Synergy Funds Management Review: Is it Legit or Scam?

Today’s review discusses Synergy Funds Management which provides its clients with managed discretionary accounts (MDAs), trading equities and derivatives on their behalf.

Synergy Funds Management is the trading name of an Australian-based company called Synergy Financial Markets Pty Limited. Marketing materials on their website claim that the team of traders behind this company have decades of combined experience. But according to who.is, the domain synergyfundsmanagement.com was created in March 2015.

This might not reflect the alleged experience of their traders. In fact, without a verifiable trading profile for each one of the traders, it would be a daunting task trying to verify if indeed their traders have the proclaimed experience.

The minimum investment that Synergy Funds Management is asking for is $10,000. They also want clients to know that Synergy Financial Markets Pty Limited (the company behind their trading name) is ASIC-regulated.

Before you invest with this Australian firm, it would be imperative that you take time to go through our review.

We’ve covered some of the most important things that would-be clients need to know regarding this firm.

We’ll answer whether Synergy Funds Management is legit or a scam. If it’s legit, we’ll also let you know its pros and cons. If it’s a scam, perhaps we’ll discourage you from using their financial service altogether.

Synergy Funds Management review

Their official website looks professional and very persuading. The financial provider has also published the necessary content that investors need to familiarize with before they can choose to invest.

This is the same approach that Strategic Gold used to lure clients to their financial service.

Synergy Funds Management is trading major currency pairs, stocks and even Oil, Silver and Gold.

They believe that the markets are driven by a huge selection of forces which include interest rates, global commodity prices, economic data and so forth.

Synergy Funds Management review: trading approach and strategy

They claim that their trading approach focuses on the medium and long term strategy that hopes to “outperform” the market in the next 2 to 4 years. They also tell us that their trading strategy involves fundamental analysis in addition to technical analysis. Trading is automated on client MDAs while risk is manually overseen.

They also tell us that they’re trading bullish and bear markets while leverage is kept to the minimum.

Synergy Funds Management review: fees and other charges

The minimum deposit of $10,000 does not attract any fee. Basically, signing up is free but depending on the investment strategy and plan you choose, management fees will vary.

It’s important to note that this broker is also working with high water market fee principle.

This means they will only deduct their fees when your trading account has achieved a new profit percentage which is higher than the previous gain.

Regulatory status and funding of accounts

Synergy Financial Markets Pty Limited is the name of this fund manager’s company. They claim to be regulated by the ASIC under registration number 403863. You can verify this info through infringement notice

It also appears that this firm is not utilizing the services of a middleman or a third party broker.

Most Forex managed account providers will use a third party broker who will hold all funds of their clients. Only access to trading the account is granted. No withdrawal access is ever provided.

With Synergy Financial Markets Pty Limited, they operate an in-house brokerage where they directly accept deposits from their clients. We presume that these deposits often go to a segregated account (if their regulatory status is anything to go by).

The Ugly things about Synergy Funds Management

While this looks like a very professional financial and investment service, it does not fail to attract controversies.

These will somehow scare investors away from this firm and it’s important that we let you know in advance.

The first thing that bothered us is the discovery that this firm was fined for misleading investors with bogus ads.

Of course they were fined by ASIC and although the amount was not significant ($10,800), that story portrayed the character of a dishonest fund manager.

According to this website, Synergy Funds Management claimed on its website that they were only deducting profits when account of their clients had new gains which is higher than the previous.

However, ASIC discovered that the firm was actually deducting fees regardless of whether their clients gained or lost money.

The company also charged an annual fee of 2% regardless of whether there was a gain or not.

They were sent this infringement notice from the Australian financial regulator. The misleading statements were redacted.

Secondly, this firm does not provide its track record of successful trading. If they’re trading Forex, we believe they could have used a myfxbook account to prove their alleged success.

The entire website does not have any evidence of trading performance. Of course their risk disclosure tells us that their trading involves some risk and if that is so, you could just lose a portion of your $10k just like that.

Conclusion

While Synergy Funds Management appears to be a professional financial service, we still feel disappointed that they didn’t show us their trading results to verify their viability as a managed account provider.

We hope they’ll fix this so as to inspire some trust in the community. We also feel that it was creepy to put up a misleading ad on their website. For an ASIC regulated broker to do this, it was unacceptable. They paid restitution but this shows the desperate lengths they can take just to win customers.

Our review won’t recommend them until they show us their trading performance. Thanks for reading the Synergy Funds Management review.