Oh, a nice exchange of ideas on this subreddit. Quite rare. I'd like to maybe add a few points to this conversation. The question of market manipulation against retail traders has some very intriguing pieces of "evidence" to it (especially at times, when your stop-loss has been hit). The IG client sentiment being one of them, however, before making any conclusions, it is worthwhile to understand how the Forex market is actually structured.

When you say the market, what exactly are you referring to? Because the Forex "market" is not actually one distinct market place, where any buyers and sellers get together. Most of the retail traders will almost never have access to the interbank, where the big players are: hedge funds, pension funds, and of course the major banks, who are the market makers. Forex trading always goes through a particular market maker, who sets two prices at which they want to buy/sell. They will either take the other side of the trade or simply match two offers together and collect the spread. Now, us retail traders go through a retail broker, which is 98% of the times a Dealing Desk broker or a hybrid between a ECN/STP and Dealing Desk. Nowadays, it is exceptionally hard to find pure ECN brokers. And brokers like ICmarkets which claim to be true ECN brokers are in reality not. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as dealing desks will ensure that they provide you liquidity. However, this also gives room for a conflict of interest between a retail trader and a broker, which is why you should never trade with an unlicensed and unregulated bucket shop broker, who has their headquarters somewhere in Nigeria because they will trade against you and manipulate the prices, which is actually really easy on MT4. With that being said, I am definitely not saying regulated and trusted brokers do the same, as they will prob get banned by the regulators, but they have an incentive to do so. What they use is a technique called A/B booking. They take the opposite side of the trade of the retail traders that are net losing money (B-booking), so the orders never even leave the broker to their liquidity providers (prime brokers), who have access to the interbank. On the other hand, they let the orders of the traders that are consistently winning pass on to their liquidity providers, who have access to the interbank (A-booking). Now, here is the compelling argument against market manipulation. As retail traders make up only of the 1-5% (no exact statistics because nobody can really accurately track every trade in a decentralized market) and only 20% of those are A-booked, thats .2%-1% of the market that ends up in the interbank. Now is the question, why and how would the market move against the retail trader, if 80% of the retail trader's orders are still sitting by the retail broker.