Triantus Shango
Sergeant Major
- Messages
- 1,371
if you have 10K/USD, try the LMAX Exchange. i have nothing but praises for them. and there are the most transparent in this cesspool of an industry, especially also when it comes to their IT infrastructure, which is something that should matter if you want to scalp.
summary:
institutional spread, that is to say, when London or NY come online, very often the spread goes down to 0 on pairs such as the EURUSD or EURJPY, USDJPY, AUDJPY, and other liquid pairs. gold (XAUUSD) also when liquid goes down to 1 pip at times, but on average it's 2 pips.
blindingly fast execution--no requotes whatsoever.
but of course, when it's news time and the news moves the market in a big way, then of course, there is some slippage but nothing bad. keep in mind that price can gap over your stop during those times. and if it does, their system will not let losses run against you and later tell you 'sorry, price gapped, so your stop never got hit and therefore it wasn't closed. nothing we could do. that's the way it is in this business. so sorry.' none of that crap. it happened to me and the system closed my trade at the best available price where there was liquidity to match my order size. no big losses. just a well oiled machine working as it should. compare that to your average retail broker out there and the fantastic stories they concoct to justify all sorts of operational failure or just sheer thievery.
a well designed interface for the order management platform, which is a webapp sitting in our browser and using the latest web technologies.
the capability to connect to their servers via FIX if you so desire so you can use any charting app that talks FIX with the advantages that FIX entails. to use FIX you need to maintain a turnaround of at least 6.25 mil notional per month (1-way order, i.e. not counting both sides of the order, that is, you open a 1 lot order and that is 100K notional, and when you close that order, that's another 100K notional, so for a total of 200K trade). but if you scalp, that shouldn't be a problem as you can easily do that kind of volume in 1 week or less.
they provide historical data both on demo and of course live systems.
customer support is courteous, speedy, informed and on the ball. (of course, they could have hired other people since last time i spoke, but man, the BS i had to deal with when using your typical retail broker, none of that BS with LMAX.) trust me on this one as well: i've been a real dick and moron just to test them and see what would push their buttons. professional and effective to the finish. nothing frazzled them. they put to shame everyone else in this sorry industry i had to deal with. again, am totally impressed.
they developed their own IT infrastructure for the order management and execution engine, and it fuc&ing rocks! (i read the open source technical spec, watched the presentation the CTO (who came up with the whole design of the thing (just brilliant) and his lead engineer gave at a leading IT conference, read through his technical blog, and so on, basically the guy knows what optimizing code means, especially how to make Java scream--what they did with Java is nothing short of utterly amazing. take it from me, i used to be a Java software engineer.)
one more thing: because the standard JVM (Java Virtual Machine) has some well-known performance and memory management limitations, they upgraded all their systems to the Azul Systems JVM, which basically sets the world standard when it comes to JVMs, simply the best and most performant and reliable JVM in existence on this side of the known universe. don't know if they also got the dedicated hardware specially designed by Azul Systems to run the JVM even faster, but if they do, i can tell you that no other broker out there can touch that kind of performance unless they have a dedicated in-house team of C/C++ geniuses who can tweak code even better than what the LMAX team did. (look, i am an IT guy, and am not impressed easily. so when i come across something that is mind-blowing, well, i can't stop raving.
)
excellent reporting and automatic emails sent to your inbox with all trade pertinent details for each day you traded. you don't even need to ask for it. just as it should be.
if you must, leverage increase can be negotiated as well.
on the exchange, you don't just trade against other retail traders. all orders are mixed and matched against all other orders or parts thereof regardless of whether they came from a hedge fund, bank, or retail trader. basically, an ECN but with no last look allowed for the liquidity providers. no one else does that (that is also accepting retail trader business, that is.)
not sure now, but if i remember properly, client accounts are segregated.
only 2 hiccups is that they use Bank of America to transfer money between clients and their trading account, and BofA are a bunch of dicks: it takes them at least 2x longer than the usual to process a wire transfer. regardless, when you request your money, it is sent without any unreasonable delays.
and second, and UNFORTUNATELY! (but business is business, i guess), they have now also setup a hookup that let's retail traders connect to their servers with MT4 via the MT4 bridge.
regardless of this last faux-pas, basically, LMAX is great, if not the greatest broker out there for retail traders.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
now, if you have 50K, then RJO'Brien (UK) (not the US branch) offers now SPOT FX as well (they are really a futures broker but...). they didn't develop any IT unlike LMAX and so license and rely on the Integral platform which aggregates institutional liquidity. so the spreads are just as good and the execution quality is stellar as well.
customer service is top notch as well.
customer accounts are not segregated.
only thing i don't like, most charting apps they allow to talk to their backend are not that great IMHO. LMAX is more flexible in this regard and so you get more choice.
insane liquidity, so no slippage. i mean, nothing like 50 pips at news time, for example. nothing significant.
