Which Broker are you using and Why?

Hi all,


I am writing this as I will be currently choosing my broker and would like to start with a good one.
I could not really find sites(other than ForexPeaceArmy which I think is legit due to their consistent checks on reviews) or forums/threads which could aid me in really closing on a good broker.

I hope by starting this thread allows me to find a good one, as well as allowing others to give real reviews on their brokers. So that we traders could have a peace of mind when doing our thing.

From what I know, having a broker with a reputable regulator is important (FCA, FSA, CFTC, NFA).

I would gladly appreciate you guys to help me out.
Thanks.

AS

Choose a regulated broker that has a lot of business. Other than that, there are a few details.

What is your starting capital? What is your trading time frame - intraday, short term, or long term? Do you have any specific trading platforms (Sierra Chart, Tradestation, MotiveWave, MultiCharts, etc.) that you use and need to be able to use with this broker?

Try Darwinex. It is regulated by FCA(UK) and has good trading conditions.

I am also looking for one and really got no idea on which to start.. Can i use Darwine if iam living in south east asia? is there any difference?

Hi Mangolassi, I am a swing trader, so you may consider it as long term.
Specific trading platform to be of MT4.

I am actually looking at FxPro, FxOpen or AdmiralMarkets. Are they good?
I have seen Admiral's reviews (in ForexPeaceArmy), they are very constant and decent.

Not going to say which broker I use and if it was feasible easily I'd not use any or maybe use all. Using just 1 is the worst option. It's the easy option but nothing that is easy in this game is worth it. Ok maybe if you "invest" in forex then... well then you should get large interest bank account - even if the brokers paid better interest than bank there are still few reasons a bank is preferable for long term holding (to do the fx cheaper than the bank there's ways if they don't have good fx spread). Banks are better capitalized is good one and there's increasing regulation.

I can list the names everyone knows and the pro/con I have learned about them: (there's a lot more that I left out but plenty of it is toward eg. giving comprehensive API over as many markets as possible and about specialized execution algos etc)

Oanda
-continous interest
-size can be any (could be great thing if you scale-in/out)
-been around
-if you know how to avoid having stop orders in market during high impact news times and other such cases or even are able to avoid having stop in their system, you should not have problem with their realistic spread (eg. if real market stops quoting, oanda spread could theoretically be from 0 to infinity or just freeze quotes - but since they also have so much retail players in their system, you may have better chance of executing a well placed emergency stop here than some ecn)

IB
-some internal and some banks in the book - multiple reviews indicate that this is "realistic" in terms of that while the quotes are still "retail style", the larger orders are atleast going to somewhere (the smaller ones are processed internally, so it's really a book that mixes 3 things and you have no idea who you trade with except the day after in the reports that show what bank was your counterparty or was it IB internal match)
-expensive for small accounts
-lots of bells and whistles which is only good if you want to learn more about the markets, info-overload possible
-allows getting all sort of markets through single API - the data isn't quite the same you'd get through a dedicated data provider (otoh if you hold for hours shouldn't matter)
-costs for non-fx data though if you have margin/futures you get that for next to nothing compared to dedicated data provider (though I think there's some dedicated futures brokers that are cheaper and may have better data)


Then there's all the FCM's for futures trading (there's mini/micro lot futures but haven't looked into how competitive using those is vs eg. Oanda and what kind of slippage is involved)

Then there's all the rest that came after these.

The ones I remember:
LMAX
- advertises as being exchange type model - initially pretty glowing reviews etc and nice sounding technology but I guess after news trading got popular the liquidity evaporated or something so there's some not so glowing reviews now. The theme overall is that it sounds like there's less liquidity providers there than on "ECN":
- I think it got bought at some point and I haven't kept up what they are doing now
- might be interesting if you have smaller account but want something resembling futures
- should be no "last look" but there was some noise about this haven't investigated - things get iffy no doubt as people there are likely to try things bucket shops would close your account for (eg. trader having lower latency system than their primary market maker(s) could be interesting situation)
- probably attracted lot of the smarter retail money so while the exchange tech may be great, intraday liquidity is logically iffy if there's less "dumb money" around - yes theoretically the market maker there should be passing the dumb money to trader...... yeah did you really think they want to do that? LOL This is why Oanda is preferable as despite being bucket shop, if most people trade there and 95% lose then do the math.

