Benjamin Boulter | Insights

Why Your Country Isn't on the List

Benjamin Boulter — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You find a broker you like. The spreads look competitive, the platform is one you know, the reviews are reasonable. You start the signup, reach the country field, and your country is not in the list.

It is a genuinely frustrating experience, and the explanation offered is usually a single unhelpful line about regulatory requirements.

People email me about this fairly regularly, and there is almost always the same assumption underneath the question: that the broker has decided not to serve you, or that its regulator has told it not to. Neither is usually what happened.

(Disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of TabTrade, licensed in Mauritius, and we maintain our own restricted country list for exactly the reasons set out below.)

The misconception

Say a broker is licensed in Mauritius and is deciding whether to take clients in a European country.

The regulator that matters in that decision is not the Mauritian one. The FSC is not going to intervene to say we would prefer you did not serve clients over there. The constraint comes from the other end.

Every regulator’s mandate is to protect consumers in its own jurisdiction. ASIC exists to protect Australians. The FCA exists to protect people in the United Kingdom. If a broker wants to solicit clients in a country, that country’s regulator generally expects the broker to be authorised there, and has enforcement powers when it isn’t.

So the country dropdown is not really a list of places the broker likes. It is a list of places where the broker is either authorised to operate or is satisfied it can operate without breaching someone else’s rules.

What it costs to enter a market properly

The obvious follow-up is why brokers do not simply get authorised everywhere. The answer is that market entry is expensive and slow in a way that is easy to underestimate.

Obtaining a licence means incorporating a local entity, meeting capital adequacy requirements that vary from significant to enormous, appointing local directors and compliance officers, building procedures that satisfy that regulator specifically, and then funding an ongoing compliance function to keep it all current. Even acquiring a business that already holds a licence involves a lengthy due diligence and approval process before you can operate.

For a large market, that investment can make sense. For a market representing a small number of prospective clients, it very often does not, and the broker declines to enter rather than operate in a grey area.

Some markets are effectively closed regardless of appetite. The United States is the standard example: retail forex there requires registration with the CFTC and membership of the NFA, alongside capital requirements that put it out of reach of all but the largest firms. That is why so few international brokers accept US retail clients, and it is a structural barrier rather than a preference.

Other restrictions come from a different direction entirely. Sanctions regimes and anti-money-laundering obligations, often imposed by the banks and payment providers a broker depends on rather than by the regulator, rule out certain jurisdictions no matter what the broker would prefer.

The part that involves you

There is a wrinkle here that most traders never see, and it connects to how larger broker groups are structured.

A broker holding a tier-one licence in one country and additional licences offshore will typically route clients to different entities depending on where they are. You may be looking at a website that advertises a well-known regulator, while the entity actually opening your account is somewhere else with different rules and different protections. It is standard structure across the industry, and it is disclosed in the client agreement, which is a document almost nobody reads before signing.

The practical takeaway is that the country restriction and the entity question are two halves of the same subject. Both are decided before you finish the signup form, and both are worth understanding before you fund an account rather than after.

When being accepted is the warning sign

Here is the inversion that I think matters most, and it is the reason I wanted to write this piece.

If you are in a jurisdiction where responsible international brokers consistently decline to onboard you, and you find one that cheerfully accepts you in three clicks with no questions asked, that is not good fortune.

It usually means one of a few things. The broker may be operating outside the rules of your local regulator, which tells you something about its general attitude to compliance. It may have onboarding and anti-money-laundering procedures loose enough that your local restrictions never got checked, which tells you something about the controls protecting your money. Or it may be structured specifically so that if a dispute arises you have no practical recourse anywhere.

None of those are reassuring, and all of them are more concerning than the inconvenience of being turned away by a broker doing its job properly.

Being restricted is annoying. Being accepted by a firm that should have restricted you is a data point about how that firm operates.

What to do if you are blocked

Check whether the broker has a different entity that serves your region, since larger groups often do and the signup flow does not always make this obvious. Ask support directly which entity would hold your account and under which licence.

Look at brokers licensed in jurisdictions that do serve your region, and verify the licence on the regulator’s own public register rather than trusting the website footer.

Be sceptical of any intermediary offering to get you onboarded somewhere you are otherwise not accepted, particularly if it involves misstating your country of residence. Beyond the obvious problems, it hands the broker a clean reason to void your account and withhold funds later, and you will have very little standing to object.

The restriction is frustrating. Working around it is worse.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does a broker licensed in one country refuse clients from another?

Because regulators protect their own residents. If a broker solicits clients in a country where it is not authorised, it risks enforcement action from that country’s regulator, not from its own. Restricted country lists are how brokers stay on the right side of other jurisdictions’ rules.

Why do so few brokers accept clients from the United States?

Retail forex in the US requires registration with the CFTC and NFA membership, together with capital requirements that are prohibitive for most international brokers. It is a structural barrier rather than a commercial choice.

Can I use a VPN or a different address to open an account?

You can, and it is a bad idea. It typically breaches the client agreement you sign, which gives the broker grounds to close the account and withhold funds, and it leaves you with essentially no regulatory recourse in any jurisdiction if something goes wrong.

Should I be reassured when a broker accepts me easily?

Not necessarily. If responsible brokers consistently decline your jurisdiction and one accepts you without friction, that may indicate weak onboarding controls or a deliberate willingness to operate outside local rules. Both are reasons for more scrutiny, not less.

What Actually Happens When You Click Buy

Benjamin Boulter — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the outside, placing a trade looks like a single event. You click buy, a position appears, and the platform reports a fill price. It feels atomic, the way sending a message feels atomic.

Behind that click is a chain of systems, relationships and decisions, and understanding roughly how it works explains most of the differences you notice between brokers.

(Disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of TabTrade. Some of what follows draws on how we have built our own infrastructure. I will keep this at the level of how the industry generally works, partly because the specifics are commercially sensitive at every broker, not just ours.)

Where the price comes from

The number on your screen did not originate with your broker.

Foreign exchange pricing starts with large institutional sources, principally banks operating globally, which quote continuously against one another. That institutional market is where price discovery genuinely happens.

Most brokers do not connect to those institutions individually. Instead they work with liquidity providers, which aggregate pricing from a range of institutional sources and pass a consolidated feed downstream. There are tiers of liquidity provider, just as there are tiers of regulator, and which tier a broker can access depends on its size, its capital, its relationships and its history.

Brokers then commonly aggregate again. Rather than relying on a single provider, a broker may take feeds from several and combine them, which improves resilience and typically tightens the resulting spread. That aggregated feed is what reaches your platform.

This is the first reason two brokers show different prices for the same instrument at the same moment. They are not looking at the same inputs.

The layer in the middle

Between the aggregated feed and your trading platform, most brokers run a risk management system. This is the part clients rarely hear about, and it does several jobs at once.

