Originally posted by VVX565
Hi folks, can I please ask which brokers you use for trading currencies, commodities and Indices and what things are important when choosing a broker and what to look out for
Thanks in advance for any replies
VVX565
brokers fall into two main categories, A Book brokers and B Book brokers.
A Book brokers are not market makers and send your order straight through to their liquidity providers, they are denoted often as ECN or STP
B Book brokers are market makers and will often trade against their clients because 70 - 90% lose money it is a very profitable strategy.
Although market makers seem to be the least attractive option they do offer some advantages such as negative account balance protection, that is you can only lose what is in your account if a black swan event occurred such as the SNB decision to abandon the 1.20 EUR/CHF peg resulted in traders being liable of debts well over the amount deposited with their broker.
In reality the larger market makers run a hybrid brokerage in that they predominately operate as B book brokers because loses incurred by retail traders and newbies are a large part of their profit but they also filter out those few percent of profitable traders and run an A book with their trades.
Just a word of caution if you are a profitable trader market makers may offer you a special "professional account' which the fine print may strip you of account balance protection and other benefits you may have had with their standard accounts.
If you are very new to FX and trading these two brokers below (which I currently do not use) offer a very uncomplicated interface (proprietary) with some of the above mentioned protections the latter offers another layer of protection where you pay more but can cancel a trade within an hour of deal inititation.
Plus 500
Easy Markets
Otherwise the most popular platform in Forex is provided by Metatquotes Software Corp and its Metatrader 4 program denoted MT4 .
MT4 is almost ubiquitous within the Forex trading business.
Metaquotes has another platform less popular than MT4 called Metatrader 5 denoted MT5, this has a few more bells and whistles
Spotware has a competing product called C trader.
A comparison of Live spreads and commissions between a large number of brokers can be found and tracked at this site
https://www.myfxbook.com/forex-broker-spreads
Regards
RM
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