What FOREX brokers do not creat their own market? Oanda, Interactivebrokers, igmarkets have all been recommended on this board, how are they at this?
I have no experience trading forex with any broker other than Interactive Brokers. Works great for me. They have several liquidity providers for each currency pair, and although they list themselves as one of them, I don't think in general that they are taking the other side of the trade. I only use limit orders and I have plenty of them executed with price improvement which would not be the case if the broker was taking the other side of the order.
The advert on Bloomberg TV said that IB take quotre from 10 different liquidity providers and display the best market.
I would estimate that 5% of IDEALPRO limit orders... Are executed with price improvement... Sometimes with > 1 pip. With limit orders IB pretty much plays it straight... But when hitting bids/offers... You're order appears to be telegraphed and may be faded.
I expect you're talking about the major crosses like EUR/USD. I can tell you that on some of the cross trades (e.g. AUD/NZD), the price improvement is probably 25%+ of the time. Often less than 1/2 pip but at times 2-3 pips. About a week ago when some announcement was unexpectantly made, USD/JPY fell and I had a small ($100k) limit order to close a position executed 20 pips in my favor.
I've made over 1,000,000 stock trades... Then did about 300 IDEALPRO trades last week USD.CAN... As an experiment. I'm not really interested in playing inside the spread... Because then you step on a lot of toes... But I find that limit orders outside the spread... Are non-threatening and executed fairly. What you're really asking is... What is the optimum scalping pip size? That depends on your market and size... But I've been easily scalping small trades for 7-8 pips on average... So that's several pips on the outside.
No, what i meant was you could use marketable limit-orders instead of marketorders when hitting bid/offer. I.E. if mkt is 50/51 and you want to buy, send a buy limit IOC 52 instead of a marketorder. Noone will fade that(not for much, anyways).
Try GFS. They have no dealing desk. They have a demo comp on at the moment which is a good time to trial them.