It monitors trading activity. Brokers have obligations to watch for market abuse and for clients attempting to exploit the system or the market, and that monitoring has to happen somewhere.

It manages pricing. A broker can apply markup or markdown to the feed it receives, which is how a standard account’s spread is constructed. Market conditions change constantly, and liquidity thins during volatility and during quieter sessions. A broker that wants to deliver a consistent client experience has to actively manage that feed rather than passing through whatever arrives.

It manages the broker’s own exposure. Not every trade is routed straight out. Brokers may warehouse some positions and hedge others externally, which is a normal part of running the business and is governed by internal risk policy.

The design of this layer is one of the biggest sources of variation between brokers, and one of the least visible.

Where your order goes

When you click buy, the order passes through that risk layer and, depending on the broker’s policy and the characteristics of the trade, is routed onward to a liquidity provider that takes it to market.

The platform you are looking at, whether that is MetaTrader 4 or 5, cTrader, DXtrade, Match-Trader or increasingly a charting front end like TradingView, is the interface. It is not the infrastructure. Most brokers license a platform rather than building one, because building genuine trading infrastructure from scratch is an enormous undertaking. What differs between brokers is everything sitting behind that shared front end.

Latency, and why location matters

Execution speed is partly a function of physical distance.

Serious brokers place their infrastructure in the major financial data centres where liquidity providers also sit, because proximity removes round-trip time that no amount of software optimisation can recover. Equinix NY4 in the New York area and LD5 in London are the two that come up most often in this industry.

This is also why algorithmic traders care so much about where their VPS sits. If your strategy opens and closes positions within seconds, the difference between being milliseconds from the broker’s servers and being on the other side of the world is not academic. It changes fills.

For a broker, fast execution is not only a service quality question. If your execution is slow, you become vulnerable to participants whose own pricing is faster than yours, because they know where the market is going before your system does. Speed is partly defensive.

Judge execution the way you should judge spreads

Here is where this connects to something I have written about before.

Brokers advertise execution speed the same way they advertise spreads, which is to say they quote the best number they have ever recorded. “Execution from 1 millisecond” may be perfectly true and tell you almost nothing, because it might describe a quiet moment on a liquid pair rather than the conditions under which you actually trade.

The meaningful figure is the average, measured over an extended period, across real market conditions. At TabTrade we track execution speed on that basis and have maintained an average under 30 milliseconds over a monthly window. I am quoting an average deliberately, for exactly the reason I set out in the piece on average versus minimum spreads: a best-case figure is a marketing artefact, an average is a description of what you will actually experience.

If a broker cannot tell you its averages, that is worth noticing.

Why this varies so much between brokers

Every component in this chain is a choice. Which liquidity providers, how many, how the feeds are aggregated, how the risk layer is configured, which data centres the infrastructure sits in, how the platform connects to everything else.

There is no standard configuration, which is why the same strategy can perform differently at two brokers advertising superficially identical conditions, and why a broker that suits one style of trading may be poorly matched to another.

It is also why testing beats reading. Open a demo account, put the platforms side by side, and watch the pricing and fills under the conditions you actually trade in. Fifteen minutes of that will tell you more than any comparison table.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my broker take the other side of my trade?

It depends on the broker and the trade. Many brokers operate a hybrid model, routing some flow directly to liquidity providers and internalising or warehousing other positions according to their risk policy. This is normal industry practice and is generally described, at least in general terms, in the broker’s disclosure documents.

Why do two brokers show different prices at the same moment?

Because they are aggregating different liquidity sources and applying different pricing logic on top. Neither price is necessarily wrong. They are constructed from different inputs and managed by different systems.

Where should I put my VPS for algorithmic trading?

As close as possible to the data centre hosting your broker’s trading servers, which for most brokers means the New York or London facilities. Ask your broker directly where its servers are located rather than guessing, since brokers do migrate infrastructure.

Is faster execution always better for me?

Faster is generally better, but it is one factor among several. Consistent execution under volatile conditions matters more for most traders than a headline best-case speed, and execution quality also includes whether you receive price improvement when the market moves in your favour, not only how quickly you are filled.

Standard or Raw: Which Account Actually Costs You Less

Benjamin Boulter — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Open an account at almost any broker and you will be asked to choose between two account types. The names vary enormously, but the structure is nearly universal across the industry.

Most traders pick based on the label. Beginners assume the simpler-sounding one is for them, and experienced traders assume the one with “raw” or “zero” in the name must be cheaper because it sounds more professional.

Both assumptions are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and the actual answer is a short piece of arithmetic that almost nobody does.

(Disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of TabTrade, which offers both account types, as does nearly every broker. The figures below are illustrative industry ranges rather than any specific broker’s pricing, including ours.)

The two models

The standard account charges you through the spread. There is no separate commission line. The broker takes the pricing it receives and applies a markup, typically in the region of one pip on major currency pairs, and that markup is the broker’s revenue.

This is the same mechanism as changing money at an airport. The rate to buy and the rate to sell are different, and that difference is the cost of the transaction. Nobody hands you an invoice, but you paid.

The raw or commission account removes most of the markup and charges separately. Spreads sit at or near the underlying market, frequently close to zero on the majors during liquid sessions, and the broker charges a volume-based commission instead. Industry pricing typically falls somewhere between five and ten dollars per standard lot, round turn.

You will see this account called raw, zero, ECN, DMA, razor, edge and a dozen other things. The naming is marketing. The mechanism is the same.

One thing worth clearing up immediately: when a broker advertises “spreads from 0.0 pips”, this is the account they are describing. It is not a claim about the standard account, and as I have written about at length, it is a best-case figure rather than a typical one.

The arithmetic

On a standard lot of EUR/USD, one pip is worth ten dollars. That single fact makes the comparison straightforward.

	Standard account	Raw / commission account
Typical EUR/USD spread	around 1.0 pip	around 0.1 pip
Commission	none	around $7 per lot, round turn
Cost per 1.0 lot, round turn	about $10.00	about $8.00
Cost per 0.1 lot, round turn	about $1.00	about $0.80

Illustrative figures using mid-range industry pricing, not a specific broker’s rates.

Two things fall out of this that are worth stating plainly.

The raw account is usually cheaper on liquid majors. Under these fairly typical numbers it costs about twenty percent less per round turn. That gap compounds quickly if you trade frequently.

Commission scales with size, so it does not penalise small traders. This is the most common misconception I encounter. Commission is charged per lot, so a tenth of a lot attracts a tenth of the commission. The proportional cost is identical whether you trade 0.01 lots or 10 lots.

Where it flips

The raw account does not always win, and the crossover depends on two things.

How wide the standard markup actually is. If a broker’s standard account markup is closer to half a pip rather than a full pip, the standard account costs about five dollars per lot and comfortably beats a seven dollar commission.

What you are trading. Commission is generally a flat rate per lot regardless of instrument, while spread markup varies enormously across instruments. On minors and exotics, where raw spreads are naturally much wider, the fixed commission is added on top of an already wide spread. The relative advantage narrows and can reverse.

