Choosing a broker can be tricky. There are so many conditions one needs to consider before pledging their funds, that sometimes it can get confusing. In this post, I explain the main points that I investigate before registering an account with a certain broker.
Reliability
In many ways, brokers are like banks in the old times. It is absolutely crucial that the company you entrust your funds to, is a decent, reliable one, that will return your hard earned money. This is indeed one of the most complicated factors too: how do you measure reliability? While the question might sound easy to answer, all the obvious points have counter-arguments too.
Certificates: while it is important to have coverage by insurance, and be audited regularly by your local financial services authority, it is also true, that quite often even these will not grant full safety of your funds. Furthermore, algorithmic trading has some requirements, like high leverage settings, that are quite often not available with many brokers, simply due to regulatory reasons. The brokers with all the certificates and approvals by regulators will often be unable to meet your needs for trading.
Online feedback: another seemingly easy method is to check online if there are any red flags raised by users. The catch is, quite often, there are paid comment armies that are smearing a certain broker online, eventually making their ways into Trustpilot and other feedback aggregators, so eventually you will have no easy way of telling if the feedback is genuine or not.
Speed: this one is quite easy to measure, but needs testing in real life to be sure. Most of the brokers will claim that they have lightning fast connections, but they never specify from which country you will need to operate from in order to enjoy those marvelous speeds.
Payment methods: I always prefer to fund my broker account using blockchain. Banks are too messy, slow, and they often block overseas payments for no apparent reason. If a broker accepts all sorts of funding channels, and they are as fast with withdrawals as they are with deposits, it means that the broker is probably quite alright. The test is in the pudding, as they say. I encourage everyone to try withdrawing after a few months of operations, just to see how fast the withdrawal process is being completed.
Geographical limitations
While you might find a broker that ticks all the boxes you have in your mind, they might just not be in a position to serve a taxpayer of the country you are a resident in. They have regulatory reasons, no doubt. You might be in a position where you need to try and see if the given broker has your country on a blacklist, before you provide all your details to them.
Brokers I use
I use 3 different brokers: Ultima; Vantage; Fusion Markets
Vantage is one of the most popular brokers out there. Their systems are blazing fast, response times are amazing, everything is snappy. Customer Support is slow to respond though. As long as you have no problem that they need to solve for you, Vantage is an excellent choice for running your algos on.
Ultima is my favourite for the time being, as they offer fantastic bonuses for deposits. The infrastructure they use is the one of Vantage, so speed and connection reliability is given. Most of my accounts are here.
Fusion Markets: registered and certified in Australia, they are closer to the well-regulated side of the list, and they have my vote of confidence. Their connections are not the fastest, and I had a situation before where there was no connection for 20 minutes for any of their users. While I got an apology from Fusion, the common response of “our technicians are working on resolving the issue” is often just not enough. This one incident aside, they are quite alright, and I still run an account with them.
