Best Broker for 2012?

any one heard about universal-fx , it has a good reviews all over the web with ECN Trading environment and competitive spreads but it is regulated by BVI FSC and it is located in British Virgin Islands which doesn't make me feel comfort

anyone having business with them

Do you trust a broker who gives ZERO info on their website about who are the owners or the management?

Who are you going to ask questions to when something happens to your money, to client chat?

I must thank-
You gave me a good idea-

isn't strange that you have 54 posts and in 50 posts of them you saying how good Armada Markets is

Never use an offshore broker. Probably a russian broker as there is no info about who owns the company.

Priceless. Keep it up, man! And to all of you here: trade well!

Bullshit.

Yep.

A bröker that resorts to this silly way of promoting itself automatically loses respect in my eyes. It's the number 1 sign of a low capitalized bucketshop.

There has been an increase in the number of bröker shills recently. So keep your eyes open guys.

If I would have said alpari is my favorit you wouldnt be so suspicious? Maybe I have different idea than You. I dont want to argue with You on this. Happy trading.

Dear Friend you Will Wait To Finish 2012 Year , After it in Sites And Forum You Can Find This Broker , You Can Search This And Know This From People in internet And Support And Speed of Withdrawal And Deposit And Open And Close Position .
Good luck

Okay newbie here. I have a question.

If Forex is unregulated, doesn't it meet that most brokers are bucket shops? I heard about stop-hunting, those are scary stuff. And not having fixed spreads is insane. Brokers can easily manipulate their spread and most short term traders will get cream.

I don't have much time here so I'm gonna be a bit brief, but I'll provide a couple resources where you can learn more about this.

No. The retail forex business has been getting more regulated recently. There are some big regulated brökers, some of which offer things like segregation of your funds, etc. Just stick to those. I'll give you some tips on how to spot them.

Of course you'll also find many small bucketshops trying to win your trust with flashy nice-looking websites, lucrative trading conditions (typically very high leverage such as 500:1, low deposit requirements, every kind of funding method you can think of, etc), and claims of being regulated, with the license/regulation of course being in some small country or less known island.

Just use commonsense here. The bröker has to be around in business for years. It has to be well-regulated in a trustable jurisdiction, preferably offering segregation of funds with other banks (so that if they go out of business your finds are protected). It has to offer you competitive trading conditions with low commissions etc. Its trading model must pose no conflict of interest with you (their income should come from trading commissions only, not from trading against you). It has to have good communication, always test their customer service with some questions before you open an account, see how responsive they are (perhaps ask about regulation and protection of funds etc, they have to be open to these questions). Also, you can tell a good company via how much they have invested on their services. For example, what trading platforms do they offer? Did they invest in offering a proprietary platform, plus one or two others, or do they just provide the standard MT4 platform that every small bucketshop can provide and that's it?

It's things like this that can tell you if a company is well-capitalized and is serious about this business or not. Word of mouth from traders that you KNOW are experienced is also helpful but not as important as your own commonsense.

If by stop-hunting you mean brökers manupilating price to trigger your stops, this is much rarer than you think as it is only done by some small, shady and unregulated bucketshops that can be easily avoided.

You will read about this activity a lot though because people don't like to lose. You need to account for the fact that most people who lose everything will tend to blame it on anything but themselves. It's just human nature.

A big serious company won't resort to such easily-exposable activities. Just know whom to choose and you will never have to worry about bröker "stop-hunting".

Not really.

Only "market makers" guarantee a fixed spread, and that comes at a price. For example, the bröker will widen spreads during news announcements to protect itself. The bröker here makes money from the spread, which is a guaranteed but "artificial" spread: The bröker is creating that spread with its own orders (hence the "making a marking"). There are however market makers (like Oanda for example) that offer variable spreads but just add to that spread (i.e. making a market). The nice thing about market makers is that they will provide very low trading requirements (micro-lots, tiny initial deposits allowed, etc) and a guaranteed spread which is typically larger than the average variable spread (i.e. in the long run you spend more on fixed spreads than on variable spreads). But the bad thing is that the spread will be widened during news announcements. The bröker has money on the line and it needs to protect its ass after all. It doesn't matter if its by widening the spreads or cutting off the connection etc. If it's at risk because of some wild market conditions (like big news), its protective algorithms WILL act. This reduces the number of opportunities you as a trader can exploit, but it's no big deal if you don't care about news and such volatile market events. So market maker or not, it really depends on your particular needs.

Now how about ECN brökers with variable spreads? Well a real ECN bröker, using several liquidity providers (such as some big banks etc. forming a "pool" of liquidity obtained from these sources), just shows you the best bid/offer currently available to it. Now this spread is NOT something fixed, because bids/offers constantly vary in the market (a market that is limited to the bröker's network of liquidity providers). The bröker here only makes money by charging commissions for letting you into this market. The bröker here doesn't care what you do, or whether there's news announcements or not. It will just give you the best bid/offer from its liquidity providers and take commissions. It's not risking anything (because it's not making a market) and doesn't care if you win or lose. That is none of its business. A big reputable company that has millions in capital will not risk losing its license and an easy way of making money (via commissions) by illegally manipulating spreads and moving price to hunt its traders' stops. This is why it's important to go with a company that is well established and has so much invested.

For more info, I highly recommend that you read this article:

The Structure of Forex Brokers

You can find all the basic info for free, but if you want spend some money on an even deeper and broader understanding of how things work in this business, this is the book you will need:

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners, by Larry Harris.

Best of luck.

You're starting to sound as verbose as myself, ahah.. nice

I do that too, start writing something I expect to be a quick reply, then 10 minutes later I nearly have a page cleared worth of text in front of me. Funny how that works.

lol, totally.

lol marv. Thanks for the insightful post. Really appreciate it. I guess maybe you're right, that those people who accuse brokers of stop hunting are finding excuses for their losses. I find it scary because I heard people talk about brokers purposely hitting your SL if you're a big trader. It is very documented on a lot of forums.

I know brokers need to make money too, but the greed game is here and it is staying.

I think that the best answer would be to evaluate who are the top 10 best brokers for year 2011.

cheers

can you recommend some and don't care about bla bla bla

Harsh dude, the guy went out of his way to give a detailed and thought out post. Don't put him down because you don't have the attention span for it. :/

yeah to make he list of the best and profitable conditions)))

Trading-Point

If regulation and spreads are the concern, OANDA is my choice.