The difference between ECN and market maker execution
The majority of forex brokers fall into two execution models: those that take the other side of your trade and those that pass it through. The difference is more than semantics. A dealing desk broker acts as your counterparty. ECN execution routes your order through to the interbank market — your orders match with genuine liquidity.
In practice, the difference becomes clear in three places: whether spreads blow out at the wrong moment, how fast your orders go through, and whether you get requoted. Genuine ECN execution tends to deliver tighter pricing but charge a commission per lot. Market makers mark up the spread instead. There's no universally better option — it hinges on how you trade.
If you scalp or trade high frequency, ECN is almost always worth the commission. Getting true market spreads makes up for the per-lot fee on the major pairs.
Execution speed: what 37 milliseconds actually means for your trades
Brokers love quoting fill times. Numbers like under 40ms fills make for nice headlines, but does it make a measurable difference when you're actually placing trades? More than you'd think.
A trader who placing longer-term positions, the gap between 40ms and 80ms execution won't move the needle. For high-frequency strategies working small price moves, every millisecond of delay translates to money left on the table. A broker averaging under 40ms with zero requotes learn more here offers an actual advantage compared to platforms with 150-200ms fills.
A few brokers have invested proprietary execution technology that eliminates dealing desk intervention. Titan FX, for example, built their proprietary system called Zero Point which sends orders straight to LPs without dealing desk intervention — they report averages of under 37 milliseconds. You can read a detailed breakdown in this review of Titan FX.
Raw spread accounts vs standard: doing the maths
Here's a question that comes up constantly when choosing their trading account: should I choose the raw spread with commission or markup spreads with no fee per lot? The answer depends on your monthly lot count.
Let's run the numbers. The no-commission option might offer EUR/USD at 1.0-1.5 pips. A raw spread account gives you the same pair at 0.0-0.3 pips but applies a commission of about $7 per lot round-turn. With the wider spread, you're paying through the spread on each position. At more than a few lots a week, the raw spread account is almost always cheaper.
A lot of platforms offer both as options so you can compare directly. Make sure you work it out using your real monthly lot count rather than trusting the broker's examples — those often make the case for whichever account the broker wants to push.
500:1 leverage: the argument traders keep having
The leverage conversation polarises the trading community more than any other topic. Regulators have capped leverage to 30:1 or 50:1 depending on the asset class. Platforms in places like Vanuatu or the Bahamas can still offer 500:1 or higher.
The usual case against 500:1 is that it blows accounts. This is legitimate — statistically, traders using maximum leverage end up negative. But the argument misses nuance: traders who know what they're doing rarely trade at 500:1 on every trade. They use the option of more leverage to lower the capital locked up in any single trade — leaving more margin to deploy elsewhere.
Sure, it can wreck you. That part is true. The leverage itself isn't the issue — how you size your positions is. If your strategy benefits from reduced margin commitment, access to 500:1 lets you deploy capital more efficiently — most experienced traders use it that way.
Offshore regulation: what traders actually need to understand
The regulatory landscape in forex exists on a spectrum. At the top is FCA, ASIC, CySEC. They cap leverage at 30:1, require negative balance protection, and generally restrict the trading conditions available to retail accounts. Tier-3 you've got places like Vanuatu (VFSC) and Mauritius (FSA). Fewer requirements, but which translates to better trading conditions for the trader.
What you're exchanging not subtle: going with an offshore-regulated broker gives you more aggressive trading conditions, lower compliance hurdles, and usually lower fees. In return, you get less investor protection if something goes wrong. There's no compensation scheme paying out up to GBP85k.
If you're comfortable with the risk and choose execution quality and flexibility, tier-3 platforms can make sense. The important thing is doing your due diligence rather than just reading the licence number. A platform with a decade of operating history under tier-3 regulation may be more reliable in practice than a newly licensed tier-1 broker.
Scalping execution: separating good brokers from usable ones
Scalping is one area where broker choice matters most. Targeting small ranges and keeping positions for seconds to minutes. At that level, seemingly minor gaps in fill quality translate directly to the difference between a winning and losing month.
Non-negotiables for scalpers is short: raw spreads with no markup, execution in the sub-50ms range, a no-requote policy, and no restrictions on scalping strategies. A few brokers claim to allow scalping but slow down fills for high-frequency traders. Look at the execution policy before funding your account.
Platforms built for scalping usually make it obvious. You'll see execution speed data somewhere prominent, and they'll typically offer VPS hosting for EAs that need low latency. When a platform doesn't mention fill times anywhere on their marketing, that tells you something.
Copy trading and social platforms: what works and what doesn't
Social trading has become popular over the past few years. The appeal is obvious: pick someone with a good track record, copy their trades without doing your own analysis, collect the profits. In reality is messier than the marketing imply.
The biggest issue is the gap between signal and fill. When a signal provider executes, your copy fills milliseconds to seconds later — and in fast markets, that lag transforms a good fill into a losing one. The tighter the average trade size in pips, the more this problem becomes.
Despite this, some social trading platforms are worth exploring for people who don't have time to monitor charts all day. The key is finding transparency around real performance history over at least a year, rather than backtested curves. Risk-adjusted metrics tell you more than headline profit percentages.
Some brokers build proprietary copy trading within their standard execution. This tends to reduce latency issues compared to third-party copy services that connect to the trading platform. Look at how the copy system integrates before trusting that the lead trader's performance will carry over with the same precision.