The rule that actually works: calculate the all-in cost per round turn, on the specific instruments you trade, at both account types, and compare the two numbers. It takes a few minutes and it is the only comparison that matters.

So which should you choose?

The honest answer is that if the arithmetic favours the raw account for your instruments, it favours it regardless of your experience level. The idea that raw accounts are reserved for professionals is a marketing convention, not a mathematical one.

That said, there are real reasons to choose the standard account.

Simplicity has value. One number to think about rather than two. If you are still building a process and want fewer variables while you learn, that is a legitimate trade-off.

Holding period changes the stakes. If you enter a position intending to hold it for weeks, a two dollar difference in entry cost is noise against the move you are trying to capture. If you are in and out several times a day, that same two dollars is the difference between a viable strategy and an unviable one.

Testing a broker. A standard account is a perfectly good way to evaluate a broker’s platform, execution and support before committing to anything.

For anyone running algorithmic strategies, high-frequency approaches or anything that turns over meaningful volume, the raw account is almost always the correct choice, and the difference is not marginal over a year of trading.

The costs neither model shows you

Both account types quote you the cost of opening and closing a position. Neither quotes you the cost of running an account, and those costs are real.

Swap and financing charges apply to positions held overnight and vary substantially between brokers. For a carry strategy or any longer-horizon approach, these can dwarf the difference between account types entirely.

Currency conversion on deposits, withdrawals or on profits in a currency other than your account denomination.

Inactivity fees, which are common and which people routinely forget about.

Withdrawal fees, which vary by method and destination.

Individually these are small line items. Across the life of an account they add up in a way that rarely appears in any comparison table, including the ones I write.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a raw or ECN account always cheaper than a standard account?

No. On liquid major pairs it usually is, because the commission is typically less than a full pip of markup. On minors, exotics and some commodities, where raw spreads are naturally wider, a flat commission added on top can make the standard account competitive or cheaper. Work it out per instrument.

Does commission make raw accounts unsuitable for small position sizes?

No. Commission is charged per lot, so it scales proportionally with your position size. A 0.01 lot trade attracts one hundredth of the per-lot commission, meaning the proportional cost is the same at any size.

What does “spreads from 0.0 pips” actually refer to?

It refers to the raw or commission account, and it describes the narrowest spread the broker has recorded rather than a typical one. It also excludes the commission, which is a real cost of the trade. Compare average spreads plus commission if you want a figure that reflects reality.

How do I compare total trading costs between two brokers?

Add the average spread cost and the commission for one round turn on the instruments you actually trade, at the account type you would actually use, then compare the totals. After that, check swap rates if you hold overnight, and check the account fee schedule for inactivity, withdrawal and conversion charges.

Which Entity Are You Actually Signing Up With?

Benjamin Boulter — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Here is a scenario that plays out thousands of times a day and almost never gets questioned.

A trader compares brokers. One of them prominently displays an ASIC licence. That carries weight, and reasonably so: there is a great deal required of an ASIC-regulated broker. The trader signs up, funds the account, and starts trading, confident about who is holding their money.

Except the entity that opened their account may not be the ASIC-regulated one. It may be an entity in another jurisdiction entirely, with different leverage, different protections and a completely different dispute process.

Nothing improper has necessarily happened. This is standard industry structure. But the trader almost certainly does not know, because the only place it is disclosed is in documentation that very few people read.

(Disclosure: I am the founder and CEO of TabTrade, licensed by the FSC in Mauritius. I previously spent years at brokers operating exactly the multi-entity structures described here. This is a description of how the industry works, not an accusation about any particular firm.)

Why brokers ended up with multiple entities

This structure did not appear by design. It accumulated, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, as regulation tightened.

When I was at Pepperstone, ASIC and the FCA were the licences to have. CySEC existed but was not top of anyone’s list. Then a series of changes reshaped the map.

Brexit meant UK-licensed firms could no longer passport into the European Union, so brokers serving European clients needed an EU-based licence. Cyprus, already growing on the back of MiFID passporting, became the obvious destination and its share of the industry expanded sharply.

European regulators tightened leverage for retail clients. Australia followed a similar path, though the timeline is longer than most people remember. ASIC’s review of the retail OTC derivatives sector dates back to 2017, when it found several hundred thousand client accounts and roughly two billion dollars in client money. Consultation Paper 322 opened for industry submissions in August 2019 and drew more than four hundred responses. The product intervention order itself was made in October 2020 and took effect on 29 March 2021, capping retail leverage and restricting how brokers could promote themselves.

Each of these changes had the same effect. Brokers holding a tier-one licence suddenly had a large population of clients they could no longer serve on the terms those clients wanted, particularly outside the licensing jurisdiction. So they acquired additional licences elsewhere to house their overseas business. New Zealand became attractive for a period. So did the Bahamas, Seychelles, Mauritius and others.

The result is that a mature broker today is often not one company. It is a group: a tier-one entity for its home market, and one or more offshore entities for everyone else.

What actually changes between entities

This is not a cosmetic distinction. Depending on which entity holds your account, several things differ.

Leverage. Often the single largest practical difference, and frequently the reason the offshore entity exists in the first place.

Client money treatment. Segregation requirements and the rules governing how your funds are held vary by jurisdiction.

Dispute resolution. Whether you have access to a well-established external ombudsman scheme, and what that scheme can compel, depends entirely on the entity you contracted with.

Compensation arrangements. Some jurisdictions operate investor compensation schemes with defined limits. Many do not.

Advertising and conduct rules. These bind the entity, not the brand.

The marketing sits at group level. The protections sit at entity level. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is invisible from the homepage.

How to find out which entity you are with

The information is disclosed. It is simply disclosed where nobody looks. A few reliable places to check:

The client agreement or terms and conditions. This is the contract. The counterparty is named in it. This is the definitive answer.

The product disclosure statement, where one exists, or the equivalent risk disclosure document.

The privacy policy, which usually names the entity collecting and controlling your data.

The footer, read carefully. Many brokers list each entity and its licence separately, often with a line explaining which entity serves which regions. It is genuinely there. It is just set in small type below the fold.

Your deposit details. The account name on the transfer instruction tells you where your money is actually going.

The signup flow itself. Some brokers detect your country and route you automatically. Occasionally you are given a choice. Usually you are not, and the decision has been made before the form loads.

If you cannot determine which entity holds your account from any of these, that itself is informative.

Is this a problem?

Mostly, this is legitimate structure. Serving clients across dozens of countries under a single licence is not possible, and the alternative to multi-entity groups is not better protection, it is simply fewer people being able to open accounts at all.

Where I think the industry can do better is disclosure. There is a meaningful difference between a broker that clearly explains which entity you are dealing with and why, and one that leans on a tier-one badge in its advertising while onboarding the overwhelming majority of its clients somewhere else. Both are legal. They are not equally transparent.

