EA METATRADER

There are hundreds of brokers operating in the retail forex market today; naturally, each has a technical capability, and business model suitable to a different trader profile. These differences are immaterial to most long term traders, for swing traders they are meaningful but not that significant, but for day traders and scalpers they are the distinction between profit and loss. At the very basic level, the spread is a tax paid on profits and losses to the broker for his services, but the relationship goes a lot deeper than that. Let’s take a look at the various issues related to the scalper-broker relationship. (Once you’ve read this article make sure to stop by our forex broker review section to find more informations on the most popular retail forex brokers.)

Low Spreads

A trader who doesn’t use the scalping or day-trading strategies will open and close may be one or two positions, at most, in a single day. Although the cost of the spread is still an important variable, a successful trading style can easily justify the relatively small fees paid to the broker. The situation is quite different for the scalper however. Since the scalper will open and close tens of positions in a short period of time, the cost of his trades will be a very significant item on his balance sheet.

Scalping Policy

In order to understand the cause of this, we should discuss how brokers net out their client’s positions before passing them to the banks. Supposing that a majority of a broker’s clients are losing money while trading, what would happen if at a time these losses were to reach such a large size that some triggered margin calls which could not be met? Since forex brokers are liable to liquidity provider banks for the profits or losses of their clients, they would have faced periodic crises of liquidity and even bankruptcy. In order to prevent such a situation from arising, brokers net-out the positions of clients by trading against them. That is, as a client opens a long position, the broker takes a short position, and vice versa. Since the result of two orders in the opposite direction is that the total exposure to the market is zero, the liquidity issue is resolved, and the firm is unimpacted by losses or profits in traders’ account.

Now that we understand that scalping does not necessarily constitute a problem for a competent broker (just like the occasional winners are not problem for casinos), we are ready to understand why some brokers dislike scalpers so much. As we said, the broker needs to net out trader positions against each other to guarantee that its liability against banks is minimal. Scalpers disrupt that plan by entering trades all over the place, at awkward times, with difficult sizes which not only forces the broker to commit its own capital at times, but also ensures that the system is bombarded with crowded trades. Add to that the possibility that the broker’s servers are not exactly lightning-fast, or modern enough to cope with the rapid flow of orders, and there you have profitable scalpers as the worst nightmare of a broker with a slow outdated system. Since scalpers enter many small, rapid positions over a short period of time, an incompetent broker is unable to cover its exposure efficiently, and sooner or later kicks the trader out by terminating his account, or slows down his access to the system so much that the scalper has to leave by his own account, due to his inability to trade.

All this should make it clear that scalpers must trade with innovative, competent, and technologically alert brokers only, who possess the expertise and the technical capability to handle the large volume of orders arising from scalping activity. A no-dealing desk broker is almost a must for a scalper. Since trades are mostly automated in the system of a no-dealing desk(NDD) broker, there is little risk of external tampering as the system is left to sort out client orders on its own (still profitable of course).

Strong technical tools

Scalping involves technical trading. In the very short time frames preferred by scalpers, fundamentals have no impact on trading. And when they do have, market reaction to them is erratic and entirely unpredictable. As such, a sophisticated technical package which supplies an adequate number of technical tools is a clear necessity for any scalper.

In addition, since the trader will spend a considerable amount of time gazing at the screen, reading quotes, opening and closing positions, it is a good idea to choose an interface that is not too wearying on the eyes. A bright, graphically intense platform may be pleasant to use and look at at first, but after long hours of intense concentration, the visual appeal will be more of a burden than a benefit.

Also, a platform that allows the simultaneous display of multiple time frames can be very useful for a scalper as he monitors price movements on the same screen. Although scalping involves short term trading, awareness of the price action on longer timeframes can be beneficial for money management, and strategical planning.

No slippage, no misquotes, timely execution

Since the scalper trades many times in the short time frame of an hour, he must receive timely, correct quotes on a system which allows rapid reaction.

If there’s slippage, the scalper will be unable to trade most of the time. If there are misquotes, he will suffer losses so often that trading will be impractical. And we should not neglect the emotional pressures which will be caused by such a stressful, difficult, and inefficient trading environment either. Scalping is already a burdensome activity on one’s nerves, and we should not agree to suffer the added trouble of broker incompetence on top of all the other problems which we have.