subject: What Markets Ic Markets The Best For Forex In Australia [print this page] I've been dealing in forex for more than eleven years, I originally began buying and selling back in 1999 when there were just a couple of forex brokers in Australia, as many of these companies were relatively new and not accustomed to managing frequent traders like myself I was forced to search for a provider offshore. After a great deal of searching I managed to find a company in Switzerland that was able to cater for high volume traders. It has only been in the last 6 months that I once again began my search for a good local Australian forex company and what I discovered was mind blowing to say the least.
After a few days searching online I noticed that the forex landscape has changed dramatically, there is allot more alternatives than there use to be. Previously there we only really 2 main forex brokers and both of them were market makers, needless to say the days of forex trading desks is over, the majority of brokers now offer straight through processing a number of the top tier companies even have an ECN forex offering.
I downloaded a few platforms, when I say a few I mean my PC was covered with shortcuts to nearly every single trading platform obtainable. Several trading platforms offered by providers were online, though online trading platforms may initially appear simpler to use as no program needs to be downloaded they often lack the superior charting functionality of downloadable trading platforms and as an experienced trader I can tell you that good quality charting is critical.
After road testing all of the online trading platforms that I had installed I found that a good number of them were not really created for professional users. The spreads on most of the platforms widened dramatically over news periods, even though this isn't uncommon as this is when the market is the most unstable, I really didn't anticipate the spread in EUR/USD to blow out by 35 pips. Some of the broker platforms had fixed spreads, however I actually noticed a worse problem with these guys, their price feed simply froze and I couldn't place any orders or get out of my open positions, the truth is on two occasions the trading platforms simply crashed.
Of all the forex trading platforms that I trialled two were actually ECNs or electronic communication networks. An ECN is basically a mini marketplace where the forex broker allows numerous banks to quote prices flowing into their trading platform. ECN brokers frequently have extremely tight spreads and so much more transparent pricing than fixed spread providers and market makers. When buying and selling with an ECN provider you will also find that your spreads will not dramatically widen over news periods, the reason for this is that with a lot of banks taking part in the price creation its expected that there will always be buyers and sellers even during market volatility.
Of course as a professional trader my favored selection is definitely an ECN forex broker, out of the two that I discovered in Australia I found that only one of them consistently had tighter spreads than the other on every one of the major currency pairs. I would say that this is because they most likely have more liquidity providers providing them with prices.
To cut a long story short I ended up choosing IC Markets, it actually wasnt a tough choice as IC Markets were really the only company that could offer me consistently tight spreads even throughout news announcements as well as a stable trading platform. So far so good, I have been dealing with them for about 3 months now and have had no troubles. As their spreads stay tight over the news I have had many more buying and selling opportunities than I'd have had with the other brokers. If you happen to be in the market for a trustworthy forex broker who is an ECN and can provide you with razor sharp spreads I can certainly say that form my experience IC Markets is the very best out there.