As a trader, you do not need to be cynical about it. You need to be specific. Do not ask “is this broker regulated?” Ask “which entity am I contracting with, where is it licensed, and what does that mean if something goes wrong?”

That is a question with a real answer, and it takes about five minutes to find.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do brokers have more than one licence?

Because regulation is national. A licence in one jurisdiction generally allows a broker to serve clients in that jurisdiction, not globally. As major regulators tightened leverage and conduct rules, brokers acquired additional licences elsewhere to continue serving international clients, which is how the modern multi-entity group structure emerged.

How do I find out which entity holds my account?

Read the client agreement you signed, which names your counterparty directly. The privacy policy and product disclosure statement usually name it too, and the account name on your deposit instructions is another reliable indicator. If none of those make it clear, contact support and ask directly.

Is it misleading for a broker to advertise a tier-one licence if most clients are onboarded elsewhere?

It is standard practice and generally legal, provided the entity relationships are disclosed somewhere in the documentation. Whether it is transparent is a separate question from whether it is compliant, and different brokers handle it very differently.

Does the entity I am with change my trading conditions?

It can. Leverage limits are the most common difference, and they are often substantial. Spreads and execution depend more on the broker’s underlying technology and liquidity relationships, which are frequently shared across entities within the same group.

What Regulation Actually Protects You From

Benjamin Boulter — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Scroll to the bottom of almost any broker’s website and you will find a line of regulatory badges. A licence number, a regulator’s acronym, sometimes a small crest. The implication is obvious enough: this business has been checked, so your money is safe here.

That implication is doing a lot of work, and most of it is unearned.

(Disclosure before we go further, because it is relevant to everything below: I am the founder and CEO of TabTrade, a broker licensed by the Financial Services Commission in Mauritius. I have also spent time at two brokers with tier-one licences. I have opinions here, and you should know where they come from.)

Regulation matters. I want to be unambiguous about that. But it does not do the thing most traders assume it does, and the gap between what people think a licence guarantees and what it actually guarantees is where a lot of bad decisions get made.

What a licence actually is

It helps to understand what happens on the broker’s side of that badge.

A regulator does not hand you a certificate of quality. What it gives you is a set of obligations and limitations: how you must handle client money, what you can and cannot say in your advertising, how much leverage you may offer, what checks you must run before onboarding a client, which roles your business is required to fill, and what you must report and how often.

Then you sit down with a lawyer, and the lawyer says: this is our interpretation of those guidelines. We believe you need to run these specific checks before onboarding. We believe you cannot accept clients from these regions. We believe your client money procedures need to look like this.

That word, interpretation, is the part nobody mentions. Two brokers holding the same licence from the same regulator can arrive at meaningfully different internal procedures, both entirely defensible, both compliant. The licence sets boundaries. It does not standardise everything that happens inside them.

Day to day, you mostly cannot tell

Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone who picks a broker purely on regulatory tier.

On a normal trading day, the experience of using a well-run broker in Mauritius and a well-run broker in Australia is largely the same. The platform is one of the same handful everyone licenses. Execution times are broadly comparable. Spreads depend far more on which liquidity providers the broker uses and how it manages pricing than on which regulator issued the licence.

Some things genuinely differ. Leverage limits differ. Advertising restrictions differ. But a lot of what people assume is regulator-driven is not: anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer procedures, for instance, are shaped at least as much by the banks and payment providers a broker depends on as by the regulator itself. Those institutions have their own obligations, and they push them downstream regardless of where the broker is licensed.

I will go further, because I think it is true and rarely said out loud. A well-run broker in a mid-tier jurisdiction can deliver a better client experience than a poorly run broker in a top-tier one. The licence is a floor, not a ranking.

Where the difference actually shows up

So when does tier-one regulation earn its cost?

When something goes wrong.

That is the honest answer, and it is worth sitting with, because it means the value of strong regulation is invisible right up until the moment it is the only thing that matters.

Consider a dispute. Perhaps a trade filled at a price you did not expect. Perhaps a withdrawal has stalled. Perhaps a fee appeared that you did not know about, or your account was closed and you disagree with the reasoning.

In a jurisdiction like Australia or the UK, there is a defined path for that. The broker is required to have an internal dispute resolution process, with specific procedures and timeframes it must follow. If that process does not resolve things to your satisfaction, you can escalate to an external dispute resolution scheme, typically an ombudsman, which sits outside the broker entirely and can compel outcomes.

The rules around how client funds are held and segregated are more prescriptive. The requirements around insolvency, insurance and indemnity are more robust. If the business fails, there is a clearer framework for what happens to your money.

Other jurisdictions have versions of this. Mauritius has an ombudsman. Many offshore centres have dispute mechanisms and client money rules. The processes exist. But on a global scale, places like Australia and the UK are generally considered safer places to do business, and the reason is not the day-to-day experience. It is the depth and enforceability of the machinery that activates when the relationship breaks down.

What I would actually check

If regulatory tier alone is not the answer, what should you be looking at? A few things matter more than most traders give them credit for.

Verify the licence yourself. Do not take the footer badge at face value. Go to the regulator’s public register and search for the company name and licence number. Confirm it exists, confirm it is current, and confirm the entity name matches the one you are actually contracting with. This takes two minutes and almost nobody does it. I wrote a list of the main registers in an earlier piece on spreads, and the same links apply here.

Find out who is behind the business. Can you identify the owners, the directors, the senior management? Can you verify any of that independently? Reputable financial institutions should not feel anonymous. In my experience, ownership opacity is rarely accidental.

Look at longevity and track record. How long has the business operated? What do clients say about it on independent review platforms? Has it been through a period of market stress, and how did it handle it?

Check the address is real. If a company lists a physical presence, it should have one.

None of these are regulatory questions. All of them tell you more about whether your money is safe than the acronym in the footer does.

The point

Regulation is necessary. It is not sufficient. Treating a licence as a binary safe or unsafe signal skips the part where you actually evaluate the business, and plenty of people have been let down by regulated brokers precisely because they stopped their research at the badge.

The better question is not “is this broker regulated?” but “if something went wrong here, what would actually happen, and who would I be dealing with?”

That question is harder. It is also the one worth answering.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is an offshore-regulated broker automatically unsafe?

No. Offshore licensing covers an enormous range, from well-capitalised businesses with serious compliance functions to shells with minimal oversight. The jurisdiction tells you what the minimum standard is, not what any particular broker actually does. A well-run broker in a mid-tier jurisdiction can be a better counterparty than a poorly run one in a top-tier jurisdiction.

What is the practical difference between tier-one and offshore regulation?

Mostly it appears in three places: leverage limits, advertising restrictions, and what happens during a dispute or insolvency. Tier-one jurisdictions typically have more prescriptive client money rules and a more robust external dispute resolution framework. Day-to-day trading conditions are driven more by the broker’s liquidity relationships and technology than by its regulator.