ECN: (Integral) FinFX
-this is mix of various kind of accounts - total bucket shop account (some bad reviews about them, Oanda seems preferable for the smallest size accounts from what I've read) / regular mt4 account (maybe hybrid of internal+integral or something) / ecn (integral) account / fix (integral, maybe also internal idk)
-there's many other Integral brokers. Some people like these. Similarly expensive as IB. Could be more liquid even - IB has mostly some banks to trade with, ECN has more "fodder" as there's more retail involved across the participating brokers. Of course totally opaque** so you need to do your homework and testing.
-ECN reportedly can also slip big and due to latency involved could be looking at even more slip than bucket shop or IB

SEF's:
There are new platforms, I don't know if any are open to retail, not advertised much yet. I'm not sure what they look like exactly, perhaps something between exchange and otc option market...

OTC:
This stuff is still out there, perhaps the biggest of all. You probably need company and some connections to get trades going. Or just call your bank to do a trade (though I think they internalize too now). Idea I've seen is that SEF's replace this but could be a while.

All the rest:
If you are looking something outside the above then I'd ask the broker some serious questions and look for whether there's complaints about withdrawals. Withdraw and deposit fees should ideally be 0 if you use wire. Anything else smacks a bit of either incompetence or attempt to keep your money at them instead of making the better thing - having it spread around so you can do stats on performance using various brokers.

If you want to know if broker is bucket shop, ask about clearing - though in practise if you want party who has 3rd party clearing option then you end up trading with the Big Boys and most likely market makers & hedge funds with ton more experience. To avoid counterparty risk I would stick to bucket shop with lot of clients and withdraw some profits regularly.


If you are serious about FX you probably want to get all of the above and do your homework on each. There are strategies, games and tactics where each may have advantage and when liquidity is really needed it's best to have every broker that just allows withdrawing profits from and doesn't change your trades after the fact.

** by opaque I mean that with ECN, even though some ECN brokers give you some depth in their/ecn book, it's not really clear from the book what is what - I'm not sure you know who you are trading with there and how executable the prices really are etc as it's a complex situation

I have accounts spread across a few different brokers. What sort of account size are you looking at?

First I heard of this. Their page says "LMAX, 9 Tier 1 Providers via Prime Broker" . I suppose that makes LMAX worth looking into again if this gets popular. The name sure is funny - they show every past losing trader as well or do they filter those out for the investors? Their pitch is real nice and I like that it's using something like LMAX instead of all the million MT4 bucket shops that some similar services allow choosing from and would be hard to deal with if you wanted in on the action.

If I have time I'll look into it, thanks for the note.

At the moment forex.com from GAIN CAPITAL (parent company), figuring that since they are traded on the NYSE they must be somewhat reputable. I probably would have gone with fxcm but after they where in the news for all the class act lawsuits from clients.

They have Lmax and 9 other banks in their feed. So their feed is reliable.

If I'm right, Oanda is stopping interest because of too low yield. But it's still one of the best and oldest broker.

This is the email I received from Oanda on 4/29/15:

Dear Valued Client,

Due to the current interest rate environment with rates near or below zero, we will be setting OANDA cash balance rates to zero as of April 30, 2015. The administrative overhead to manage interest payments is significant across our 6 regulated entities. Setting account balance interest rate to zero enables us to continue to offer you tight spreads with no incremental fees.

We will continue to pay and charge interest on the currency pairs currently held in customer positions. OANDA calculates interest charged and paid continuously, second-by-second. This is in contrast to other financial markets, where interest payments are made at daily intervals with the shortest increment of one business day.

If you have any questions about this notice, please contact our Customer Support teamwhenever the markets are open.

Thank you for trading with OANDA.

mxtglobal or vantagefx both are of same parent company. been around for quite awhile.

so is Oanda recommended?

Is there a truly retail ECN broker out there?

Many of the forex brokers are just bucket-shops, many of them claim to be ECN but are just market makers. Some even go as far as claiming to have both system.

The truth is once a broker is a market maker, then sometimes they will try or successfully manipulate your trades and at least make sure you lose, it is can be stop loss hunting especially during violate markets or slippage.

