Best Broker for Canadians from Alberta

Quote from Pepperstone website:

"Our servers are set to GMT +3 to match with the end of the trading day in the US – generally considered the close of the trading day. This means that when trading concludes in the United States at 5pm, the daily candle closes in Metatrader.
This time also corresponds to the beginning of Pepperstone’s roll-over period (https://pepperstone.com/support/faq/what-time-does-your-rollover-occur-2/), in which swaps are applied to any trades held over the close of the trading day. During this time, trading is disabled for 5 minutes when banks reset their servers and liquidity is very low."

So this daily 5 minute shut down could explain the gaps as they all happened during this 5 minute time period.

it looked pretty big on the hourly chart - see below. i did not check the smaller timeframes. it stayed like that till the weekend and now it is gone - they just draw one big hourly bar instead of it removing the gap.

i am not really sure how the mt4 technology works and why would i redraw bars if that was a real representation of what happened.

dkam, i am doubting it is connected with the daily rollover. it was a reaction to elections i think. it looks like about 100 pips piece is missing.

my question still remains unanswered - is this gap the evidence of a true representation of what was in the interbank space or is it their inside manipulations. why interactive brokers had this gas and others, vantage for example, did not.

i think it is like a logical test showing which broker is lying.

look normal. Alot of broker will stop pricing before market close because lack of liquidity provider. Also some broker prefer to lower leverage on weekend to protect client. mean ib and pepperstone both suck and less liquidity provider.
they redraw it because lack of liquidity proviser.

Top 10 brokers for canadians:

http://www.tradersasset.com/forex/brokers/canadian-forex-brokers

anyone with ava or etoro?

After Alpari I went for
1. IC Markets
2.City Index (Under Regulation by FSCA - which is key )
3.Pepperstone

I spread my accounts by 3 because I don't weant to put all my money into one broker like I did with Alpari

tafa, i did not look at city index. what do you know about them other than what they claim on their website?

fsca is good, at least better than nothing with others.

AxiTrader is now regulated in the UK as well as Australia. Might be worth checking out for those that use Global Prime, IC Markets, Pepperstone etc as similar business model and a larger broker in terms of volume.

I think CIty Index are very good , they have this fixed spreads during certain hours , and I like it .It means even if there is news , thier spreads do not chnage , thats very very good

Citi Index, Lmax, FXCM UK does not accept Canadian clients.

Canadians can trade on the FXCM platform by opening an account with Friedberg Direct: http://www.fxcm.com/ca/?CMP=SFS-70160000000MusRAAS

Friedberg is regulated by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) and a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF) which insures each client's funds for up to $1 million.

Since the original topic of this thread was asking about brokers for traders in Alberta, it's important to note that the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC) passed regulations that require a person to be an accredited investor (http://www.albertasecurities.com/industry/issuer-regulation/Pages/common-capital-raising-exemptions.aspx) in order to trade forex in Alberta.

The most unreasonable, ridiculous and draconian protective-of-the-rich regulation ever passed in a G8 country. One of the many reasons why I would never set foot in Alberta to become its residents.

For one, I don't understand WHY there has to be financial regulatory body at provincial level. Trading of an investment instrument is the same everywhere regardless whether you are in British Columbia or Nova Scotia and everywhere in between so WHY does the provincial government needs to get involved.

We should have ONE financial regulatory body at the federal level for ALL investment instruments and that's it with consistent, unambiguous regulation rules for ALL Canadians no matter where they are in Canada. United States has financial market 100 times larger than Canada and they only have ONE financial regulatory body, the NFA/CFTC for derivative products and we Canada who has only 1/100 of the size of financial market as United States needs TEN different financial regulatory bodies in each province?

That's ridiculous!

I live in Ontario and my main broker is ICMarkets. Last Friday I was pissed by the slippage and searched for brokers again. It seems that slippage is the worst on Friday. If this is the case, I am going to modify my EA on Friday to combat slippage. To Avoid trading on Friday may also be a good idea.

