The difference between ECN and market maker execution
A lot of the brokers you'll come across fall into one of two categories: market makers or ECN brokers. The distinction matters. A dealing desk broker acts as the other side of your trade. An ECN broker routes your order through to liquidity providers — you get fills from actual buy and sell interest.
Day to day, the difference matters most in how your trades get filled: how tight and stable your spreads are, fill speed, and order rejection rates. Genuine ECN execution will typically offer raw spreads from 0.0 pips but charge a commission per lot. Market makers mark up the spread instead. There's no universally better option — it comes down to how you trade.
If you scalp or trade high frequency, ECN is almost always the right choice. Getting true market spreads more than offsets the commission cost on high-volume currency pairs.
Fast execution — separating broker hype from reality
Every broker's website mentions execution speed. Numbers like under 40ms fills look good in marketing, but does it make a measurable difference in practice? More than you'd think.
A trader who placing longer-term positions, the gap between 40ms and 80ms execution doesn't matter. If you're scalping 1-2 pip moves targeting small price moves, execution lag means money left on the table. If your broker fills at under 40ms with zero requotes offers an actual advantage versus slower execution environments.
Some brokers have invested proprietary execution technology specifically for speed. Titan FX, for example, built their Zero Point execution system which sends orders directly to LPs without dealing desk intervention — they report averages of under 37 milliseconds. There's a thorough analysis in this Titan FX review.
Raw spread accounts vs standard: doing the maths
This ends up being the most common question when picking a broker account: should I choose a commission on raw spreads or a wider spread with no commission? The answer depends on volume.
Let's run the numbers. A spread-only account might offer EUR/USD at 1.1-1.3 pips. The ECN option gives you true market pricing but applies a commission of about $7 per lot traded both ways. With the wider spread, you're paying through the spread on each position. Once you're trading more than a few lots a week, the commission model is almost always cheaper.
Most 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 going off hypothetical comparisons — broker examples tend to make the case for whichever account the broker wants to push.
500:1 leverage: the argument traders keep having
Leverage splits retail traders more than most other subjects. Regulators restrict leverage to 30:1 in most jurisdictions. Offshore brokers can still offer up to 500:1.
The standard argument against is that it blows accounts. This is legitimate — the numbers support this, the majority of retail accounts do lose. The counterpoint is a key point: experienced traders don't use full broker titan fx leverage. They use the option of more leverage to lower the money locked up in open trades — leaving more margin for additional positions.
Sure, it can wreck you. Nobody disputes that. But that's a risk management problem, not a leverage problem. When a strategy needs lower margin requirements, the option of higher leverage lets you deploy capital more efficiently — most experienced traders use it that way.
Choosing a broker outside FCA and ASIC jurisdiction
The regulatory landscape in forex operates across different levels. At the top is FCA (UK) and ASIC (Australia). They cap leverage at 30:1, require negative balance protection, and put guardrails on what brokers can offer retail clients. Further down you've got places like Vanuatu (VFSC) and Mauritius FSA. Less oversight, but the flip side is higher leverage and fewer restrictions.
The trade-off is not subtle: going with an offshore-regulated broker gives you higher leverage, less account restrictions, and typically more competitive pricing. The flip side is, you get less safety net if something goes wrong. You don't get a regulatory bailout equivalent to FSCS.
For traders who understand this trade-off and choose execution quality and flexibility, offshore brokers are a valid choice. The key is looking at operating history, fund segregation, and reputation rather than only reading the licence number. A broker with a decade of operating history under tier-3 regulation can be more reliable in practice than a brand-new FCA-regulated startup.
Scalping execution: separating good brokers from usable ones
For scalping strategies is the style where broker choice has the biggest impact. Targeting small ranges and staying in trades open for very short periods. At that level, even small differences in execution speed translate directly to profit or loss.
The checklist comes down to a few things: 0.0 pip raw pricing from 0.0 pips, execution in the sub-50ms range, a no-requote policy, and the broker allowing scalping and high-frequency trading. Certain platforms technically allow scalping but throttle execution for high-frequency traders. Read the terms before funding your account.
Brokers that actually want scalpers usually make it obvious. Look for execution speed data somewhere prominent, and they'll typically include virtual private servers for running bots 24/5. If a broker is vague about fill times anywhere on the website, that's probably not a good sign for scalpers.
Social trading in forex: practical expectations
The idea of copying other traders took off over the past few years. The pitch is obvious: identify profitable traders, copy their trades automatically, benefit from their skill. In practice is more complicated than the platform promos suggest.
The main problem is the gap between signal and fill. When a signal provider enters a trade, your mirrored order fills with some lag — when prices are moving quickly, the delay can turn a profitable trade into a losing one. The smaller the profit margins, the bigger the impact of delay.
Despite this, a few copy trading setups work well enough for traders who don't have time to monitor charts all day. Look for access to verified trading results over no less than a year, instead of simulated results. Metrics like Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown matter more than the total return number.
A few platforms have built proprietary copy trading within their standard execution. Integration helps lower latency issues compared to third-party copy services that bolt onto the trading platform. Check how the copy system integrates before expecting the results will translate with the same precision.