Many of the popular ECN brokers do not send lots of trades to interbank or liquid providers instead they hedge them in house, then wait for the trade to end up as a loss to make profit from it. If this trade ends up in profit, of course the broker is sad and will try to manipulate with you the next time. I currently trade with Dukascopy Europe and after trading with them for more than 2 years i can say that this broker is not attending to my best interest.

Dukascopy have a lot to offer and it is truly a good broker, but recently i started noticing the very wide gap in slippage, freezing platform. Once i got slippage more than 50 pips.

Right i am back to square one, looking for a reasonable ECN broker and this time one that uses MT4.

One of the major reason why traders end up in losses is cause by the brokers, of course the other reason includes overconfidence and fear compounded with stupid trading strategies.

But once your broker is feeding you wrong data and manipulating with your trades which is what market makers regularly do, your indicators will be making wrong calculations and you will definitely end up blowing your account, that is why as a trader at the mercy of the brokers we are mostly dead on arrival.

Can anyone recommend true ECN broker that uses MT4 and if regulated in EU.

ECN's:
Look at the ECN home pages and the brokers they list. I mentioned one above.

If you don't understand the market then it's safest to go with a bucket shop that hasn't chased people after negative balances... I'm not sure if Oanda did cancel negative balances or not. The problem is of course, lets say you though like Soros and was sure CHF was going to unpeg, so you held some trades open for a long time paying swap costs and so on. Then the trade works out and now bucket shop cancels the negative balances... So who is going to pay the profits? And lets suppose you were hedged with leverage across multiple brokers. So your trades are massive in size but small in profits net profits. You could end up with huge losses if one of the "legs" or brokers said they won't pay your wins because they decided it was better for marketing reasons to not chase the negative balances.

This whole thing above creates a situation where losers may prefer to go to bucket shop and winners to avoid bucket shop for natural reasons.
Due to "market structure" and "self-interested parties" one could speculate the following may be true:

Bucket shop: your take profit order does not execute while your stop loss order does
ECN type market: your take profit order does execute and your stop loss order does too
Futures: your take profit order does execute and your stop loss order does too, but I would say less likely as in bucket shop or ECN

A rule of thumb: Your stop loss orders tend to be more likely to execute and limits less likely. Bucket shops are even more partial to not executing take profit limit orders. In futures no one should theoretically see whether you are about to make a profit but if your trade ends up with some shark and there's no one else there to lose well they can probably guess what you are doing if you are doing some intraday scalping.


Nice things of a broker:
-Has low or no carry/swap charges (there's few that pay large swaps - says "too good to be true" as it could open arb scenario)
-ideally no fee for withdrawal or deposit using electronic wire transfer (if there is a fee, it indicates they have human involved to determine if the withdrawal is bad for the brokers bottom line - this is why *every* market maker/bucket shop has withdrawal fees - they don't want to automate the process as automation costs and further the fees keep small traders locked in)
-has no reviews suggesting failed withdrawals or deleted trades


So as far as well capitalized retail brokers that allow profitable traders, I don't think there's any perfect broker. Each has pros and cons. I mentioned the well known ones earlier above. There may be bunch of others used by more experienced pros doing futures, options, algos etc but as there's no statistically significant amounts of reviews on them and they may not cater to those that are just getting from newbie stage to the next stage in their "career", it's hard to recommend any.

Hi,

I personally am and have used IG Markets it does offer a range of different markets (forex, commodities, options, bitcoins) in CFD's, fairly straight forward platform, has linked with MT4 recently, no long wait times when you call them for questions or updating account (credit cards),

I would say download a few of them and use the practice account feature use them and see which one suits you better personally.

Currently with XM, pretty good, best of the ones I have tried. A bit expensive with some of their exotic pairs like usdzar.

I have had accounts with iForex, 4XP & MaxFX when I first started but they weren't any good.

Could even try ETX. They are pretty good too.

Would love an account with Citi but as a South african I am not allowed.

I'm using Pepperstone. I was using Axitrader and FXPro (standard accounts) before but found those two's charts had quite a few "big" differences compared to what the real markets were doing
Pepperstone are honest and have treated me well so far. I'm now using Pepperstone Razor ECN and I'm very happy with it.

+1 . Have been observing their live servers for few years. Initially I had some platform breakdowns but now its more ok and for the past year everything perfect. Good execution and server response and no obvious manipulation. Withdrawal ok, but has some deposit fees that i really hate.