Hey, my strategy executes about 300 trades a day. 1 lot per trade. At the moment I have an account with IC Markets and pay around $5 per roundtrip. Still way too much. I'm searching for a broker where I pay much less. I heard that BAXTER FX is offering $5 per million traded, but I assume that means for 500k you pay $5 (2 legs - in and out) which would still be pretty good. Spread is important as well and should be small. Do you guys know any good broker?
With annual spend like that, have you looked into banks like Citi? https://citifx.com/electronic-solutions/citi-velocity-trading.html
Not a broker recommendation, but a place I had found helpful myself when searching for brokers in the past. On the left side, there are a lot of search settings you can narrow down to your own specifications including broker type, regulations, spreads etc. This will give you a general list that you can hopefully narrow down and then reach out to the brokers that may meet your qualifications on their sites for more info. https://www.myfxbook.com/forex-brokers At a quick glance, you can also go here to see a long list of broker live spreads by pairs with or without commissions(turned on in the top right). If you mouseover the "i" beside the broker name, it will also show in and our commissions they charge. You can also click on a live spread for an individual pair to see what that pair's spread max hits during rollover if your strategy happens to hold through that. https://www.myfxbook.com/forex-broker-spreads
Are spreads a very important factor to take into account in Forex? I mean even though I’m a beginner, I’ve been reading a lot about it on forums like these with traders asking for tighter spreads.
$5 is not bad, I had a few accounts with IC M too. The problem with IC is their feed. In the past it had bigger spikes than those of other brokers or it had questionable, non existent spikes which other brokers didn't have. Plus strange things happened which I could not explain. Many brokers including IC Markets use a system called tapaas https://tapaas.com which manages clients and automatically changes things on their accounts, for example keeping +ve slippage and allowing -ve, delaying or blocking execution? etc etc Pepperstone also use tapaas but I have been with them for years and I want fund diversification so I will keep them for now. Their commissions are higher than those of GP for me. I'm now down to 2 brokers. Global Prime and Pepperstone I applied for PRO status with both and was approved so I kept my old leverage. (using the sophisticated trader method) (you would qualify if you had a live account for 4 quarters with any broker and traded 0.5 lot in each quarter + passed the PRO test) Global Prime are my favorite broker for the following reasons. Our funds are kept in a AAA rated Australian bank. They are a genuinely A book broker (no in-house trades at all). They use a number of liquidity providers so our trades are spread over various banks. This is good because some LP's might not want trades of certain currency pair in a certain direction and it might be slow getting certain trades filled. They provide trade receipt for all trades. When you login to the client portal, you can see which LP filled your order. They employ many support people so you can chat with someone at all times (Monday to Friday) and not be 30th in the que as I was with IC a few times. They don't fiddle with our MT4 account (with plugins) and they will never fiddle with our trades and keep the +ve slippage. I also pay the lowest commissions (I achieved this by direct negotiation with them). I am not able to reveal the exact $ amount but it is <5
Depends on what you trade and how you trade it. Usually (for the majority of traders) they are not very important.
Normally it’s 1-5 pips in between two prices. Nevertheless, a spread can vary depending on the market’s condition or movement. Simply select a broker that offers you low fixed and variable spreads for minting more money and cover the fee. If your next question would be about the brokers, I trade with roboforex, fxview, and HYCM.