hello, can you tell me about latency levels and execution during news, will I get excessive slippage?
Hi MPepe68,
The location of your MT4 terminal relative to the server is the determining factor when it comes to latency. The solution is to use a
co-located Virtual Private Server (VPS).
The risk of slippage increases dramatically during news events. This is a risk you must be prepared to accept, if you decide to trade the news. That said, you can be confident of receiving a fair price on FXCM's No Dealing Desk (NDD) forex execution, because of how we offset your orders with our 10+ liquidity providers.
In the NDD model, FXCM acts as a price aggregator. Once a mark-up is added, we take the best available bid and best ask prices from our liquidity providers and stream those prices to the platforms we provide. That's the price you see. FXCM's liquidity providers include global banks, financial institutions, and other market makers. This large, diverse group of liquidity providers is one of the things that make this model special.
When you trade with a standard Dealing Desk, you may not know where the prices are coming from or if they actually reflect prices in the broader market. FXCM's deep and diverse pool of liquidity providers helps to ensure that NDD prices are reliable - not set by a single provider - and that they do reflect the broader forex market. Also, through competition, the NDD model ensures that prices are market-driven and fair. FXCM rewards liquidity providers with order flow when they provide the best bid or ask prices. The more advantageous their prices are the more order flow the liquidity provider will receive. The less advantageous, the less order flow they will receive. This efficient selection method keeps a single liquidity provider from adversely affecting your price.
FXCM does not take a market position, eliminating a major trading conflict of interest. Dealing Desk brokers may actively trade against your positions. They can profit when you lose. Alternatively, they may lose when you profit. Because of this, Dealing Desk brokers are incentivized to manipulate your orders. They may for example place restrictions on stops and limits or re-quote your orders. FXCM's NDD execution model does none of this. Your orders automatically fill from the NDD price feed, which is the best available bid and best ask prices from all of our liquidity providers after FXCM's mark-up. Additionally, your orders are anonymous to the liquidity providers. They cannot see your stops, limits, or entry orders; they only see market orders coming from FXCM.
Furthermore, it's worth noting that slippage can be positive or negative with FXCM. Positive slippage is when your order gets filled at a better price, also known as a price improvement. Currently, FXCM is only of the brokers to allow clients to allow clients to benefit from positive slippage available on all order types including market and limit orders. By contrast, some brokers re-quote their clients rather than let them to benefit from positive slippage. There are no re-quotes at FXCM, and in just 6 months from August 2013 to January 2014, our clients received
over $15.5 million in price improvements.
While price improvements are available on all order types, they most commonly occur with limit (take profit) orders due to the direction of price movement when such orders are triggered. As an MT4 user, you'll be interested to know that unlike some brokers, FXCM offers true limit orders on MT4. That means your limit order can only be filled at the specified price or better (positive slippage). By contrast, some brokers will convert your take profit order into a market order when it's triggered opening up the risk that it could get filled at a worse price (negative slippage).