Brokers

Hi all,

 

Okay we have SQ, we have the best data possible.  We generated and tested our strategies.  Many days go by during this phase, and we have some good candidates that pass robustness testing.

 

Which broker should we be using?  ECN only, or should we consider market makers?

 

How do we know what slippage will be like?  How do we know what the spread widening will look like?

How do we know how fast the execution will be? Will we see platform freezes and requotes/invalid prices?

 

 

The choice of broker and how they execute the trades must be as important as selecting the best strategies, so what’s everyone’s opinion?

 

Currently I’m looking at Pepperstone, FxOpen, SynergyFX and AxiTrader as possible brokers. 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Mike

ECN is great unless you get $1million for a real broker.
You don’t know what slippage will be like, broker is not just the factor, depends on market volatility. This is why M1 and M5 strategies blow up in live trading. You will be safe if your strategies are robust, not over optimized, and trade m15 TF and higher.
You don’t know what spread widening will be like unless you have been manually trading with them.
You don’t know how fast the execution will be unless you have manually traded with them.
Never had a platform freeze (MT4) ever.
Only time I had a requote message and invalid price was because not enough margin in the account for additional trades. The trade simply did not execute.

If you are worried about all of the above, manually trade with them for 1 month, especially during high impact data such as FOMC and cash rate decisions. That will be the highest spreads and slippage. Use 0.01 if you cannot manually trade profitably.

What I mean by platform freezes is broker freezes.  I’ve seen orders placed with some market maker brokers close to economic news, where the order just hangs until a very long timeout occurs (i.e. broker stops communicating with MT4 terminal).

 

I agree the only way is to open real accounts with lots of brokers with minimum lot size and min deposit size and trade best SQ strategies for real. Not only should this highlight curve fitting, it will also uncover trade execution “features” (such as always negative slippage and slow order placement) that kills profitability.

 

However, opening lots of real accounts is a time consuming and expensive practice, surely there’s another way collectively to find good brokers and bad brokers….

Google broker reviews.

Google broker reviews.

 

Yes, but there’s more to it than reviews.  I’d rather hear personal experience from SQ users, which brokers give good execution and which play silly games with spread, slippage and order processing time.

I use Oanda, MB trading, and FXChoice. No problems with any.

http://www.globalprime.com.au without any doubts. ECN, low spreads, very good slippage and most important: great support that listens to you if you need anything or have complaints.