Following months of investigation, back-testing and programming I finally decided to take the jump into live trading. I decided that I’d start by using a few forex provider platforms here in Australia so I went with three brokers, these were Axitrader, Go Markets and IC Markets. All these three brokers allow Automated forex trading so I decided to give them all a shot and write this review on how my EA performed across all three forex broker platforms to share with other traders.
Before I get started I should give you all a brief rundown on how I performed my appraisal across my live trading accounts on all 3 forex broker trading platforms. I used these three main criteria to conduct my appraisal:
1. Execution Speed or Order Latency 2. Quantity of Moneymaking Trades Taken 3. General EA Profitability; and
Every one of the three brokers were evaluated according to their performance across all 4 of these criteria.
Execution Speed or Order Latency Execution speed was an interesting part of the test for me because from the outset I knew that the outcomes from each of the 3 brokers would be very different as they’d be very much dependent on the forex brokers server location and model they utilize (market maker, STP, DMA, ECN). To make this test more precise I made a decision to ping each brokers server from VPS’s located in Australia, UK and the USA. My results from the ping experiment were as follows:
Australia Axitrader = 271ms ping Go Markets = 108ms ping IC Markets = 94ms ping
USA Axitrader = 419ms ping Go Markets = 234ms ping IC Markets = 134ms ping
UK Axitrader = 528ms ping Go Markets = 189ms ping IC Markets = 178ms ping
The outcomes of my ping tests were very surprising. It was interesting to see that IC Markets had the lowest latency out of all three forex brokers when tested on 3 separate VPS’s. I also found it very interesting that Aussie established forex broker Go Markets latency was poorer when tested on VPS’s based in the UK and the United states than on an Australian Virtual private server. The winner of my server ping trial was IC Markets.
Quantity of Profitable Deals Executed This was probably the most fascinating tests that I’ve ever carried out. The examination itself was intended to illustrate EA performance across all 3 forex brokers based on the quantity of deals taken, of course the more deals an EA takes doesn’t necessarily mean that the Expert Advisor is better, it simply comes down to the profitability of the trades executed. To make sure that I covered various different market circumstances I tested the EA with all forex brokers over a 3 month time frame. Regrettably as this analysis was executed on real trading accounts to ensure exactness I could only use a VPS in a single location, so I chose an Aussie VPS supplier as all three forex brokers have their headquarters in Australia.
As the Expert advisor took numerous trades over the 3 month time-frame of this test it would be impracticable to provide particulars of all the trades taken in this review so my results for eachforex broker only show the quantity of trades taken and their average profitability on my $1,000 micro account. My findings are below:
Axitrader Quantity of Trades Taken : 187 Average Trade Profitability : $19.72 Total Profitability : $3,687.64
Go Markets Number of Trades Taken : 178 Average Trade Profitability : $23.40 Total Profitability : $4,165.20
IC Markets Number of Trades Taken : 189 Average Trade Profitability : $22.89 Total Profitability : $ 4,326.21
Based on my analysis IC Markets came out trumps, my Expert advisor took two more deals on IC Markets MT4 than on Axitrader’s and 11 more deals than on Go Markets. The average profitability per trade was highest on Go Markets MT4 however as there were fewer trades taken Go Markets in fact showed the smallest total profitability.
Overall EA Profitability This part of my test wasn’t really much of a test but it was instead an evaluation of the overall performance of my Expert Advisor on each of the 3 broker instances of MT4. It’s fairly obvious that after running the exact same Expert advisor across all 3 broker platforms that the most rewarding broker for my Expert advisor was IC Markets. The performance of the EA on IC Markets trading platform was marginally superior to what was achieved on Go Markets platform however it showed substantially greater profits than on Axitrader’s platform which had the worst performance of the group.
In conclusion from my testing the very best forex broker trading platform to run your Expert advisors on is IC Markets, I believe that the improved results achieved with IC Markets was primarily due to reduced latency and better execution on their instance of MT4. Of course it is advisable to check all of the forex brokers out yourself prior to leaping into EA trading, however I’m positive that your results won’t be much dissimilar to mine.
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