Recommended Forex Organisations for ECN traders
There are many opinions given by traders when we decide which ECN forex brokers are in the top 5 best ECN brokers. However, based on our experiences, there is no one could be the best broker because the best broker to a trader pretty much depends on the country that trader is living in and also his/her trading strategy. Even when we claimed that brokers from the United State (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) are the most reliable ones, Cyprus brokers usually offer better trading conditions like lower spread and commission, lower margin, better trading platforms and payments systems, etc. Don’t be too worry if there is no complete standard to identify the best broker, I would share with you some secrets that will help you to identify the best broker for your trading conditions. However, in this article, I just focus on three standards, which are: trustworthy, good payment systems, dedicated customer service.
And I also introduce the top 5 ECN brokers are holding all three of the listed secrets below:
No - Broker names - Rating
1 - Exness.com - 8/10
2 - FxPro.com - 7.5/10
3 - XM.com - 7.5/10
4 - ICmarkets.com - 7/10
5 - FXTM.com - 6.5/10
1. Trustworthy
These criteria should be prioritized when you making a decision of which ECN broker will be your partner in the forex market. ECN traders are experienced and large in common, so they would trade off a big amount of money to prevent them from being tricked by bad brokers. In order to clarify bad brokers easily, you should first check the brokers’ licenses, and then you should look that there scam reports and trading volume.
Licenses are given to the brokers by profit or non-profit organisations. Each license has its own principles that brokers must follow such as:
● Maximum Leverage
● Quotes quality
● Broker’s minimum operation fund.
● Bonus
● Segregated accounts to protect clients.
● Advertising messages to avoid misleading for traders.
It is not easy to get a license, as you see, it is because the brokers have to satisfy all of the standards before being qualified. In contrast, license also brings back drawbacks to the brokers like high spread and commission, higher margin requirements, less trading platforms supported, less payments method choices, etc. Moreover, regulated brokers not only need to pay some fee for those licenses, they also must have separate accounts for client-fund insurances’ payment. Hence, their incomes would be less than it supposed to be. Although fee are charged by those licensing organisations, brokers are prohibited to set high leverage, causing low trading volume and even lower income. Therefore brokers have to charge higher spread or commission to the traders, this also means the more licenses they have, the higher cost they have to pay and the less competition advantages they are.
In my professional point of view, brokers that having lots of licenses doesn’t mean that they are good brokers. Licenses are important to demonstrate that those brokers have achieved a quantity of standards, but because of the high cost when a broker’s holding too many licenses, it is better to be qualified by one reliable regulation to prove that they are following trustworthy financial criteria and the company’s finance is healthy. Some people claims that brokers in the US and UK are more reliable than the rest of the world, but the regulations don’t allow them to protect the foreign traders. Hence, it makes no sense for me to pay a large amount of money but receive no guarantee and protection in the case any problems occurred.
The 5 listed above brokers are more reliable than other brokers form the US and Europe and of course they are having at least one valuable license:
No - Broker names - Regulations
1 - Exness.com - CySEC, FCA (UK)
2 - FxPro.com - CySEC, FCA (UK), DFSA (Dubai), FSB (South Africa).
3 - XM.com - CySEC, FCA, ASIC
4 - ICmarkets.com - ASIC (Australia)
5 - FXTM.com - IFSC
2. Trading system
The 5 ECN brokers above charge the traders a much lower trading cost comparing to the US brokers. To be more specific, Forex.com charges from 1.7-2 pip for trading EUR/USD, but the 5 ECN brokers charge just about 50% lower from 0.0xx pip spread for ECN accounts and between $5 and $7 for each lot. Exness ECN account charges the lowest spread to the customers, which is from 0.0xx and sometimes the spread come down to zero. It only charges $5 commission/ lot while IC Market charges from $6 to $7 and XM charges $6. Moreover, Exness minimum deposit can be as low as $1.
As I have mentioned earlier, the US and UK brokers usually don’t offer the Asian and African traders lots of benefits, so the payment systems offered by the listed ECN brokers are more beneficial to Asian and African traders. For example, as I am an Asian trader, I will be charged from 1.7 % to 4 % of my fund by my bank if I deposit by credit card. Ironically, earning 5% per month is already difficult so it is nonsense for me to trade with those brokers. I normally recommend Exness to the other traders because its payment system has wide range of options. Besides from offering 30 different payment methods, it also has local payment without any fee-charged. One more figure that I love about Exness is their automatically withdrawal system. Instead of spending hours or days to pull back your fund, when you come to Exness it only takes you a few seconds or few minutes in case you withdraw it to your bank account.
Good rebates/Bonuses
Even though many specialists don’t really care about the amount of rebates or bonuses, as they have spent too much money to care for brokers’ trustworthiness, spread, payment systems and wrap; in fact if you use the bonuses and rebates in an effective way, it will contribute to your cost saving. For instance, when you get $5 rebate per lot, it means you are reserving 0.5 pip spread (if trading XXX/USD). For me, once the brokers are reliable, their rebates and bonuses programs are extremely useful. In the 5 mentioned ECN brokers, only FXTM and XM offer bonus programs for the starters. If you create an account for the first time, you could receive up to $30 welcome bonus and 100% bonus when you deposit your money, it sounds pretty appealing right? Whereas the US/UK brokers hardly offer bonuses sue to the regulations of bonuses prohibition which attributing to one of their marketing obstacles.
3. Dedicated local supports
All of the 5 brokers in the list offer approximately more than 20 languages, which is different from most of the brokers who only offer English online services. These brokers’ offices could be found in big forex market like China, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Dubai. However, if you are living far away from those countries, you could contact with them easily either through live chat, phones or local offices. Their service is available 24/7 for some favourite languages like English, Thai and Chinese. Since traders feel that the forex market is tough and complex, so helps from the brokers are very essential, and they will appreciate if they receive the helps in their local languages. To be more specific:
● Exness supports 13 languages and 24/7
● XM supports 30 languages and 24/7
● Hot Forex supports 27 languages and 24/7
I wish my experiences would help you when you need to find a broker that meets the majority of your needs. There are other standards too, but the ones I have just shared would be a beneficial experience whenever you need to choose an alliance in the forex market.