1 big let-down, and that's not RJO'Brien's fault, it's Integral's fault. the eggheads in Palo Alto can't design a UI to save their lives. Integral FX Inside has to be the app that has the worst and ugliest user interface i have ever had the misfortune to use. it's that bad. in fact, it is so bad, it is embarrassing for the company. at least, if i were Integral's CEO, i would be ashamed.
other than that, another excellent broker.
ok. gotta go. hope this helps.
summary:
institutional spread, that is to say, when London or NY come online, very often the spread goes down to 0 on pairs such as the EURUSD or EURJPY, USDJPY, AUDJPY, and other liquid pairs. gold (XAUUSD) also when liquid goes down to 1 pip at times, but on average it's 2 pips.
blindingly fast execution--no requotes whatsoever.
but of course, when it's news time and the news moves the market in a big way, then of course, there is some slippage but nothing bad. keep in mind that price can gap over your stop during those times. and if it does, their system will not let losses run against you and later tell you 'sorry, price gapped, so your stop never got hit and therefore it wasn't closed. nothing we could do. that's the way it is in this business. so sorry.' none of that crap. it happened to me and the system closed my trade at the best available price where there was liquidity to match my order size. no big losses. just a well oiled machine working as it should. compare that to your average retail broker out there and the fantastic stories they concoct to justify all sorts of operational failure or just sheer thievery.
a well designed interface for the order management platform, which is a webapp sitting in our browser and using the latest web technologies.
the capability to connect to their servers via FIX if you so desire so you can use any charting app that talks FIX with the advantages that FIX entails. to use FIX you need to maintain a turnaround of at least 6.25 mil notional per month (1-way order, i.e. not counting both sides of the order, that is, you open a 1 lot order and that is 100K notional, and when you close that order, that's another 100K notional, so for a total of 200K trade). but if you scalp, that shouldn't be a problem as you can easily do that kind of volume in 1 week or less.
they provide historical data both on demo and of course live systems.
customer support is courteous, speedy, informed and on the ball. (of course, they could have hired other people since last time i spoke, but man, the BS i had to deal with when using your typical retail broker, none of that BS with LMAX.) trust me on this one as well: i've been a real dick and moron just to test them and see what would push their buttons. professional and effective to the finish. nothing frazzled them. they put to shame everyone else in this sorry industry i had to deal with. again, am totally impressed.
they developed their own IT infrastructure for the order management and execution engine, and it fuc&ing rocks! (i read the open source technical spec, watched the presentation the CTO (who came up with the whole design of the thing (just brilliant) and his lead engineer gave at a leading IT conference, read through his technical blog, and so on, basically the guy knows what optimizing code means, especially how to make Java scream--what they did with Java is nothing short of utterly amazing. take it from me, i used to be a Java software engineer.)
one more thing: because the standard JVM (Java Virtual Machine) has some well-known performance and memory management limitations, they upgraded all their systems to the Azul Systems JVM, which basically sets the world standard when it comes to JVMs, simply the best and most performant and reliable JVM in existence on this side of the known universe. don't know if they also got the dedicated hardware specially designed by Azul Systems to run the JVM even faster, but if they do, i can tell you that no other broker out there can touch that kind of performance unless they have a dedicated in-house team of C/C++ geniuses who can tweak code even better than what the LMAX team did. (look, i am an IT guy, and am not impressed easily. so when i come across something that is mind-blowing, well, i can't stop raving.
)excellent reporting and automatic emails sent to your inbox with all trade pertinent details for each day you traded. you don't even need to ask for it. just as it should be.
if you must, leverage increase can be negotiated as well.
on the exchange, you don't just trade against other retail traders. all orders are mixed and matched against all other orders or parts thereof regardless of whether they came from a hedge fund, bank, or retail trader. basically, an ECN but with no last look allowed for the liquidity providers. no one else does that (that is also accepting retail trader business, that is.)
not sure now, but if i remember properly, client accounts are segregated.
only 2 hiccups is that they use Bank of America to transfer money between clients and their trading account, and BofA are a bunch of dicks: it takes them at least 2x longer than the usual to process a wire transfer. regardless, when you request your money, it is sent without any unreasonable delays.
and second, and UNFORTUNATELY!
(but business is business, i guess), they have now also setup a hookup that let's retail traders connect to their servers with MT4 via the MT4 bridge. regardless of this last faux-pas, basically, LMAX is great, if not the greatest broker out there for retail traders.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
now, if you have 50K, then RJO'Brien (UK) (not the US branch) offers now SPOT FX as well (they are really a futures broker but...). they didn't develop any IT unlike LMAX and so license and rely on the Integral platform which aggregates institutional liquidity. so the spreads are just as good and the execution quality is stellar as well.
customer service is top notch as well.
customer accounts are not segregated.
only thing i don't like, most charting apps they allow to talk to their backend are not that great IMHO. LMAX is more flexible in this regard and so you get more choice.
insane liquidity, so no slippage. i mean, nothing like 50 pips at news time, for example. nothing significant.
1 big let-down, and that's not RJO'Brien's fault, it's Integral's fault. the eggheads in Palo Alto can't design a UI to save their lives. Integral FX Inside has to be the app that has the worst and ugliest user interface i have ever had the misfortune to use. it's that bad. in fact, it is so bad, it is embarrassing for the company. at least, if i were Integral's CEO, i would be ashamed.
other than that, another excellent broker.
ok. gotta go. hope this helps.