I looked through the list briefly and have to admit none of them are as good as ICMarkets. Some of the brokers mentioned look like scams and their web sites are lousy. The bottom half are major market maker brokers which only allow 33:1 leverage.

LMAX used to accept Canadian traders until the passing of those stupid regulations by Alberta and at first LMAX would ask you to provide proof to show you are an "accredited investor" regardless of which province you are from and now LMAX just stopped accepting Canadian traders altogether. It's so unfair for the rest of us in other provinces of Canada that we had to suffer the non-acceptance just because of Alberta government's ignorance and stupidity.

Probably paid trolls by Global Prime LOL. Just saying...

thx, will look into Pepperstone. My strategy requires low slippage.

33:1 is default leverage offered by major brokers, fxcm, forex.com and oanda for canadians. This is enforced by IIROC.
http://www.fxcm.com/ca/forex-margin-leverage-guide.jsp
I am surprised Australia brokers does not care about the regulations.

since i started this discussion i will chime in again: i talked to friedberg. i don't remember now what, but something did not work for me big time. either the leverage was too high or they did not take albertans, don't remember now. anyway, i crossed them out right away.

i also looked at global prime. i see 2 drawbacks there: they are very small, they have only, i think, a couple of thousand of clients. another thing is that they do something different with client's money than the rest of australian brokers do. there was a discussion about in on another forum, not shwd, and they just retreated from there which raised even more suspicion for me.

i am with pepperstone, as i said. i have their razor account which is supposed to be good. so, my observation for now is that it has 1 pip smaller spread than their regular account. at the same time you have to pay a commission plus to the spread, so the real difference is only 0.1 pip. as i don't trade too high of a volume it is irrelevant i'd say.

my other broker is vantage. their spread is another 1-2 pips above the razor but they have so called bonus which they transfer in small portions to my account. so really, i don't see any difference between them, it ends up being almost the same. 1 pips difference with volumes i trade and the way i trade doesn't change anything.

i contacted city index today and they confirmed that they don't accept canadians and americans so they are out of the equation.

i also looked very closely at dukas but they do another strange thing - they drastically increase leverage requirements over the weekend, at least for swiss pairs. so i would be stopped for a margin call during the weekend many times. plus to their spread which is horrible even with the introducing broker.

my conclusion is that we don't know how good the broker is until the sh*t hits the fence but then it is too late. under the normal circumstances most brokers in normal countries are good. so spreading the risk by trading via multiple brokers is the only real protection, pretty much.

almost forgot to mention - opened an account with active trades as they claim they have a supercoverage for each trader. first of all, i was told that their claim is probably not real and i would tend to believe it. the price of this coverage, had it been real, would have killed their business so there should be a small print somewhere which negates all they claim, but you don't know about it until it kicks in if anything bad happens. but then transferring money from them to pepperstone was a real hell. it worked out at the end but i wasted a week of my trading and i will not touch active trades with 20 meters stick ever again.

well, again and again, nowhere really to go ... just to find several ok brokers and trade through all of them hoping for if one screws up the rest won't.

I think you are very wise to be concerned over brokers in general.
Its no so much about the price but getting your money out is the key.

Brokers with 100% fully segregated accounts not the ones who use clients funds as collateral would be the one i would be using.

going to try ATC brokers UK next. looks like they have low spreads and lower slippage than ICmarkets. I have seen 30+ pips slippage twice from ICMarkets.

All of those brokers are in Canada and are a member of IIROC thus are required to comply with leverage rate stipulated by IIROC regulation.

Australian brokers are bound by regulations enforced by ASIC, the Australian equivalent of IIROC and as far as I understand ASIC has different allowable leverage rate. And it's good so far that they don't give a crap about those draconian "accredited investor" requirement by those nosy out-to-lunch regulators and take us Canadians traders.

IC Markets has really low spread but their slippages are notoriously high. During normal trading hours, i.e. non-news time, you pretty much have to add 2-4 pips to whatever is the advertised spread that they publish. So if they say their E/U is 0-pip spread, in reality it's 2-4 pips.