Choosing the best forex broker of 2018 to start trading with sometimes can be a difficult decision since there are lots of things to consider. To name a few criteria when choosing a broker, you should always consider their trading conditions, customer service and transfer time, etc. Having traded with many different brokers from higher to lower tier, from international to local ones, I’m confident that I’ve had enough experience to offer advices responsibly. But still, it’s hard to say for sure which broker is the best because while one broker might be the best for someone, it might not suit the trading strategies as well as trading conditions to some people. In this article, I’ll be comparing some popular brokers based on 8 categories:
1. LOW SPREAD
One thing you should know is that most top brokers often don’t charge commission, at least to their regular account. Top tier brokers make profit mostly by charging their traders/customers spread. If you didn’t know about spread, we have an article about this topic as well as commission here. To sum it up, spread is the difference between the ask and bid price. As traders, we obviously love brokers with low spread. To name a few ones with such low spread, there’s Exness, FBS, or Hot Forex, all have their spreads vary around 1.1 pip for the most currency pair, EUR/USD.
2. LOW COMMISSION
If you’d read the section above carefully, you’d know that most brokers don’t charge commission, but this is the case for regular accounts only. For accounts of higher tier, such as ECN account, the account that almost every professional and big forex trader prefer, the brokers charge commission fee due to the reason that these accounts have almost nonexistent spread. As for me, I consider Exness to be the best in this category since their commission fee is only 2.5 USD for each lot traded.
3. MINIMUM DEPOSIT
Needless to say, new traders/beginners most of the time don’t like depositing too much into their account. They would always like to start small, gather experience and that’s a good thing. However, lots of brokers out there implemented account restrictions to limit this kind of thing. Specifically, they’d require their new/beginner accounts to have the minimum deposit of $2000 and $500 respectively. Fortunately for the small traders, there too are brokers that require as little as $1 for their minimum deposit such as Exness mini accounts and FBS, or Hot Forex who require a little higher but still of an acceptable range, which is $5 minimum deposit.
4. HIGH LEVERAGE
The unexpectedly surprising element in this category is that Asian traders benefit a lot more from leverage comparing to the Western traders. This is due to the fact that there are laws in many developed countries such as the United States, United Kingdom or Japan that strictly prohibit brokers to offer their traders high leverage. As for developing countries in Asia, these laws seem to be almost nonexistent, which lead to Asia brokers having exceptionally high leverage.
Take Exness for example, the leverage is unlimited for accounts with less than $1000 and having traded more than 5 lots. The leverage then is up 1:2000 for accounts with over $1000. For more info about Exness accounts, click here.
Hot Forex: up to 1:1000. Click here for more info about Hot Forex accounts.
XM: up to 1:888. Click here for more info about XM accounts.
Exness maximum leverage
5. TRANSFER/WITHDRAWAL TIME
As I’ve mentioned in the beginning, transfer/withdrawal time is one of the main criteria you should also consider when choosing your broker. While it might not pose to be such an issue to other traders, the transfer/withdrawal time has a large effect on the speed that you make money, and efficiency should always be the utmost importance in working. Needless to say, the transfer/withdrawal time varies a lot from brokers to brokers. The international ones most of the times offer all-around excellent service as well as trading conditions, but with the trade-off of long transfer/withdrawal time. Whereas your local brokers might not be that professional but they can offer you exceptionally fast transfer/withdrawal time. As for me, I consider Exness to be the best in this category. There just seems to be no competitor in this field for them since their transfer/withdrawal works are fully automatic and are done by machine, thus making their transfer/withdrawal time to be only the matter of milliseconds.
6. REPUTATION
A broker’s reputation is among the very first thing that you should consider when choosing your broker. Other traders have their different ways of determining a broker’s reputation. As for me, I base a broker’s reputation on 3 criteria:
License:
A best forex broker should always have one or two licenses from trusted, famous agencies. To name a few famous agencies, there are ASIC (Australia), CySEC (Cyprus), FSA (Japan), CFTC (United States), NFA (also United States), and FCA (United Kingdom). Owning a license, however, limits a broker a lot. The agencies would charge the broker abundantly high fees in exchange for their services, thus making the broker finding more ways to make more profit such as charging higher spread, making leverages lower, … Over my years of trading, I personally find Exness the most trustworthy when it comes to license. They have two licenses both from famous agencies which are CySEC and FCA.
Audit:
Unless you didn’t know, audit is an official inspection of an organization’s financial records. In simpler term, an audit the act of determining a broker’s transparency in doing their business. Brokers that have their audit done by famous, trustworthy and non-corrupt firms such as Deloitte, PWC, EY and KPMG should be most of the times reliable. After all, doing business is all about trust and profit. There are even companies such as Exness and ExPro that go out of their way to gain their customer trust by making their financial information and records public. Exness even takes an extra step by showing how much money that they have in the bank.
Search traffic:
In this digital age, search traffic can be one of the more obvious way of determining a broker’s fame. A broker that has high traffic, which lead to high fame, must either be doing really good or bad. And by checking their customer’s satisfaction and reviews, we can know if a broker is worth doing business with.
Here’s the search traffic of 3 of the top brokers in 2018 that I’ve gathered using Google Keyword Planner.
XM: 40,000 search monthly.
Exness: 36,000 search monthly.
FBS: 30,000 search monthly.
7. TRADING VOLUME
Trading volume, as the category suggests, is basically the financial status of a broker. A broker that has exceptionally good trading volume and steady trading volume growth must be pretty reliable and trustworthy. Below is the trading volume each month of some top forex brokers.
Exness: $323 billion a month.
Hot Forex: $280 billion a month.
Forex.com: $185 billion a month.
FXCM: $108 billion a month.
8. CUSTOMER CARE
Customer care is always important in business, it shows that a company cares about its customers. I mean, why would you want to do business to a company that doesn’t care about their customers. Not to mention that the whole forex trading market is a big and rather complicated place, new traders most of the time always find themselves lost and in need of professional help. In my opinion, a good broker is one that offer good trading conditions as well as excellent customer care. The top brokers such as Exness, FBS, FxPro and XM without a doubt all have amazing customer care (24/7 customer service, multiple language support).
Overall, when choosing your broker, there are lots of things that you should consider. I hope that this article could somehow ease your headache of choosing a broker. Personally, I find almost all the top brokers to be the same, each with its own perks. As a trader, you should always consider the broker that you feel the most comfortable doing business with after carefully weighing their pros and cons.
