Who is the best Meta Trader Forex broker? is probably one of the most recurrent questions in every Forex trader’s mind. You have probably gone around that question yourself a number of times, and rightfully so because choosing the right broker is crucial for your long term success as a trader.

Today we will look at 12 things you should consider before choosing a forex broker.

Tight spreads: As you probably know, the spread is the difference between the bid price and the ask price of any particular currency pair. It’s the cost of doing business in the Forex market because that spread is effectively what you pay up to your broker in order to open a position. You’d be surprised the wide array of spreads we’ve seen among the different brokers reviewed. For example: GBPJPY is quoted all the way from 5 pips to 12 pips of spread depending on the broker. That’s 7 pips you can potentially save!

Execution speed: How fast your order is sent to the market. Why is it important to trade through a fast broker? Here’s why: imagine you clicked your entry/exit order for a GBPUSD trade at 1.9720, but the order takes few seconds to actually hit the market. A fast-moving currency pair like GBPUSD can easily move lots of pips within seconds, so by the time your order is filled the current price is no longer 1.9720 and you may never enter the trade.

Number of currency pairs available: How many different currency pairs are available for you to trade through each specific broker. Some of them offer as little as 12 pairs while others offer 30+. The more, the better.

Dealing desk honesty: Some brokers actively hunt traders’ stop losses in order to cause them an “artificial” loss. Moreover, some brokers also pass systematically-successful traders to “manual execution”, meaning that a side dealing desk filters his trades to lower the trader’s overall performance.

Length of demo accounts: Goes all the way from 30 days to unlimited. We feel that 30 days is not nearly enough to practice your Forex trading skills, so the longer the length of demo account, the better it is.

Safety of funds: How comfortable would you be if you knew your broker is in fact incorporated in a tax heaven location such as Belize, Panama or Cyprus? These countries usually don’t require corporations to present their accountancy books to any governmental regulatory bureau, if there is indeed any to begin with! Forex brokers, like any other company, may go belly-up and if that ever happens to your broker you don’t want your trading funds to be located in an unregulated, shady corner of the world.

Spread-widening: Some brokers widen their spreads significantly around news announcements. The problem with widening the spreads is that your stop loss could be automatically taken out just because what it used to be a 5 pip spread few minutes ago, has just multiplied 5-fold artificially knocking your stop loss out! This is, of course, a big negative point.

Market data reliability: Have you ever opened your MetaTrader4 platform just to find a very confusing and unexpected huge price spike out of the blue for no particular reason? Yup, we all have… Some MT4 brokers are notorious for the poor stability in their servers, and whenever their server burps you get to see those unreliable price spikes that usually end up messing your charts.

Responsive customer service: it is astonishing how often a customer needs to dial three or four times the customer service department number in order to get someone at the other end of the line, and even then you often encounter someone who knows very little about Forex and trading as a whole, adding up to your frustration.

 Price re-quotes: The nightmare of every news trader! Have you ever tried to enter or exit a trade at a high-volatility time such as news announcements? If so, you have probably suffered from the dreaded “price re-quote” error message pop up window, which basically keeps you away from entering your position while price takes off without you.

Institutional accounts: Are you a pro-trader with a larger than-most account? If so, some brokers offer what they call “institutional accounts” which usually offer larger liquidity pools, much tighter spreads, wider options for account management, etc.

And few other elements we’ve bundled into the “Other” category: For example: some brokers donate a portion of their profits to UNICEF, some others allow PayPal funding/withdrawals, some others provide a brief introductory course to Forex, etc. You know, little sweeteners that are always nice to see.

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