Best ECN Forex Broker

FOREX.com is our top pick for ECN-style trading. We were easily able to open an account and trade through MetaTrader5 within minutes.

Spreads can be as low as 0 pips and have a commission of $7.00 per lot each way. We thought their average execution speed of just 0.004 seconds and 99.57% of trades being completed in <1 second was most impressive. Plus, we were excited to see an active trader program allowing for lower trading costs for active traders.

Very few other brokers in the US have ECN (also called RAW) spread trading, and you can choose between some of the most globally popular trading platforms, such as MT4, MT5, and TradingView, which make FOREX.com stand out to us.

While most brokers only offer commission-free trading, we thought FOREX.com has a unique point of difference with their RAW spread account. As far as we know, FOREX.com is the only broker that actively promotes a commission-free account with ECN or RAW spread-style trading for American traders. Spreads can be as low as 0 pips with their RAW pricing account and have commissions of $7.00 to open and $7.00 to close ($14.00 in total).

Since RAW pricing accounts use interbank spreads, they are variable meaning slippage can occur. Fortunately, in our testing, we found FOREX.com has order execution speeds that average 0.04 per second, which we think is very fast and enough to give you confidence slippage shouldn’t happen too often. FOREX.com claims over 99.57% of trades with them are executed in under 1 second.

We also found FOREX.com improve your spreads when using a limit order. According to FOREX.com, they have automated the trading process so that 49.29% of trades have limit orders executed at or better than the requested price, with a 0.46 pips improvement on average. They also say 100% of orders are filled at or better than the limit order you set, which is great for scalping.

A big part of FOREX.com being our top pick for ECN traders is the fact that there is a wide selection of trading platforms.

FOREX.com offers MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, the in-house developed FOREX.com platform and TradingView. All these platforms are excellent choices but if you wish to use the RAW Pricing Account then you won’t be able to use MetaTrader 4.

The broker is owned by the StoneX Group, a major name in the global brokerage industry, regulated by A-level regulators such as Australia’s ASIC, the UK’s FCA and Cyprus’ CySec.

Lastly, while we often aren’t impressed with most broker’s typical news and education resources, we found FOREX.com’s selection to be quite impressive and it was clear that the broker had put a lot of thought into building that part of their service.

Your capital is at risk ‘74% of retail CFD accounts lose money with FOREX.com’

Interactive Brokers impressed us with its available liquidity, the company’s financial stability and a huge range of financial instruments available to trade.

In general, we’re huge fans of interactive brokers, and if you’re an intermediate to experienced trader, particularly if you also trade stocks, futures or other asset classes, we recommend you look into opening an account with the firm.

If you’re a beginner trader though, we recommend you look elsewhere. If you need an ECN forex broker, FOREX.com is much simpler to open, the platforms and software are easier to navigate and you’ll receive better customer service.

Interactive Brokers, established in 1977, is a household name in the global trading community. The company offers access to practically every trading product in the world, with stocks on most global exchanges, futures contracts, options, CFDs, Forex, indices, cryptocurrencies and many more.

As a retail trader, you will be signing up for the IBKR lite trading account. This account has no minimum deposit an inactivity fees and also commission-free trading for US exchange-listed stocks and ETFs.

When signing up, we had to jump through certain hoops depending on the account settings we desired. For example, when we asked to open a margin account, we were asked for verification from our financial planner, to ensure that we had the financial capacity to safely trade with margin, this was much stricter than any other brokerage account we’ve ever opened.

When we navigated our way to spot currencies, we found that the commissions you pay are on a tiered program. If you trade more than USD 1 billion in total positions each month, you will pay less in commissions. While this is fine in itself, we found ourselves wishing they had a more simple fixed commission plan.

Commission rates start at 0.2 basis points with a minimum of $2. This means that if you trade $100,000, you’ll pay $2, or if you trade $500,000, you’ll pay $10 per side. We found this quite competitive with most retail brokers, especially when you combine it with IB’s tight spot currency spreads.

Another thing that impressed us was the size of liquidity in the IB FX platform. The company deals with 17 of the world’s biggest liquidity providers, meaning that if you trade very large sizes, such as 100s of lots, or you trade using a VPS, you’ll find IB is well suited for you.

When we opened our account, we could choose from three proprietary platforms: IBKR Client Portal, Trader Workstation, and IBKR Mobile and webtrader, each was mediocre for active traders, and all of the in-house IB platforms felt a bit old and clunky to us. It’s important to note that we were unable to use MetaTrader4 or MetaTrader5, they’re simply not offered by IBKR.

Most serious traders on IBKR, use third-party trading platforms. We use NinjaTrader when trading with IBKR, but some of our serious trader friends use SierraChart, cTrader and DAS Trader.

Interactive Brokers ReviewVisit Interactive Brokers