I have become very suspect about a a number of forex brokers that I’ve dealt with over the past few months who claim to have an ECN forex offering. Obviously trading with an ECN broker is the ultimate as you are certain to receive the absolute best spreads in the market and you may place big trades. It seems to me that there are allot of small forex brokers round the place that have jumped on the ECN bandwagon and are calling themselves an ECN broker when all that they are doing is takinganother brokers ECN price feed and making a market on this price themselves in order to benefit from your losses.
It is often hard for brand new fx traders to have the ability to choose the real ECN fx brokers from the bunch when these days there are so many fake ECN fx brokers out there. To assist brand new fx traders in determining whether or not a broker is actually an ECN forex broker or simply a forex broker taking a price feed from another broker. Below I’ve outlined just a few uncomplicated checks that you can conduct.
Checks
1. Is there a minimum distance that you can place your take profit and stop-loss orders from the current market price?
2. Does your forex broker slow or freeze price updates?
3. Do your fx brokers charts differ from the price shown on your order ticket?
4. Will your forex provider only pass on negative slippage?
5. Does your broker accept orders bigger than 5 standard lots?
Is there a minimum distance which you can place your take profit and stop-loss orders away from the current market price?
A True ECN forex broker will have no limits on the distance which you can put your stop-loss and take-profit orders away from the current market price. Market maker forex brokers apply this minimum distance rule to prevent scalpers and day traders from taking money from the forex broker when trading intraday. True ECN fx brokers do NOT aim to benefit from client losses they are motivated by flow only, meaning the more frequently you deal the more money you make, this is primarily why they charge a commission and will NOT have any limits on your deal placement.
Does your fx broker slow or freeze price updates? In a genuine ECN environment there are tens of thousands of pricing updates each minute this means that the prices a True ECN broker will show should fluctuate quite allot as spreads are set inside the ECN market place. Brokers that are NOT true ECN brokers are unlikely to show all the ECN price updates since it reduces load on their servers, after all they do not need to show all price updates as they are NOT passing on the trades to the ECN environment anyhow but instead warehousing them internally.
Do your brokers charts differ the bid price shown on your deal ticket?
A number of brokers that are NOT True ECN forex brokers adopt a piece meal approach to their Metatrader 4 setup and simply plug in an ECN price feed to their existing NON-ECN Metarader 4 offering. When fx brokers do this it means that the graphs won’t replicate the prices which the ECN price feed shows. This is what one would call a “Sticky Tape Offering” as there has been little attempt shown by the broker to setup their Metatrader 4 environment correctly. Brokers who’s setup exhibits this characteristic are NOT likely to be have a True ECN offering.
Will your forex broker only pass on negative slippage? Various traders think that slippage is negative feature of forex trading, however this is in-fact NOT true. Slippage is quite normal even inside a True ECN environment however the slippage that occurs will work for you in addition to against you. Slippage that works in your favour is often called positive slippage and slippage that works against you is generally known as negative slippage. Unfortunately some brokers take advantage of this and add a couple of pips to the negative slippage and simply don’t pass on any positive slippage at all. A tell tale sign of a fake ECN forex broker is one that does NOT pass on any positive slippage.
Does your provider agree to orders larger than five standard lots?
A True ECN environment is designed to provide traders with deep liquidity from the many contributors. Obviously if a broker is showing ECN prices but is in reality a market maker broker then they will simply not be able to pass on all the benefits that a True ECN has to offer. A fantastic test is to simply place a big trade on to see whether it gets accepted or rejected, a True ECN forex broker will have no problems taking on a trade that is 5 standard lots in size.
I have carried out these five easy checks on over fifty different fx brokers around the globe and my findings were really quite shocking. Out of in more than 50 different forex brokers who claim to be ECN brokers. I have found that there are just eight brokers that pass all five tests and could be considered a True ECN broker. Of these five forex brokers only 3 offer the Metatrader 4 trading platform to their customers.
I’m not in a position to tell you which fx broker fits you best as each forex trader has different necessities, however out of these 3 brokers I have personally chosen to deal with IC Markets simply due to their pricing and very fast order execution speeds.