ECN vs dealing desk: understanding what you're trading through
Most retail brokers fall into two execution models: market makers or ECN brokers. The difference is more than semantics. A dealing desk broker acts as the other side of your trade. An ECN broker routes your order directly to liquidity providers — your orders match with actual buy and sell interest.
Day to day, the difference matters most in how your trades get filled: how tight and stable your spreads are, how fast your orders go through, and whether you get requoted. ECN brokers will typically give you tighter spreads but apply a commission per lot. Market makers pad the spread instead. There's no universally better option — it depends on your strategy.
If you scalp or trade high frequency, a proper ECN broker is typically worth the commission. The raw pricing more than offsets paying commission on the major pairs.
Fast execution — separating broker hype from reality
Brokers love quoting execution speed. Claims of sub-50 milliseconds sound impressive, but what does it actually mean when you're actually placing trades? Quite a lot, depending on your strategy.
For someone making two or three swing trades a week, shaving off a few milliseconds won't move the needle. For high-frequency strategies working tight ranges, every millisecond of delay can equal money left on the table. Consistent execution at 35-40 milliseconds with zero requotes provides noticeably better entries compared to platforms with 150-200ms fills.
Some brokers have invested proprietary execution technology specifically for speed. One example is Titan FX's Zero Point technology designed to route orders directly to LPs without dealing desk intervention — the documented execution speed is under 37 milliseconds. There's a thorough analysis in this Titan FX broker review.
Raw spread accounts vs standard: doing the maths
This ends up being a question that comes up constantly when choosing a broker account: should I choose the raw spread with commission or a wider spread with no commission? The answer varies based on how much you trade.
Here's a real comparison. A standard account might show EUR/USD at 1.1-1.3 pips. A commission-based account gives you true market pricing but charges roughly $3-4 per lot traded both ways. On the spread-only option, the broker takes their cut via the markup. If you're doing 3-4+ lots per month, the raw spread information resource account saves you money mathematically.
Many ECN brokers offer both as options so you can see the difference for yourself. Make sure you work it out using your real monthly lot count rather than relying on the broker's examples — broker examples tend to make the case for the higher-margin product.
High leverage in 2026: what the debate gets wrong
The leverage conversation divides the trading community more than almost anything else. The major regulatory bodies restrict leverage to relatively low ratios for retail accounts. Offshore brokers can still offer 500:1 or higher.
The standard argument against is that inexperienced traders wipe out faster. That's true — the numbers support this, most retail traders end up negative. But the argument misses nuance: experienced traders rarely trade at 500:1 on every trade. What they do is use the availability high leverage to reduce the money tied up in open trades — which frees capital to deploy elsewhere.
Sure, it can wreck you. That part is true. But that's a risk management problem, not a leverage problem. If what you trade needs reduced margin commitment, having 500:1 available lets you deploy capital more efficiently — which is the whole point for anyone who knows what they're doing.
VFSC, FSA, and tier-3 regulation: the trade-off explained
Broker regulation in forex falls into tiers. Tier-1 is FCA, ASIC, CySEC. Leverage is capped at 30:1, require negative balance protection, and generally restrict the trading conditions available to retail accounts. On the other end you've got jurisdictions like Vanuatu and Mauritius and Mauritius (FSA). Less oversight, but that also means higher leverage and fewer restrictions.
The trade-off is straightforward: going with an offshore-regulated broker means higher leverage, less trading limitations, and typically cheaper trading costs. But, you sacrifice some investor protection if something goes wrong. No investor guarantee fund paying out up to GBP85k.
If you're comfortable with the risk and choose execution quality and flexibility, regulated offshore brokers can make sense. What matters is looking at operating history, fund segregation, and reputation rather than simply checking if they're regulated somewhere. An offshore broker with a long track record and no withdrawal issues under VFSC oversight may be more reliable in practice than a freshly regulated FCA-regulated startup.
Broker selection for scalping: the non-negotiables
For scalping strategies is one area where broker choice makes or breaks your results. Targeting 1-5 pip moves and holding for less than a few minutes at a time. At that level, seemingly minor gaps in execution speed become profit or loss.
What to look for is short: raw spreads from 0.0 pips, order execution in the sub-50ms range, a no-requote policy, and the broker allowing scalping strategies. A few brokers say they support scalping but slow down fills when they detect scalping patterns. Check the fine print before committing capital.
Platforms built for scalping will make it obvious. Look for their speed stats disclosed publicly, and often throw in VPS access for automated strategies. If a broker is vague about fill times anywhere on their marketing, that tells you something.
Copy trading and social platforms: what works and what doesn't
Copy trading took off over the past decade. The concept is straightforward: identify traders who are making money, replicate their positions in your own account, benefit from their skill. In practice is less straightforward than the advertisements make it sound.
What most people miss is execution delay. When the trader you're copying enters a trade, the replicated trade fills milliseconds to seconds later — during volatile conditions, that lag might change a winning entry into a bad one. The tighter the strategy's edge, the more this problem becomes.
Despite this, a few implementations work well enough for traders who don't have time to trade actively. The key is finding access to audited performance history over at least a year, not just demo account performance. Risk-adjusted metrics tell you more than headline profit percentages.
A few platforms build proprietary copy trading integrated with their regular trading platform. This can minimise latency issues compared to external copy trading providers that connect to the trading platform. Check whether the social trading is native before expecting historical returns can be replicated in your experience.