What to look for in an ECN broker right now

The difference between ECN and market maker execution

Most retail brokers fall into one of two categories: dealing desk or ECN. This isn't just terminology. A dealing desk broker is essentially the other side of your trade. An ECN broker routes your order straight to liquidity providers — your orders match with actual buy and sell interest.

Day to day, the difference matters most in how your trades get filled: whether spreads blow out at the wrong moment, execution speed, and requotes. Genuine ECN execution tends to offer raw spreads from 0.0 pips but charge a commission per lot. Market makers mark up the spread instead. Neither model is inherently bad — it hinges on how you trade.

If you scalp or trade high frequency, ECN is almost always the right choice. Tighter spreads compensates for the commission cost on most pairs.

Why execution speed is more than a marketing number

You'll see brokers advertise execution speed. Numbers like "lightning-fast execution" make for nice headlines, but what does it actually mean when you're actually placing trades? It depends entirely on what you're doing.

For someone executing a handful of trades per month, shaving off a few milliseconds is irrelevant. For high-frequency strategies trading small price moves, every millisecond of delay can equal money left on the table. A broker averaging under 40ms with no requotes provides measurably better fills over one that averages 200ms.

A few brokers built proprietary execution technology that eliminates dealing desk intervention. Titan FX developed a Zero Point execution system which sends orders straight to LPs without dealing desk intervention — their published average is under 37 milliseconds. There's a thorough analysis in this Titan FX review.

Commission-based vs spread-only accounts — which costs less?

Here's the most common question when choosing an account type: do I pay commission plus tight spreads or markup spreads with no fee per lot? It varies based on volume.

Here's a real comparison. A spread-only account might offer EUR/USD at around 1.2 pips. The ECN option offers the same pair at 0.0-0.3 pips but applies a commission of about $7 per lot round-turn. For the standard account, you're paying through the spread on each position. If you're doing moderate volume, the commission model works out cheaper.

Many ECN brokers offer both as options so you can pick what suits your volume. What matters is to calculate based on your actual trading volume rather than trusting the broker's examples — those usually be designed to sell whichever account the broker wants to push.

500:1 leverage: the argument traders keep having

Leverage divides the trading community more than any other topic. Tier-1 regulators like ASIC and FCA have capped leverage to 30:1 in most jurisdictions. Platforms in places like Vanuatu or the Bahamas continue to offer up to 500:1.

The standard argument against is simple: inexperienced traders wipe out faster. Fair enough — the numbers support this, the majority of retail accounts end up negative. What this ignores nuance: experienced traders don't use the maximum ratio. What they do is use the option of high leverage to minimise the money sitting as margin in any single trade — freeing up capital for other opportunities.

Obviously it carries risk. That part is true. But blaming the leverage is like blaming the car for a speeding ticket. If your strategy needs less capital per position, access to 500:1 lets you deploy capital more efficiently — which is the whole point for anyone who knows what they're doing.

Offshore regulation: what traders actually need to understand

Broker regulation in forex falls into a spectrum. The strictest tier is FCA (UK) and ASIC (Australia). Leverage is capped at 30:1, enforce client fund segregation, and limit the trading conditions available to retail accounts. Tier-3 you've got the VFSC in Vanuatu and Mauritius FSA. Fewer requirements, but that also means more flexibility in what they can offer.

What you're exchanging not subtle: tier-3 regulation gives you 500:1 leverage, fewer account restrictions, and typically more competitive pricing. In return, you have less safety net if there's a dispute. You don't get a investor guarantee fund like the FCA's FSCS.

If you're comfortable with the risk and pick performance over protection, regulated offshore brokers work well. The important thing is looking at operating history, fund segregation, and reputation rather than only reading the licence number. An offshore broker with 10+ years of clean operation under an offshore licence is often a safer bet in practice than a freshly regulated broker that got its licence last year.

Scalping execution: separating good brokers from usable ones

For scalping strategies is the style where broker choice matters most. Targeting tiny price movements and staying in for less than a few minutes at a time. With those margins, tiny variations in fill quality equal profit or loss.

What to look for is short: true ECN spreads at actual market rates, fills in the sub-50ms range, a no-requote policy, and the broker allowing holding times under one minute. Some brokers say they support scalping but slow down fills if you trade too frequently. Look at the execution policy before committing capital.

Platforms built for scalping tend to make review it obvious. Look for execution speed data somewhere prominent, and they'll typically include virtual private servers for EAs that need low latency. If the broker you're looking at is vague about execution specifications anywhere on their marketing, that tells you something.

Social trading in forex: practical expectations

The idea of copying other traders has become popular over the past few years. The appeal is simple: pick profitable traders, replicate their positions automatically, collect the profits. In practice is less straightforward than the marketing imply.

The biggest issue is time lag. When the lead trader executes, the replicated trade goes through after a delay — when prices are moving quickly, the delay transforms a profitable trade into a worse entry. The more narrow the profit margins, the more this problem becomes.

Despite this, certain implementations deliver value for traders who can't develop their own strategies. The key is finding access to verified performance history over a minimum of several months of live trading, not just simulated results. Risk-adjusted metrics tell you more than headline profit percentages.

A few platforms have built in-house social platforms alongside their regular trading platform. This can minimise the delay problem compared to external copy trading providers that connect to MT4 or MT5. Look at the technical setup before expecting historical returns will translate with the same precision.