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Searching Which is the best forex broker in Australia?

Help me find a company
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Hello,

I posted this thread somewhere else on the forum and i cant find edit button. My apologies for a double post in advance.

Now on to the post... Im slowly getting into forex currency trading and have been reading what I can about different brokers. I have gone through the whole "compareforexbrokers" website and so on to see what the deal is in Australia. I then came across FPA scam alerts and complaints and everything seems backwards of what compareforexbrokers and other reviews have stated.

I was keenly interested in using pepperstone, icmarkets or vantagefx in Australia. These are the 3 i am considering (unless there is something better i dont know about?)

ICmarkets seem to have the tightest spreads and execution speeds 40ms or lower (pepperstone have good execution speed as well?)

From all the feedback I have received it seems icmarkets is the best broker for Australian citizens. Heres the logic for me... in terms of withdrawals, they say they happen pretty much the same day, they are ASIC regulated which is one of the strongest regulation bodies in forex and with the tight spreads they offer on their raw accounts, it would be logical to conclude that you, as a trader, would be left with more profits than trading with someone else that has higher costs/spreads eating into your profits.

I mean looking at simple math here, if broker X chargers 0.8 pips spread on a currency pair and you trade 1.0 lot size $10 per pip, that means as soon as you click buy, you are sitting at a loss of $8 at that very moment due to spread.

Icmarkets for argument sake charge 0.5 spread for the same currency pair which results in $5 upfront spread cost to the $8 of the other broker. This is only a 0.5 vs 0.8 pip difference. Thats $3 difference on 1 trade at 1.0 lots. If you add up the huge amount of lots that get traded monthly or yearly over many currency pairs (positions you take out close etc) that can add up to thousands of dollars lost going with a broker with higher spreads.

Now as much as this sounds fine, even pepperstone who have very tight spreads seem slightly higher across the currency pairs on their razor account than icmarkets raw account. Add the fact that if you use ctrader icmarkets charge $3 per lot per side ($6) commission while pepperstone charge 3.50 ($7) commission.

When you look at the spread factor per lot and commission per lot... it seems you would be paying thousands more to pepperstone (or put another way, you would be losing thousands of dollars of potential profit over time) than you would using icmarkets because of the higher spreads.This means using icmarkets would leave more money in your bank than any other broker.

So logically it seems to be the right choice. Lower fees + tighter spreads = more profit for the trader (myself).

Heres the thing though. I read FPA scam alerts and peoples complaints/reviews and hownicmarkets is dodgy, they will close your trades early, manipulate the price and so on. But then you got people saying the same thing about pepperstone scamming clients closing positions that never reached margin, disconecting your price feed during volatile conditions or times when you can be very profitable... your trading platform doesnt work when it needs to work and when the market is quiet and not a time money can be made then it seems to work fine.

So heres where Im stuck,

Are these reviews full of it and are just competitors making fake accounts to bash other companies or what?

Since im in Australia, i dont have an overseas withdrawal issue other people might have unless the company is dodgy in general. So whos the best broker for forex to go with in Australia that will have the lowest costs/fees/spreads and fast execution and positive slippage (all the stuff that hurts your profit or magnifies your losses) thus leaving the trader (me) with the most profits at the end of each trading month between vantageFX, pepperstone and ICmarkets?

I am talking about the commission based raw ecn accounts not the standard accounts as the spread costs much more than the commission fee.

And if you would not use any one of those 3 for X reason... who else would you recommend? Everyone else I have looked at has HUGE spreads.
 
I don't think that you will have problems with IC Markets neither with Pepperstone, both are properly regulated, but if comissions are so important take a look at Fusion Markets ($2.25 per lot) which is also ASIC regulated.
 
I personally use IC Markets and find them solid enough. Few on here had issues but every broker seems to have some horror story
 
Found an A-Book broker and am not bothering with pepper/ic b-book brokers. Don't like the fact there is conflict of interest.
 
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