ECN vs dealing desk: understanding what you're trading through
Most retail brokers fall into one of two categories: dealing desk or ECN. The distinction matters. A dealing desk broker is essentially the other side of your trade. An ECN broker routes your order straight to liquidity providers — you're trading against real market depth.
For most retail traders, the difference matters most in three places: whether spreads blow out at the wrong moment, fill speed, and whether you get requoted. A proper ECN broker generally give you tighter spreads but charge a commission per lot. Market makers mark up the spread instead. Neither model is inherently bad — it depends on your strategy.
If your strategy depends on tight entries and fast fills, a proper ECN broker is typically the better fit. Tighter spreads makes up for the per-lot fee on high-volume currency pairs.
Fast execution — separating broker hype from reality
You'll see brokers advertise execution speed. Numbers like sub-50 milliseconds look good in marketing, but what does it actually mean when you're actually placing trades? Quite a lot, depending on your strategy.
A trader who placing a handful of trades per month, the gap between 40ms and 80ms execution won't move the needle. But for scalpers working tight ranges, slow fills translates to money left on the table. If your broker fills at 35-40 milliseconds with zero requotes provides an actual advantage versus slower execution environments.
Some brokers put real money into proprietary execution technology specifically for speed. Titan FX, for example, built their Zero Point technology which sends orders straight to LPs without dealing desk intervention — they report averages of under 37 milliseconds. You can read a detailed breakdown in this Titan FX broker review.
Raw spread accounts vs standard: doing the maths
This ends up being the most common question when choosing an account type: is it better to have commission plus tight spreads or zero commission but wider spreads? The answer depends on how much you trade.
Take a typical example. The no-commission option might offer EUR/USD at around 1.2 pips. The ECN option gives you true market pricing but adds roughly $3-4 per lot round-turn. For the standard account, the broker takes their cut via the markup. At more than a few lots a week, ECN pricing works out cheaper.
Many ECN brokers offer both as options so you can compare directly. What matters is to work it out using your real monthly lot count rather than going off hypothetical comparisons — they tend to make the case for one account type over the other.
High leverage in 2026: what the debate gets wrong
Leverage divides forex traders more than almost anything else. The major regulatory bodies restrict retail leverage at 30:1 in most jurisdictions. Brokers regulated outside tier-1 jurisdictions still provide 500:1 or higher.
Critics of high leverage is simple: inexperienced traders wipe out faster. Fair enough — statistically, the majority of retail accounts do lose. The counterpoint is a key point: traders who know what they're doing don't use full leverage. They use the option of more leverage to lower the margin sitting as margin in open trades — which frees margin to deploy elsewhere.
Sure, it can wreck you. No argument there. But that's a risk management problem, not a leverage problem. If what you trade needs less capital per position, access to 500:1 means less money locked up as margin — and that's how most experienced traders actually use it.
Choosing a broker outside FCA and ASIC jurisdiction
The regulatory landscape in forex operates across a spectrum. The strictest tier is regulators like the FCA and ASIC. They cap leverage at 30:1, mandate investor compensation schemes, and limit what brokers can offer retail clients. Further down you've got the VFSC in Vanuatu and Mauritius FSA. Fewer requirements, but which translates to higher leverage and fewer restrictions.
The trade-off is straightforward: tier-3 regulation offers more aggressive trading conditions, lower trading limitations, and usually lower fees. The flip side is, you sacrifice some safety net if the broker fails. No investor guarantee fund paying out up to GBP85k.
Traders who accept this consciously and prefer performance over protection, regulated offshore brokers work well. The key is checking the broker's track record rather than just checking if they're regulated somewhere. A platform with a decade of operating history under tier-3 regulation can be more reliable in practice than a freshly regulated tier-1 broker.
What scalpers should look for in a broker
For scalping strategies is where broker choice has the biggest impact. You're working tiny price movements and keeping trades open for very short periods. With those margins, seemingly minor variations in fill quality equal the difference between a winning and losing month.
The checklist comes down to a few things: raw read this spreads with no markup, execution consistently below 50ms, guaranteed no requotes, and explicit permission for holding times under one minute. Some brokers technically allow scalping but throttle fills when they detect scalping patterns. Read the terms before funding your account.
Platforms built for scalping tend to say so loudly. Look for their speed stats disclosed publicly, and usually offer VPS hosting for running bots 24/5. If the broker you're looking at doesn't mention fill times anywhere on their marketing, that tells you something.
Following other traders — the reality of copy trading platforms
The idea of copying other traders has become popular over the past several years. The pitch is simple: identify profitable traders, mirror their activity automatically, collect the profits. In practice is more complicated than the marketing make it sound.
The biggest issue is the gap between signal and fill. When a signal provider enters a trade, your copy executes after a delay — and in fast markets, the delay can turn a winning entry into a worse entry. The more narrow the profit margins, the bigger the impact of delay.
That said, certain social trading platforms work well enough for traders who don't have time to trade actively. The key is finding transparency around verified trading results over at least a year, rather than demo account performance. Metrics like Sharpe ratio and maximum drawdown matter more than headline profit percentages.
Some brokers build in-house social platforms integrated with their main offering. This can minimise latency issues compared to external copy trading providers that connect to the trading platform. Research how the copy system integrates before assuming the results will carry over to your account.