How do I check a broker’s licence is genuine?

Go directly to the regulator’s public register rather than trusting the broker’s website. Search the company name and licence number, confirm the licence is current, and check that the entity named on the register is the same entity named in the client agreement you are asked to sign. Those two names are not always the same.

Does regulation guarantee I will get my money back?

No. Some jurisdictions have compensation schemes with defined limits, and most have client money segregation requirements, but neither is a guarantee. Regulation improves the odds and defines the process. It does not underwrite your balance.

Why Average Spreads Matter More Than Minimum Spreads

Benjamin Boulter — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Biggest Mistake Traders Make

If I asked a room full of traders how they compare forex brokers, I already know what most of the answers would be.

“Low spreads.”

It’s one of the first things almost every trader looks for, and understandably so. Every trade begins with a cost. The lower that cost, the better… at least in theory.

That’s why broker websites are full of headlines like:

“Spreads from 0.0 pips.”

On the surface, comparing brokers seems straightforward. If one broker advertises spreads from 0.0 pips and another advertises spreads from 0.2 pips, the first one must be cheaper. Unfortunately, that’s where many comparisons stop.

After spending many years in the brokerage industry, I think this is one of the biggest mistakes traders make.

(Quick disclosure up front, since it’s relevant to everything that follows: I’m the founder and CEO of a brokerage called TabTrade. I’ll come back to why that matters later in this piece, including in the data, but I’d rather you know that now than find out at the end.)

Not because spreads don’t matter. They absolutely do. It’s because the number most traders compare often isn’t the number that determines what they’ll actually pay.

Imagine buying a car based solely on its advertised fuel consumption, only to discover those figures were achieved under perfect laboratory conditions that bear little resemblance to your daily commute. The advertised number wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t representative of your real-world experience.

Broker spreads work in a remarkably similar way. The figure that receives the biggest headline on a website is often the best spread the broker achieved under ideal market conditions. It tells you what was possible.

What it doesn’t necessarily tell you is what you’ll experience when you open an account, fund it, and start placing trades over the coming months or years. Those are two very different questions.

One asks:

What’s the lowest spread this broker has ever quoted?

The other asks:

What am I actually likely to pay every time I trade?

The distinction sounds subtle, but it can have a meaningful impact on your trading costs over time. In my opinion, understanding that difference is one of the simplest ways to become a better-informed trader, and once you recognise it, you’ll probably never compare brokers in quite the same way again.

What Is a Spread?

Before comparing minimum and average spreads, it’s worth taking a step back and understanding what a spread actually is.

Every tradeable financial instrument has two prices. The bid price is the price at which you can sell, and the ask price is the price at which you can buy. The difference between those two prices is known as the spread.

That difference exists because someone, usually a bank, a liquidity provider or a market maker, is standing ready to take the other side of your trade at any moment. The spread is effectively their compensation for providing that liquidity and absorbing the risk of holding a position until it can be offset elsewhere in the market.

For example, imagine EUR/USD is quoted like this:

Bid: 1.17500
Ask: 1.17510

The difference is one pip, so the spread is 1.0 pip.

If the market moves higher and the quote becomes:

Bid: 1.17500
Ask: 1.17502

the spread has narrowed to 0.2 pips.

If liquidity reduces, perhaps during major news events or quieter trading periods, the quote might become:

Bid: 1.17500
Ask: 1.17520

Now the spread has widened to 2.0 pips.

This is completely normal.

Contrary to what many newer traders assume, spreads are not fixed. They are constantly changing throughout the trading day as market conditions change.

When liquidity is high and buyers and sellers are actively trading, spreads generally become tighter; when liquidity falls, uncertainty increases, or markets become more volatile, they naturally widen.

That’s why there is no such thing as “the spread” for a currency pair. There are countless different spreads quoted throughout the day, every single trading day.

That simple fact is the foundation for everything that follows.

What Is a Minimum Spread?

Now that we know spreads are constantly changing, it’s easier to understand what a minimum spread actually represents: the lowest spread a broker observed on a particular instrument.

That’s it.

It isn’t a promise that every trader will receive that spread, or even that you’ll receive it most of the time. It’s simply the narrowest spread that occurred while the broker was measuring its prices.

For example, imagine a broker records the EUR/USD spread every second over an entire trading day.

Over those 86,400 observations, the spread might look something like this:

0.0 pips for 45 seconds
0.1 pips for 3 hours
0.2 pips for 8 hours
0.3 pips for 7 hours
Wider spreads during periods of lower liquidity

Even though the spread only reached 0.0 pips briefly, the broker can legitimately advertise:

Spreads from 0.0 pips.

That statement is factually correct.

In my experience, that 0.0 print usually isn’t even a fluke. It tends to happen for a fraction of a second, when a buy order and a sell order cross almost simultaneously. The liquidity provider on the other side isn’t really taking on any risk in that moment, so there’s nothing to charge for. It’s a genuine market condition, just not one that lasts.

There’s a common misconception here: that brokers are somehow being misleading when they advertise minimum spreads. In most cases, they’re not. If the spread genuinely reached that level, they’ve accurately described the lowest pricing that was available.

The difficulty is that many traders naturally interpret the statement differently.

When people see “from 0.0 pips”, they often assume that’s broadly representative of what they’ll experience when trading under normal market conditions.

In reality, the advertisement is describing the best-case scenario, not the typical one.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with publishing a minimum spread. The problem is using it as the primary way to compare two brokers.

By itself, it tells you very little about what your trading costs are actually likely to be over the lifetime of your account.

What Is an Average Spread?

If a minimum spread tells you the best pricing a broker achieved, an average spread attempts to answer a much more practical question.

What is a trader actually likely to pay?

Rather than focusing on a single point in time, an average spread looks at pricing over an extended period and calculates the average spread observed throughout that sample.

Instead of asking:

“How low did the spread get?”

it asks:

“What did the spread look like most of the time?”

That difference matters. Think about your own trading.

You don’t wait for the one moment each day when the spread hits its lowest point before placing every trade. You trade when your strategy tells you to trade. Sometimes that’s during the London session. Sometimes it’s during New York. Sometimes it’s immediately after an economic announcement, and sometimes it’s during quieter periods when liquidity isn’t quite as deep.

Over weeks, months and years, your trading experience isn’t defined by the single best spread a broker ever quoted. It’s defined by the thousands of spreads you actually traded through, which is exactly what an average spread is trying to capture.

Imagine two brokers.

Broker A

Minimum spread: 0.0 pips
Average spread: 0.7 pips

Broker B

Minimum spread: 0.2 pips
Average spread: 0.3 pips

If you only compared the advertised minimum spreads, Broker A would appear to be the cheaper option. If you compared the average spreads, you’d probably reach the opposite conclusion. This is why traders should be careful not to compare brokers using a single headline figure.

