked was Forex.com: one of the largest brokers around the world, and one with outstanding reputation and a sustainable client base. During Q2 the broker had 6,862 new accounts created – so approximately 2,300 accounts per month (download .pdf here ). If you do the math, you will see that for the same period EXNESS had an average of 7,560 newly registered accounts per month.
Forex.com’s retail trading volume for Q2 was $340.8 billion. The trading volume of FXCM, another one of the major brokers, was $869 billion. The one of EXNESS - $204.2 billion.
What’s important to note here is that both Gain Capital, the company behind the Forex.com brand, and FXCM are publicly listed company – this means that they are mandated to publish accurate data, and they are being audited by independent companies on a regular basis. EXNESS, on the other hand, is based in Russia, where there is no forex legislation whatsoever.
I’m not going to draw any conclusions here – you do the math yourself and figure out whether the data so willingly given by EXNESS seems plausible or not. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out.