A couple of weeks ago, people in China had the sudden misfortune of being unable to access their accounts on MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5.
From speaking to executives at several brokers, it seems this started on May 22nd and continued for a few days. There are some indications that it’s still happening to some providers.
Figuring out why that actually took place would involve knowing the intricacies of the Chinese government’s internet policies, which I’m sad to say, I don’t. However, there are some things we can infer from what happened.
The first thing to note is that MetaQuotes products were not suddenly ‘banned’ in China because they are already not that simple to access.
You cannot access the company’s website in the country as it’s blocked. You cannot get the Play Store on an Android phone either, meaning two of the main routes to access the firm’s platforms were already unavailable to Chinese traders.
Usually this is counteracted by brokers who give people a link to download the software, either for PC / Mac or as an apk file for Android devices. The app also seems to be available in the Chinese iOS App Store, although it’s worth noting that iPhones ‘only’ have about a 20% market share in China.
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The basic point is there was not some blanket ban on people’s access to the product.
What did change was that when you went on to the app and searched for a broker, the company would simply not show up.
However, that does not seem to have been the case across the board. Whether they figured out a solution quickly or they weren’t impacted at all, some brokers do not seem to have been impacted by the outage.
For example, Exness seems to have stayed online and accessible, even when other companies were facing the problem described above.
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One suggestion among Chinese ‘netizens’ – a word I can’t believe I’m using – is that it was due to a system update. People that didn’t update to the latest version of either platform would not be able to access their brokerage account.
Broker EC Markets put out a Chinese language video suggesting this was the reason behind the problems. This does not seem realistic to me as presumably that would impact everyone using the platform globally, rather than just people in China.
It is hard to say for sure but just like blocking a website, you can block access to a MetaTrader server based on its IP address.
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Chinese authorities already do this and have done for ages with broker websites. For example, TMGM seems to be one of the firms that got hit by the outage. Their main website is blocked in China.
What seems most plausible to me is that the government began targeting broker server IPs and blocking access that way.
The fact that clients who had access to a VPN could circumvent whatever was stopping them from seeing their provider suggests that an IP block is a plausible reason for what happened.
I am not a tech nerd and start to feel like Homer, with a monkey banging a pair of cymbals together in his head, whenever people start talking about servers, hosting, cache-ing and so on. But – and I am putting myself out on a limb here – this is positive in the sense that it’s presumably a solvable problem.
What would be less of a solvable problem is if I am wrong and the government is actually doing something specifically to MetaQuotes.
The difference is that an IP block is targeting a broker and can be fixed.
In contrast, if the government is doing something to target the platform as a whole that is bad, firstly because it means you as a broker cannot do anything apart from complain to MetaQuotes customer support. Secondly it means that the company is in the CCP’s crosshairs. I don’t like the idea of being in crosshairs in general but I would particularly not want to be in those crosshairs.
As to why the government did this, we can only guess. One point to note is that scamming online has become a big ‘thing’ in China, like everywhere else, and the government has launched several initiatives to crack down on it over the last few years.
If you remember a couple of years ago when MetaTrader got removed from the App Store, there was a strong case to be made that it was due to Chinese ‘pig butcher’ scammers using a fake version of the trading platform.
Consequently, there may just be some association between the government, online scams and MetaTrader, meaning they don’t want people to be able to use the platform.
Another possibility is that it’s just a random move against CFD firms by the government. This happens all the time and has done for as long as I’ve been working (or watching) this industry.
Whatever the case, what this all highlights is how tricky it has become to do business in China.
For example, one provider with a big presence in the country currently has over 100 active URLs for one brand. This is presumably to avert the risk that one gets blocked and they have to switch over to a new. Ultimately that probably works but what a headache it must be to manage that set up.
It’s no surprise then that bigger, less risk tolerant brands have thrown in the towel. Despite all the hype around its entrance to the market with its prior shareholders, Saxo Bank has shut its operations in the country over the last 12 months or so and CMC Markets has done something similar. You can get around the Great Firewall but it takes a lot of effort to do so – a lot of people can’t be bothered and don’t have the risk appetite for it.