The question isn’t:

“Who has the lowest minimum spread?”

It’s:

“Who is likely to cost me less over the hundreds or thousands of trades I’ll place over the life of my account?”

That’s the question average spreads are designed to answer. Of course, that leads to another question: if average spreads provide a more realistic picture of trading costs, why don’t more brokers advertise them instead?

A Real-World Example

Imagine you’ve just accepted a new role that requires you to travel regularly between Sydney and Melbourne. You’ll be making the trip every few weeks for the foreseeable future, so choosing an airline isn’t just about your next flight. It’s about finding one you’ll probably use for years.

As you compare your options, one airline advertises fares from $99. Another doesn’t make the same headline claim, instead publishing data showing its average fare on the route is $140.

At first glance, the choice appears obvious. The first airline looks considerably cheaper.

Several months later, however, your experience tells a different story.

The advertised $99 fare genuinely exists, but only on a handful of flights at times you rarely travel. The flights you actually book are usually somewhere between $180 and $220. The second airline, meanwhile, consistently charges between $135 and $145 on the flights that suit your schedule.

The advertised fare wasn’t misleading. It simply represented the cheapest ticket the airline offered, not the price most regular travellers were likely to pay.

As your travel continues, you stop paying attention to the headline fare altogether. Instead, you begin asking a different question.

What am I actually going to pay over the next hundred flights?

That question is more useful because it reflects your real experience rather than the single best price that happened to exist.

Choosing a broker follows the same logic.

Opening a trading account isn’t a one-off transaction. It’s the start of an ongoing relationship. You’ll place trades during the London session, the New York session, around major economic announcements, and during quieter periods when liquidity naturally changes. Over the life of your account, your trading costs will be determined by the prices you actually trade through, not the tightest spread that briefly appeared under ideal market conditions.

That’s why the distinction between minimum and average spreads matters. A minimum spread tells you the best pricing a broker achieved; an average spread attempts to tell you the pricing you’re most likely to experience over time. For anyone comparing brokers with a long-term view, they’re answering two very different questions.

Why Brokers Advertise Minimum Spreads

If average spreads provide a more realistic picture of what traders are likely to pay, it’s reasonable to ask why minimum spreads have become the industry standard.

The answer isn’t that brokers are trying to hide anything. It’s that minimum spreads solve several practical problems.

For one thing, they’re simple.

Every trader understands what “spreads from 0.0 pips” means, even if they don’t fully appreciate how often that spread occurs. It’s a clear, concise marketing message that can be displayed on a website, in an advertisement, or on a broker comparison page without needing further explanation.

They’re also objective.

A broker either achieved that spread or it didn’t. There’s very little room for interpretation.

Average spreads, on the other hand, immediately raise questions:

Over what period were they measured?
Which trading sessions were included?
Were they measured every second, every minute, or every hour?
Were unusually volatile periods included?
Was the daily rollover included?
Which instruments were measured?

All of those decisions influence the final result, and without a clearly defined methodology, average spreads from two different brokers may not be directly comparable.

There’s also a commercial reality.

If you only have one number to capture a prospective client’s attention, every broker naturally wants that number to be as competitive as possible.

This isn’t unique to financial services.

Airlines advertise fares from a certain price.

Hotels advertise rooms from a certain nightly rate.

Car manufacturers advertise fuel consumption achieved under standardised testing conditions.

Internet providers advertise speeds up to a particular limit.

These advertisements aren’t necessarily misleading. They’re simply highlighting the most favourable figure that can legitimately be claimed.

The brokerage industry has evolved in much the same way.

Over time, minimum spreads became the common language used to compare pricing because they were easy to communicate, easy to verify, and easy for traders to understand.

The problem isn’t that minimum spreads exist. The problem is that many traders unknowingly use them as a proxy for their long-term trading costs.

They’re measuring the wrong thing.

I’ve sat in enough internal marketing reviews to know how this works in practice: someone pulls the tightest print from the last quarter’s tick data, checks it’s technically accurate, and it goes on the homepage. It’s rarely a deliberate attempt to mislead traders. It’s just how competitive marketing works when the metric that gets the most attention is also the easiest one to cherry-pick.

If your goal is to understand what you’ll actually pay across a full trading career, a minimum spread tells only a very small part of the story.

Why Measuring Average Spreads Is More Difficult Than It Sounds

By this point, it might seem obvious that every broker should simply publish its average spreads instead of its minimum spreads. In practice, it’s not nearly that straightforward.

Unlike a minimum spread, which is simply the single lowest spread observed, an average spread depends entirely on how it is measured. Two organisations can analyse the same broker and produce different average spreads while both being technically correct.

The first question is over what period should the data be collected?

A single trading day is unlikely to be representative. One week may include major economic announcements, while another may be relatively quiet. Market conditions change constantly, which is why a meaningful average generally requires a sufficiently large sample collected over an extended period.

The second question is how often should prices be sampled?

Foreign exchange prices update continuously, often many times per second. Measuring the spread every second may produce a different result from measuring it every minute or every five minutes. The more comprehensive the sampling, the more representative the final average is likely to be.

There’s a subtlety here that catches out a lot of comparison sites. Even second-by-second sampling can miss the sharpest spread spikes, because spreads can blow out and snap back within milliseconds during a major data release. A methodology built on those snapshots will systematically understate how wide spreads get during those moments. That’s true across every broker being measured, not just one.

Then there’s the question of when the market is being measured.

Should pricing during the daily rollover be included?

Every experienced trader knows that spreads naturally widen around rollover as liquidity temporarily falls between trading sessions. That’s the point in the day, typically around 5pm New York time, when major liquidity providers close their books for interest calculations. Trading desks hand over between the US close and the Asian session opening at around the same time, so for a few minutes, fewer participants are actively quoting and spreads widen almost everywhere at once. It isn’t specific to any one broker; it’s simply how the market behaves.

Some analysts argue those periods should be included because they are part of the trading day. Others argue they should be excluded because relatively little trading occurs during those few minutes and they can disproportionately influence the average.

Neither approach is inherently right or wrong. What matters is that the methodology is clearly explained and then applied consistently to every broker being compared.

There are other decisions to make as well.

Should the average be calculated across every instrument a broker offers, or only the most actively traded currency pairs? Should each currency pair carry the same weighting, or should EUR/USD contribute more heavily because it accounts for a much larger share of global trading volume?

Here’s something worth knowing: the gap between a broker’s best-case and average pricing is usually smallest on EUR/USD, the most liquid pair in the world, and widens considerably on minors and exotics. A broker’s “from 0.0 pips” headline is almost always built on EUR/USD. The same broker’s minimum-to-average gap on something like USD/ZAR or NZD/CHF can look very different, which matters if you trade anything outside the majors.

Each of those choices moves the number, which is exactly why average spreads deserve context.

An average spread without a published methodology is simply another number. It doesn’t say much about how that number was produced, or whether it’s comparable with the figures published by another broker.

