When people start trading, they discover plenty of techniques available to gain profits from their investments. Between them, one of the fastest and most advanced to use is called scalping.
Let’s get it straight: if you’re a retail trader, this technique may not be for you. This is a technique which requires advanced skills, focus, and most of all, a cutting edge platform to use due to the incredible speed which is required to trade.
Today we’re going to examine some of those platforms and analyse this technique with the tips and help offered in this article on the best forex broker for scalping on investingoal.com.
Scalping: Limitations
Before beginning to add this technique to your investment strategies, you should be aware that there may be some limitations on scalping depending on which country you’re in and which platform you’re using.
There are some brokers which have a minimum period of time to wait between market price, stop-loss, and take-profit, which makes it problematic to use such a high-frequency trading style.
Scalping, as a matter of fact, is the fastest trading technique available today. While other investors spend days, weeks, months, even years on an investment, scalpers will open and settle numerous trades on a daily basis. We’re speaking of at least 10 trades per day, with top-scalpers peaking to 200 trades each day.
Having limitations on speed-time will inevitably have intense repercussions on your profits or the general strategy, so check the regulation regarding your country and broker. In particular, be careful if you’re a citizen of:
- Australia
- USA
- Japan
- UK
- Cyprus
Usually, scalpers will also check fees and spreads in order to find the best brokerage service, with most of them aiming their attention toward ECN forex brokers.
Best Forex ECN Brokers
As we already said, in order to properly begin scalping the market, you’ll have to rely on the best and fastest technology available on modern trading platforms. In this case, we’re referring to ECN trading platforms.
ECN is an acronym standing for “Electronic Communication Network” which is a type of computerized network that facilitates financial trading outside of traditional stock exchanges, such as in the case of the Forex market. This fast tech helped also to eliminate many problems, such as the once infamous re-quotation, a recurring issue in the past caused by the market moving too fast.
As of today, thanks to the aforementioned article and our research, we draw up a small list of the best ECN forex brokers available on the market today.
- Pepperstone: the largest MT4 broker and the best option if you’re interested in scalping thanks to its Razor account. This typology of account will enable a fixed rate of 3.5 USD commission per lot with spreads starting from 0 pips. It is also extremely useful for those with their first experience with scalping thanks to many social trading features enhanced with their service. Once a minimum deposit of $200, you’ll have access to different trading platforms, including MT4, MT5 and their proprietary platform cTrader.
- Admiral Markets: this brokerage service has a strong focus on the scalping scene and has its core in advanced ECN technology. Thanks to it, order execution provided by their service will help scalpers to miss any interesting market movement on more than 4,000 assets available. If you open a Prime account, you’ll also have 0 pips and top trading platforms such as MT4, MT5 and Webtrader.
- IC Markets: one of the best brokers in terms of liquidity and scalping, with a $3 per lot as commission and tight spreads starting from 0.1pips. Trading platforms available with their ECN accounts are MT4, MT5, cTrader and WebTrader, but it doesn’t require any minimum deposit.
- HotForex: with this broker, we can open an interesting ECN account with the possibility of using the MT4 trading platform for scalping with a fixed $4 commission per traded lot. He also has some of the lowest spreads on the market and regulations provided by top regulators such as MIFID-ESMA, CySEC and FSC (Mauritius). Account types differ very much between them and so does the minimum deposit with the lowest starting from just $5.
In Conclusion
To end our article, we want to leave you with a few recommendations and hints.
First of all, remember that we are speaking about a technique which can profit a lot to the scalper thanks to the correct use of the leverage, but also provoke immense damages to our finances in case of wrong investment.
Additionally, you should always remember that scalping is not for everyone. We are speaking of a technique that requires enormous trading skills, the right strategy and a lot of time dedicated to monitoring the charts. All of this, while being under constant pressure.
With all that being said, think twice before starting this new financial adventure, and do your homework!