I have been dealing in forex for more than eleven years, I first started trading back in 1999 when there were just a handful of forex brokers in Australia, as most of these companies were relatively new and not accustomed to managing active investors like myself I was forced to search for a company overseas. After a great deal of searching I managed to find a company in Switzerland that could cater for high volume traders. It has only been in the last 6 months that I again commenced my search for a first rate local Australian forex broker and what I found was astounding to say the least.

After several days searching online I noticed that the forex landscape has changed dramatically, there is allot more choice than there was previously. In the past there we only really two major forex brokers and both of them were market makers, not surprisingly the days of forex dealing desks is over, the majority of providers now offer straight through processing a few of the top tier brokers even have an ECN forex product offering.

I downloaded quite a few platforms, when I say a few I mean my PC was covered with shortcuts to nearly every single trading platform in existence. A number of platforms offered by providers were web based, though on-line platforms might at first appear a lot easier to work with as no application needs to be downloaded they often lack the highly developed charting features of downloadable platforms and as a professional trader I can tell you that excellent charting is essential.

After road testing all the online trading platforms that I had installed I discovered that almost all of them were not really suitable for professional investors. The spreads on most of the trading platforms widened dramatically over news periods, even though this is not uncommon as this is when the market is the most unstable, I really did not expect the spread in EUR/USD to widen by 35 pips. Some of the broker trading platforms had fixed spreads, however I actually observed a worse problem with these guys, their prices just froze and I couldn't place any orders or get out of my open positions, the truth is on two occasions the platforms just crashed.

Of all the forex trading platforms that I trialled 2 were in fact ECN’s or electronic communication networks. An ECN is basically a mini marketplace where the forex broker enables various banks to quote prices flowing into their trading platform. ECN brokers often have tremendously tight spreads and so much more transparent pricing than fixed spread brokers and market makers. When trading with an ECN broker you will also find that your spreads won’t dramatically widen over news periods, the reason for this is that with a lot of banks taking part in the price formation it is probable that there will always be buyers and sellers even in market instability.

Naturally as a professional trader my favored choice is definitely an ECN forex broker, out of the 2 that I discovered in Australia I discovered that only one of them constantly had tighter spreads than the other on all the most important currency pairs. I would say that this is because they most likely have more liquidity providers providing them with prices.

To cut a long story short I ended up choosing IC Markets, it actually was not a hard decision as these guys were the only provider that could offer me consistently tight spreads even throughout news announcements along with a stable trading platform. So far so good, I have been dealing with them for about 3 months now and have had no problems. As their spreads stay tight over the news I have had allot more trading possibilities than I would have had with the other providers. If you happen to be in the marketplace for a trustworthy forex company who is an ECN and can provide you with razor sharp spreads I can definitely say that form my experience IC Markets is one of the best out there.