Stage 5 TradingReviews of stage5trading.com

approval was quick but funding the account is a pain

I have an automated trading app and was looking for a futures broker. This broker used Rithmic, so between the two companies, they initially sounded like a good fit. Kevin was brilliant, and I am sure the brokerage itself is fine. Rithmic's customer service was also polite. My problem was the technical support experience and what I was ultimately charged for a service I was never able to get working. I spent six days trying to connect my app properly to the API. Technical-support communication appeared to come roughly once per day, usually around 4:00 a.m. my time. That made troubleshooting extremely difficult. I would explain exactly what was happening, receive a response the next day, explain again that the problem still existed, and then wait another day. I successfully connected to the test API once. During development, I had a bug that triggered a lock on the test account—which is exactly one of the reasons test accounts exist. I found and fixed the bug immediately. After that, however, I could not get the API authorization restored properly. Support would tell me everything was good, while the API continued telling me that it was not authorized. It appeared they were confirming that I could log into the webpage, even though I repeatedly and specifically explained that the problem was with API authorization and provided the exact steps and behavior I was seeing. The documentation is also fairly limited, so some things have to be figured out during development. That isn't necessarily a dealbreaker when responsive technical support is available, but combined with one troubleshooting exchange per day, it became impractical. After six days, I decided to close the account. I knew there would be some costs, and I understand the approximately $30 wire fee. What I did not expect was to lose approximately $178 of the $500 I had deposited after only six days, particularly when I was never able to get the service operational. Apparently some of the fees are monthly minimums and are not prorated. I do not know which organization was responsible for each individual fee, so I am not going to assign blame where I cannot verify it. But from a customer's perspective, I paid approximately $178 for six days of attempting to connect to a system that I ultimately could not use. Had we received responsive technical support and actually been making progress toward resolving the API problem, I would view the situation differently. Under these circumstances, I do not believe charging the full monthly costs was fair. Both companies have the right to structure their services, support, and fees however they choose. I have the same right as a customer to decide where I do business. For me, this was a nearly $200 lesson. Based on my experience, I will not use either company again and cannot recommend this combination to another independent developer who needs reliable API access and timely technical support.