Dukascopy is a platform for wannabe professionals. Their spreads are not competitive, their Compliance team is a mess and their platform is awful - indeed the worst platform I ever had the "dishonor" to try out. Note: I am a buy side user and not a competitor of Dukascopy - so I am one these "real investor" guys. You are looking for good spreads and deep liquidity? Look for brokers that cooperate with Prime of Prime banks like ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Barclays. The best liquidity for retail tarders is a mixture from Sucden, LMAX and Citibank. And these are only 3 liquidity providers. One MT4 bridge provider is offering meanwhile 68 liquidity providers. PM me for details.
Not so sure about that. How many worthwhile LPs are there really in FX. On Hotspot there are now only ~20 left, after they kicked all the useless ones with low fill ratios out. Personally i am using lmax only nowadays. They got the top 10 FX banks, 4 other banks and a few HFTs on their network. Its just a straight up central limit order book, no routing out, no last looking. I doubt the other 50 LPs, who ever they might be, wouldn't add much value, not for my usecase anyways. P.S. agree about Dukascopy. They aggregate everyone and their mom, but have horrible last look provisions (up to 300ms! thats a license to print money really).
Dukascopy does provide tight spreads, coming close to IB's and LMAX's spreads. Liquidity is admittedly a bit thin for anyone trading more than >5mil on the clip. And I would not use Dukascopy's platform but have access to their API and it is solid, as solid as their FIX implementation. Btw, HSBC, ABN, and BNP are not prime they are 2nd and third tier banks. If you look at prime liquidity providers then you want to check whether your ECN or broker aggregates liquidity of the likes of Barclays, Deutsche, Citi, and UBS. They alone command almost 50% of global liquidity. LMAX is not bad for retail actually its a very good platform, though liquidity is also very thin for anyone wanting to trade larger size. Citi Retail should not even be discussed in the same post as its a ripoff. Nor should MT4 be a viable platform for anyone serious in this business.
FWIW SAxo has recently introduced a custody fee, of 12bp a year. I'm curious still what deal corporate/institutional accounts manage to get