Clearing furms in the strict sense do exactly that: they keep electornic "paperwork" regarding your trades. To use a clearing firm you need your own market access (presumably as an exchange member) and your own source of credit (if you need leverage). There are a number of firms that specilise in services to prop firms and actively trading hedge funds. These would let the customer choose services the customer needs: clearing, execution, credit. From what I hear a few hedge funds execute via interactive brokers (for access to a wide range of markets) but use an independant clearing firm (for lower clearing rates and more favorable portfolio margin). To get an account with a major investment bank you need $5m to get them interested but I'm sure independent firms are much more moderate in their expectation. Note clearing firms may not provide any paper-trading facility. If they do execution, they would offer a simulated trading environment to test the trader's own trading software but this simulated environment wouldn't provide real market prices or P&L calculation.
An excellent point - I should have said an independent data feed for the ECN your broker connects to. A feed for a different ECN, while potentially interesting, would not help you catch broker funny business.
I forwarded this link to my brother & these are his comments: Thanks... Very intelligent and experienced people.
Why does everyone pick on FXCM?? I have been with them a few months and love everything about them. Service is great, platform is solid, and I get great fills. I think people just repeat what they hear about FXCM without even trying them for themselves.
Because you have only been with them a few months. Give it some time. Does it ever make you think that if SO MANY people are saying how crappy that shop is that maybe there just might be some truth to it? Let me ask you a different question: if everyone tells you that cow dung tastes nasty, do you believe them, or do you need to taste it yourself before you realize we are all right?
When you have 150,000 live accounts there are going to be unhappy clients. Especially when they lose money they always blame the broker. If they are so bad, why are they the largest? 150,000 clients is pretty impressive!
I've more than tripled my account with FXCM and far as I'm concerned, whoever knocks them as being a "bucket shop" etc are simply sorry arse losing traders who choose to make them an excuse for their own sorry arse trading. Proof is here: http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/95794-casual-traders-journal.html They have some slippage when you use market orders same as any broker out there - but limit orders are consistently filled at the price or better. The "many" people saying FXCM is crappy = they can't trade for chit. Simple as that. Anyway, demo trading involves no emotions - as such, you will always do a lot better with the demo imo.