ECN vs dealing desk: understanding what you're trading through
The majority of forex brokers fall into one of two categories: dealing desk or ECN. The difference is more than semantics. A dealing desk broker is essentially the other side of your trade. An ECN broker routes your order through to banks and institutional LPs — you get fills from actual buy and sell interest.
In practice, the difference shows up in three places: spread consistency, fill speed, and requotes. Genuine ECN execution tends to deliver tighter pricing but add a commission per lot. Market makers mark up the spread instead. There's no universally better option — it depends on what you need.
For scalpers and day traders, ECN execution is generally the right choice. The raw pricing more than offsets the commission cost on the major pairs.
Execution speed: what 37 milliseconds actually means for your trades
Every broker's website mentions execution speed. Figures like under 40ms fills sound impressive, but what does it actually mean when you're actually placing trades? It depends entirely on what you're doing.
A trader who placing two or three swing trades a week, read this article the gap between 40ms and 80ms execution won't move the needle. If you're scalping 1-2 pip moves working tight ranges, execution lag can equal money left on the table. A broker averaging 35-40 milliseconds with no requotes provides measurably better fills over one that averages 200ms.
A few brokers built proprietary execution technology specifically for speed. Titan FX developed a proprietary system called Zero Point which sends orders directly to LPs without dealing desk intervention — they report averages of under 37 milliseconds. For a full look at how this works in practice, see this Titan FX review.
Raw spread accounts vs standard: doing the maths
Here's a question that comes up constantly when picking their trading account: do I pay the raw spread with commission or markup spreads with no fee per lot? The answer comes down to how much you trade.
Take a typical example. A standard account might have EUR/USD at 1.0-1.5 pips. A commission-based account gives you 0.1-0.3 pips but applies around $3.50-4.00 per lot traded both ways. On the spread-only option, the cost is baked into the markup. At 3-4+ lots per month, ECN pricing is almost always cheaper.
A lot of platforms offer both as options so you can pick what suits your volume. What matters is to calculate based on your actual trading volume rather than relying on marketing scenarios — those often make the case for one account type over the other.
High leverage in 2026: what the debate gets wrong
Leverage divides retail traders more than almost anything else. Regulators limit leverage to 30:1 in most jurisdictions. Offshore brokers continue to offer up to 500:1.
The standard argument against is simple: it blows accounts. This is legitimate — the numbers support this, the majority of retail accounts lose money. But the argument misses something important: traders who know what they're doing don't use 500:1 on every trade. They use the option of more leverage to lower the capital tied up in each position — freeing up margin for additional positions.
Sure, it can wreck you. Nobody disputes that. But blaming the leverage is like blaming the car for a speeding ticket. If your strategy needs less capital per position, the option of higher leverage lets you deploy capital more efficiently — most experienced traders use it that way.
VFSC, FSA, and tier-3 regulation: the trade-off explained
Broker regulation in forex falls into different levels. At the top is FCA, ASIC, CySEC. Leverage is capped at 30:1, enforce client fund segregation, and generally restrict how aggressively brokers can operate. Tier-3 you've got the VFSC in Vanuatu and similar offshore regulators. Fewer requirements, but that also means better trading conditions for the trader.
The trade-off is not subtle: tier-3 regulation offers 500:1 leverage, lower account restrictions, and usually cheaper trading costs. But, you get less safety net if something goes wrong. There's no compensation scheme like the FCA's FSCS.
For traders who understand this trade-off and pick better conditions, offshore brokers can make sense. The important thing is checking the broker's track record rather than just reading the licence number. A platform with a decade of operating history under tier-3 regulation is often more trustworthy in practice than a newly licensed FCA-regulated startup.
Scalping execution: separating good brokers from usable ones
For scalping strategies is the style where broker choice makes or breaks your results. Targeting 1-5 pip moves and holding trades open for very short periods. In that environment, seemingly minor variations in fill quality equal real money.
Non-negotiables for scalpers comes down to a few things: true ECN spreads at actual market rates, fills under 50 milliseconds, zero requotes, and explicit permission for holding times under one minute. Certain platforms technically allow scalping but add latency to execution when they detect scalping patterns. Look at the execution policy before funding your account.
Brokers that actually want scalpers usually make it obvious. You'll see average fill times on the website, and usually throw in VPS access for EAs that need low latency. If a broker is vague about fill times anywhere on the website, that's probably not a good sign for scalpers.
Copy trading and social platforms: what works and what doesn't
Social trading has become popular over the past several years. The appeal is obvious: pick profitable traders, replicate their positions without doing your own analysis, collect the profits. How it actually works is more complicated than the advertisements imply.
The biggest issue is the gap between signal and fill. When the lead trader executes, the replicated trade executes milliseconds to seconds later — during volatile conditions, that lag might change a winning entry into a worse entry. The more narrow the average trade size in pips, the more this problem becomes.
Having said that, a few implementations work well enough for traders who can't trade actively. Look for transparency around audited trading results over no less than a year, rather than backtested curves. Looking at drawdown and consistency are more useful than raw return figures.
Some brokers offer in-house social platforms integrated with their regular trading platform. Integration helps lower the delay problem compared to third-party copy services that sit on top of the trading platform. Check how the copy system integrates before expecting historical returns will carry over to your account.