That’s also why an independent set of eyes on the data matters so much. When every broker is assessed using the same methodology, traders can make much more meaningful comparisons than marketing claims alone would ever allow.

Why Independent Measurement Matters

One of the biggest challenges when comparing brokers is knowing which numbers you can trust.

Every broker has access to its own pricing data and, in many cases, there’s nothing stopping them from publishing average spreads calculated using their own methodology. Many do exactly that.

The difficulty for traders is that they have no easy way of knowing whether two brokers have measured those figures in the same way.

Imagine two brokers both claim an average EUR/USD spread of 0.2 pips. The numbers appear identical.

However, one broker may have measured pricing over an entire calendar month, while the other sampled just a few days. One may have included the daily rollover period, while the other excluded it. One may have sampled every price update throughout the day, while another only sampled periodically.

Each approach can produce a different result, but that doesn’t necessarily mean either broker is being dishonest. It simply means the figures aren’t directly comparable.

This is exactly why independent measurement carries so much weight.

Rather than asking every broker to report its own performance, an independent organisation applies a single methodology across every broker it measures. Every participant is assessed over the same period, using the same sampling approach and the same calculation method.

That creates something traders rarely get when comparing marketing material: a genuine like-for-like comparison.

One company doing exactly that is Datalyst, an independent pricing intelligence platform that samples pricing from over 10,000 real trading accounts to build its picture of spread volatility.

Rather than relying on figures supplied by brokers themselves, Datalyst independently measures pricing using a published methodology that is applied consistently across every broker in its comparison universe.

Whether you agree with every aspect of that methodology is almost beside the point. The important thing is that it is transparent, repeatable and independent.

As traders, we should always be cautious of numbers that can’t be independently verified. The same principle applies to execution speeds, slippage statistics, uptime claims and virtually every other performance metric published within the industry.

Independent data doesn’t eliminate debate, but it gives everyone a common starting point. In my view, that’s far more valuable than asking each broker to mark its own homework.

Independent doesn’t mean flawless, either. It’s still worth asking who funds the measurement, whether brokers pay to be included, and how the sample was assembled, because those things can shape coverage even when the methodology itself is sound. The same scrutiny this piece has applied to broker marketing should apply to any data source, Datalyst included.

What I Would Compare When Choosing a Broker

If I were opening a trading account today, minimum spreads wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of my checklist.

That might sound surprising given everything we’ve discussed, but even average spreads are only one part of the equation. They’re a far better indicator of likely trading costs than minimum spreads, but they’re still just one variable in a much bigger decision.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe there are a handful of questions every trader should ask before choosing a broker.

1. Are the trading costs independently verified?

This is the first thing I’d look for, for reasons already covered above. A self-reported number and an independently measured one are not the same thing, however close the figures look.

2. Who owns the business?

This is one of the most overlooked questions in the industry. Can you easily identify who owns the broker, find the directors or senior management, and verify that information independently? If something goes wrong, do you know who is ultimately responsible for the business you’re trusting with your money?

Transparency matters. Reputable financial institutions shouldn’t feel anonymous.

I’ve seen enough offshore, opaque brokerage structures over the years to know that ownership opacity is rarely accidental. It’s usually a choice.

3. Can I independently verify the broker’s regulatory status?

Don’t rely solely on what a website says.

If a broker claims to be licensed, take a few minutes to visit the regulator’s public register and verify it yourself. Confirm the company name, licence number and licence status.

Here’s where to look, depending on where the broker is based:

Australia: the AFS licensee register on ASIC’s website
UK: the FCA Register
United States: the NFA’s BASIC database, which also shows CFTC registration and any disciplinary history
Cyprus: CySEC’s list of regulated investment firms
Germany: BaFin’s register
Singapore: the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s register of licensed entities
South Africa: the FSCA’s register
Mauritius: the FSC’s Register of Licensees
Seychelles: the FSA’s list of licensees
UAE: depends on the entity. Onshore firms sit with the Capital Market Authority (renamed from the Securities and Commodities Authority in January 2026), while those operating from the DIFC or ADGM free zones are regulated by the DFSA or FSRA respectively.

Most regulators worldwide maintain something similar, and it’s usually just a name and licence number search away.

It takes only a few minutes, yet surprisingly few traders ever do it.

4. What does execution quality actually look like?

Many brokers advertise “fast execution.”

That’s easy to say.

What’s much harder is demonstrating how that execution is measured, where orders are processed, what technology sits behind the trading infrastructure, and how consistently clients receive the prices they expect to receive.

Execution quality is difficult to summarise with a single number, but it’s an important part of the overall trading experience.

One practical test: ask whether the broker passes on positive slippage as readily as negative slippage. If price improvement only ever seems to run one way, that tells you more about execution quality than any marketing claim about speed.

5. How consistent are the trading conditions?

Consistency is often more valuable than occasional best-case performance.

I’d rather know that pricing remains competitive throughout the trading day than focus on the tightest spread achieved for a brief moment during ideal market conditions.

The same applies to platform stability, execution quality and customer support. A consistently good experience is usually worth far more than an exceptional experience that’s only delivered occasionally.

6. Is the broker transparent?

Finally, I’d look at the business as a whole: does it explain how it measures performance, publish meaningful data rather than marketing slogans, and can you independently verify the claims being made?

Transparency doesn’t guarantee quality, but it usually says a great deal about the culture of the business.

Choosing a broker shouldn’t come down to whichever company advertises the smallest number on its homepage.

It should come down to understanding the complete picture and making an informed decision based on information that can be independently verified.

Other Trading Costs People Often Ignore

By now, it should be clear that average spreads are generally a much more meaningful measure of trading costs than minimum spreads.

They’re just not the whole story.

A broker with the lowest average spreads won’t necessarily be the cheapest place to trade once every other cost is taken into account.

The most obvious example is commission.

Many professional-style accounts offer raw spreads with a fixed commission charged separately. That’s not inherently better or worse than an account with a wider spread and no commission. They’re simply different pricing models.

What matters is the all-in cost of completing a trade.

If Broker A averages a spread of 0.1 pips but charges a significantly higher commission than Broker B, the apparent pricing advantage may disappear altogether. Looking at spreads in isolation can therefore be just as misleading as looking only at minimum spreads.

Execution quality is another factor that deserves more attention than it gets.

Suppose two brokers both average 0.2 pips on EUR/USD.

On paper, they appear identical.

But if one consistently fills your orders at the requested price while the other regularly experiences delays, slippage or rejected orders during volatile market conditions, your actual trading costs may end up being materially different.

This becomes particularly important for shorter-term traders, where even small differences in execution quality accumulate fast across a high volume of trades.

Platform stability also matters.

The tightest spreads in the world are of little value if your trading platform freezes during major market events, disconnects unexpectedly, or struggles to process orders when volatility increases.

