I’m a professional fx trader and trader mentor. I have been fx trading professionally myself for in excess of 12 years now and have been educating would-be fx traders for in excess of eight years. I’ve educated over 10,000 people how to buy and sell currencies professionally in both the United kingdom and Australia, most of my students have gone on to become professional traders themselves or have been offered work opportunities as traders from some of the world’s largest investment banks and forex brokers.

Time and time again my pupils ask me what to search for in a forex broker, of course lots of them are influenced by promotional material produced by fx brokers and are of the assumption that they ought to be fx trading with a broker which has tight spreads, though more often than not they fail to consider some of the most important aspects of selecting a fx broker and tight spreads are on the list of the least important factors.

To assist my students in selecting a forex provider I always advocate they think about these factors ahead of selecting a forex provider:

1. Execution Latency 2. Depth of Liquidity 3. Prices Over news Periods 4. Forex broker Regulation 5. Foreign currency Pairs Offered

Execution Latency

Envisage placing an order only to have the deal hang on you and then get executed at a totally different price. This could happen for two separate reasons, the initial reason that this occurs is simply because the price has changed from when the deal is placed to when it is filled, this frequently happens when the you have a bad internet link or when the forex brokers server is found a good distance away the other reason this happens is because the broker is slowing the order as they’re a market maker and they’re intentionally stopping you from being filled at the price quoted profiting from the price difference. Always select an ECN broker this way you can be guaranteed that your trades are going to be executed in a timely way and the forex broker is not looking to cash in on your losses.

Depth of Liquidity

Not a lot of people understand that when tight spreads are displayed to them on a broker platform it does not always mean they are able to trade on those prices. Most of the time fx brokers will display spreads that can not be traded on for any decent quantity. Not having the ability to trade on forex broker prices can be irritating for most traders and frequently results in deals being executed with slippage that will frequently work against the trader. It is imperative that you ask your fx broker what their liquidity is like to make sure that if you’re trading any sort of quantity your deals are filled at the price displayed on the fx brokers trading platform or alternately deal with an ECN fx broker where you are guaranteed bottomless liquidity.

Prices Over News Announcements

Before choosing a broker you need to make sure you spend a while keeping track of their spreads over news announcements. One of many issues forex traders often face is widened prices over news announcements. Widened prices are caused by banks refusing to show prices over this period until they can ascertain the effect of the news announcement on the currency. A good broker will aggregate a variety of investment bank forex prices to make sure that if one investment bank is not quoting prices there are others that will. If you choose to deal with an ECN forex broker more often than not you won’t have any problems with prices over news periods.

Forex broker Regulation

Choose a broker that is regulated and even better one which is regulated in the country which you reside. If you decide on a fx broker that’s regulated within the country that you live you have a better chance of getting your money back if something goes wrong. In case you cant find a suitable broker within the country that you live in you should look for a fx broker in a country which has a superior regulatory regime, forex brokers in nations such as the USA, UK and Australia tend to be the safest in the world

Currency Pairs Accessible

There isn’t any point selecting a fx broker that doesn’t offer the pairs which you trade so take an in depth look at what your provider offers prior to opening an account. There are some forex brokers that do not offer many of the more exotic crosses and simply stick to the majors, other brokers will offer a full range of foreign currencies in addition to gold and silver.

I expect this helps you in selecting the best fx broker, personally I’ve traded with the majority of forex brokers all over the world and in Australia but I have ended up settling with ECN forex broker IC Markets. International Capital Markets (IC Markets) are able to offer me a full range of currencies and commodities, are regulated in Australia by AISC, have deep liquidity behind the prices shown and speedy execution speed which assists my scalping plan. Of course you should always do your own research ahead of choosing a broker however I can certainly vouch for IC Markets.

Even as a normal Joe, you can easily learn and trade in the IC Markets just by going online. Click here to learn more on forex trading.

Just the other day I saw a new forex provider on the scene called FXTG. There seem to be new forex brokers popping up each day and this is the most recent one that I have spotted. I thought that I would open a live account to give them a go and write a review comparing them to my existing fx broker IC Markets.

Of course not all fx brokers are the same. I understood this from the start ahead of starting an account with FXTG. There are some subtle features that make each and every forex provider pretty different. On the list of key differences is whether the fx broker is an ECN or market marker. Fortunately FXTG is an ECN broker exactly like my current fx broker IC Markets.

I went ahead and opened an account with FXTG and naturally I chose an ECN trading account because at least this way I would be able to match apples to apples when comparing FXTG to IC Markets. The trading account opening procedure was relatively straightforward however I was a bit disappointed by their sales and client support, what really annoyed me was that they were incredibly pushy and tried to get me to deposit with more money than what I actually wanted to. One good thing was that my trading account only took only two days to open which is pretty reasonable.

I hooked up my spread monitor on the FXTG platform and ran it next to my IC Markets trading account. At first I was genuinely excited about FXTG and expected that they would give IC Markets a real run for their money however after running the spread monitor for three days on both live accounts I discovered that IC Markets was displaying dramatically tighter spreads than FXTG, this was especially disappointing as I had gone to the trouble of opening an account.

The FXTG prices actually didn’t excite me but I thought not to write them off immediately, I decided to test their execution. The main reason for me testing their execution was because occasionally ECN fx brokers quote slightly wider prices to avoid slippage. I figured that the best time to test slippage was over a news announcement this might also confirm whether the price feed has liquidity behind it. Non-farm payroll is naturally the perfect news announcement to test slippage on. I chose the most liquid foreign exchange pair pair EUR/USD to perform the test, my deal size was 12 standard lots on both platforms. Much to my disappointment the slippage utilising FXTG trading platform was terrible. IC Markets on the other hand didn’t slip me at all.

I’m confident that if you’re new to fx trading a slightly wider spread and slippage will probably not matter all that much, it’s only when you start forex trading actively with size and scalping the market when the you realise how much money you’re leaving on the table. In my opinion I have chosen to stick to IC Markets because I know that their Metatrader platform is dependable and they are well priced. I still have my FXTG trading account opened but I do not really utilize it a great deal.

Even as a normal Joe, you can easily learn and trade in the IC Markets just by going online. Click here to learn more on FXTG