fxopen ecn/stp spread profit

hi there, i´m a 21 year old student from germany, currently looking for a new ecn/stp broker. i´ve traded with a german dealing desk company for about 6 month, but the main problem was that their stop loss orders had to be at least 25 pips from the bid offer. i only trade eurusd with 0.5 lot size a few hours a day. so i just talked to a guy from fxopen about their stp commisions and he said that they are compansated by the spread. now im wondering if a true ecn broker is allowed to be compansated by the spread because by adding a spread to the actual bid/ask the ecn broker would requote the price. further he wouldnt tell me by how much the spread is widened. if anybody has made some experience with fxopen ecn or has deeper understandings about hoe ecn brokers function, feel free to post back.

greetings

Hi,

may i ask u for the name of the German broker u used so far?

onu

Plenty of info here on different types of brokers. You might check out:

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=8046

But re. your questions, to my knowledge, FxOpen is not an ECN, but are a bucketshop market maker (regardless of what they say on their website). That's the way they used to be at least; maybe something has changed, but I doubt they are really an ECN. A "true ECN" is simply making bids and offers available to you that exist from their liquidity providers (banks), and charging a commission every time you place an order. Commissions are the way they make money, rather than manipulating the spread.

You might do a search here on Forex Factory for FxOpen; I think there are lots of threads here about them with relevant comments.