For traders who hold positions overnight, financing costs should also form part of the comparison.

Swap rates can vary considerably between brokers and, depending on your strategy, may have a much greater impact on profitability than small differences in spread.

Account fees are worth a mention too: inactivity charges, withdrawal fees, currency conversion charges on deposits. They’re smaller line items individually, but they compound over the life of an account in ways that rarely make it into any comparison table.

The broader point is this: trading costs should be viewed as a complete package rather than a single number.

Average spreads are an excellent starting point because they provide a far more realistic indication of day-to-day pricing than minimum spreads. But they should always be considered alongside commissions, execution quality, platform reliability, financing costs and the overall trading experience.

No single metric tells the whole story.

The most informed traders understand how each of these factors contributes to the true cost of trading and evaluate them together, rather than in isolation.

Datalyst says as much itself. Its own methodology notes state plainly that spreads don’t represent execution quality, slippage or any other broker fees. That’s a useful admission from an organisation with every incentive to present spread data as the complete picture, and it’s exactly the caveat this section has been making.

What the Independent Data Shows

Fortunately, traders no longer have to rely solely on marketing material when comparing pricing.

Independent pricing intelligence providers now monitor and analyse broker spreads using transparent methodologies over extended periods, allowing traders to compare pricing on a considerably more meaningful basis than headline advertising alone.

Datalyst, introduced earlier, is a useful illustration of what that looks like in practice. Its reports include both the methodology used and the underlying data, allowing traders to understand exactly how the figures were produced rather than simply accepting a marketing claim at face value.

Using Datalyst’s April 2026 analysis of the seven major currency pairs (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, AUD/USD, NZD/USD, USD/CAD and USD/CHF) across 34 brokers, the table below shows the ten lowest average spreads recorded. It also includes a handful of additional widely recognised brokers for direct comparison, even though they didn’t place in the top ten:

Rank (of 34)	Broker	Account Type	Average Spread
1	TabTrade	Raw	0.04 pips
2	Deriv	Raw	0.06 pips
3	Iron FX	Razor	0.10 pips
4	Exness	Raw Active	0.10 pips
5	Axi	Raw Plus	0.12 pips
6	GO Markets	Zero	0.14 pips
7	Tickmill	DMA	0.14 pips
8	IC Markets	Zero (ECN)	0.17 pips
9	BlackBull	Zero Spread	0.18 pips
10	Pepperstone	STP Zero	0.18 pips
12	CMC Markets	Plus	0.23 pips
26	FXPro	Premium	0.49 pips
30	XM	Pro	0.74 pips
34	IG	Standard	1.48 pips

Source: Datalyst, April 2026. Average spreads measured across seven major currency pairs, combined across trading sessions, daily rollover period excluded. Full results across all 34 measured brokers are available directly from Datalyst.

One caveat worth flagging: account names vary by broker, and pricing models differ accordingly. Some carry a separate commission on top of the spread shown; others build all costs into the spread itself. As covered earlier, that commission is part of the real cost of a trade, so it’s worth checking each broker’s own fee schedule rather than assuming average spread alone tells the whole story.

The same scrutiny applies here too: one month of data is a reasonable snapshot, but it’s exactly the kind of single-period sample this article has cautioned against treating as gospel. Spread rankings can shift from month to month, so treat this table as a strong indicator of where pricing sits today rather than a permanent scoreboard.

The rankings themselves are only part of the story. Two brokers, Deriv and Iron FX, came close enough to TabTrade’s result that the real story isn’t a runaway win. It’s that pricing at the sharp end of the market is genuinely competitive right now. That’s a more honest takeaway than a single headline number would suggest, and it’s the same principle this entire article has been making: look past the number that grabs attention and understand where it actually sits in context.

What I find more encouraging is the direction the industry is moving. Rather than asking traders to compare headline claims such as “spreads from 0.0 pips”, independent organisations are beginning to publish data that better reflects the pricing traders are likely to experience over time.

That’s good news for everyone.

It encourages greater transparency, allows more meaningful comparisons between brokers, and moves the debate away from marketing headlines and toward independently verifiable data.

As disclosed at the start of this piece, TabTrade was included in this comparison and recorded the lowest average spread during the reporting period. Whether you’re considering TabTrade or any other broker, my advice is exactly the same.

Whenever independent data is available, use it. It will almost always provide a clearer picture than comparing minimum spreads alone.

Final Thoughts

One of the things I enjoy most about the financial markets is that they’re built on data.

As traders, we spend our days analysing charts, testing ideas and making decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. Yet when it comes to choosing a broker, many of us still rely on the biggest headline on a homepage.

I think we can do better than that.

Minimum spreads have their place. They’re a legitimate metric, and when presented accurately, there’s no issue with them. The mistake is assuming they tell the whole story.

Average spreads are one of the most useful indicators of what trading is actually likely to cost over time. They won’t tell you everything you need to know, but they provide a noticeably more representative picture than the single lowest spread a broker happened to quote under ideal market conditions.

More broadly, I hope the industry continues moving towards independently verified, transparent and comparable data.

Whether it’s spreads, execution quality, platform reliability or regulatory status, traders deserve information they can independently verify rather than simply accept at face value.

That’s ultimately why I wrote this article: not to tell you which broker to choose, but to encourage you to ask better questions before making that decision. If this article changes the way you compare brokers, then it’s achieved exactly what I hoped it would.

As I mentioned at the outset, I’m the founder and CEO of TabTrade, and naturally I’m biased in its favour. But I’d encourage you to apply exactly the same principles discussed in this article whether you’re evaluating TabTrade or any other broker.

Look beyond the headlines.

Understand how the numbers were measured.

Whenever possible, rely on independent data.

The more informed the industry becomes, the better this works for everyone.

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the difference between a minimum spread and an average spread?

A minimum spread is the single lowest spread a broker has recorded on an instrument, usually for a brief moment under ideal market conditions. An average spread is calculated across a much larger sample over time, so it reflects the pricing a trader is actually likely to experience. Minimum spreads show what’s possible; average spreads show what’s typical.

Why do forex spreads change throughout the day?

Spreads widen and narrow constantly based on liquidity. They tend to be tightest when major trading sessions overlap and liquidity is deep, and they widen during quieter periods, around major news releases, and around the daily rollover when liquidity providers temporarily thin out their quoting.

Is a broker with the lowest average spread always the cheapest to trade with?

Not necessarily. Spread is only one part of the total cost of a trade. Commission, execution quality, swap rates, and account fees such as inactivity or withdrawal charges all affect the real cost of trading, and a broker with a slightly wider spread can still work out cheaper once those are accounted for.

How can I verify that a broker’s spread data is accurate?

Look for spread data measured by an independent third party using a published, consistent methodology, rather than figures a broker calculates and reports about itself. It’s also worth checking who funds the measurement and whether brokers pay to be included, since that can affect how trustworthy the comparison is.