Not long ago I had the opportunity to test drive a fixed spread and a variable spread accounts with FXChoice and shared my experience. At the end of January they contacted me again and offered to try their new ECN account and I accepted. For the last three weeks I made 268 trades on the account they provided me with. It was a really fascinating experience. Below is the detailed review.
Deposit
You need $1,000 to open an ECN account with FXChoice. You can fund it by Wire Transfer, Credit Card, Skrill (Moneybookers), Liberty Reserve, WebMoney, JCB, and CashU. Deposits by credit card and online payment systems are processed the same working day, bank wires take a little longer.
Platform
FXChoice offers the old but gold MT4 forex trading platform. It provides traders with all necessary tools for technical analysis, including 30 of the most popular forex indicators, trend lines, fibo retracements and projection etc. If you need some more sophisticated instrument like custom indicator or automated trading strategy, you can code it using MQ4 program language, or download it from Metaquotes’ Code Base .
Price feed
Unlike the fixed spread account price feed, the ECN quotes don’t lag even during volatile market conditions and news releases. That’s why FxChoice will allow you to do whatever you want on their ECN account - use any Expert Advisor (EA) you want, any strategy you want, literally anything.
However one night I found a little glitch in their price feed and tried to take advantage of it. At first it seemed pointless because MT4 was returning me “off quotes” message. But when I lowered the trade size to 0.04 lots FxChoice’s server accepted my orders and I was able to place several trades at the wrong prices. Here is the result:
Spreads
FxChoice ECN spread on EUR/USD is as low as 0.1 pips. Typical spread on EUR/USD is about 0.5 pips. Next week I’ll add FxChoice to my spread monitor and you will be able to check their min, max and average spread on 10 currency pairs.
However spread is not the only transaction cost on an ECN account. ECN forex brokers make their money on commissions, not on trader’s losses, so FxChoice will charge you $3.5 per $100,000 traded. It’s a pretty good price to avoid conflict of interest at.
Execution
If you choose to open an ECN account with FxChoice, you will forget about requotes, slow execution and unfair slippage. Each trade is executed at the first possible price. Unlike with most forex brokers, with FxChoice slippage may work to your disadvantage as well as in your favor. Take a look at the screenshots below – I’ve marked the limit orders, executed with POSITIVE slippage. It’s quite impressive.
Exactly the positive slippage makes me a fan of FxChoice ECN account. It makes me believe that this forex broker really care about its clients.
Unfortunately you still may experience some lag in execution during news releases. Here is an example of 4 seconds lag:
Withdrawal
Withdraw methods include Wire Transfer, Skrill (Moneybookers), Liberty Reserve and WebMoney. My withdrawal request was processed in a timely manner and my Moneybookers account was credited the same day.
Bottom line
Tight spreads, reasonable commissions, positive slippage on market and limit orders, fast deposit and withdrawal - FXChoice is just a perfect broker. I highly recommend their ECN account.