Pages

The Forex Battle - IC Markets vs Armada Markets

By Mathew Josepailld


Picking a forex provider is often hard, there are so many forex brokers out there most of which are unregulated or just market makers aiming to make the most of your losses. I have been forex trading for about six years now and during my time as a trader I have traded with more than 15 different forex brokers all over the world, I decided that I'd write this review comparing the two brokers that I'm presently trading with.

Before I get started with my comparison I must point out that both fx brokers are poles apart in that one is based in Estonia and another in Australia and regulated by ASIC. It is worth pointing this out as traders receive much better safeguard in highly regulated jurisdictions such as Australia.

In this appraisal I've attempted to examine the service, spreads and order latency between both brokers. Please keep in mind that this evaluation is extemely subjective and dependent on my own individual experiences trading with both brokers, before selecting any forex broker you ought to perform your own evaluation and choose which forex brokers would be better matched to your fx trading style.

Here is my appraisal.

Service Testing service is of course very subjective and dependent on a variety of factors including, the time of day and method of contact (chat, email, phone). To make this test fair I decided to get in touch with the support teams of both forex brokers within an hour of each other on the same day. I found both fx brokers to have rather good support response times, both support representatives were polite and professional, I did however find that the IC Markets support person seemed to have more market and Metatrader 4 knowledge. In conclusion both forex brokers have first-rate support, however I must say IC Markets support team were far more helpful and informative.

Spreads Once again comparing the spreads of 2 brokers really depends on the time of day along with market volatility. To examine the spreads of both forex brokers I decided to watch their spreads around London open as this is probably the most liquid time of day in the forex market. After 30 minutes of monitoring it was extremely obvious to me that IC Markets does in fact have much better spreads than Armada Markets, they are approximately twenty percent better across the main currency pairs. If you are not an active fx trader, spreads shouldn't be a great concern, however if you're scalping the market you need the very best spreads available. I certainly recommend IC Markets over Armada Markets if you're a frequent trader.

Order Latency Order latency isn't important if you're a set and forget trader running medium to long-term strategies, however if you plan on scalping the market having quick order execution is very important. After placing a couple of trades on both platforms at the same time it became quickly obvious that IC Markets True ECN account had much faster order execution. The order execution speeds at IC Markets averages 156 m/s vs an average of 490 m/s with Armada Markets. With quick order execution speeds IC Markets is really a much better platform for scalpers.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment