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[mig928]

Is your market maker a bucket shop or uses straight thru processing?

A bucket shop takes all trades but does not hedge their customers trades with a bank or group of banks. They are bookies in the gambling world.

Try this experiment. You must have a real account, demos are useless. Stops and Limits are also useless, the order has to be market orders.

Everytime you trade; note down the time it takes to complete the order.

Baseline: Opening position, regardless if long or short
Negative: Closing a losing trade
Positive: Closing a profitable trade

Take the average of the Baseline then compare it with the average of the Positives and Negatives.

If the average time to close the Positives is significatly greater than Negatives and Baseline, then you have a bucket shop. So close your account quick and look for another one.

If your market maker is using STP, why would it take longer to close a profitable trade. All trades should take the same amount of time.

[Avatar]

I have done the research according to your parameters, quite interesting actually, my negative trades when closed took the same time as the positive ones, 1.12 secs, depending on how fast is my internet connection, which is at most times 317Kbps (adsl real transfer rate).
i dunno if that's fast enough to say that i'm not with a "bucket shop", Mig, what do you think?
BTW, thank you for your post about the currency simbols.

[MoMoneyFX]

You are not using the term STP correctly, this has nothing to do with what you guys are talking about. If your Market Maker is offsetting your deals back to back one for one, they are not a market maker, they are a broker. Many operations operate in this fashion. These agency desks are quite common especially in the FX Fund sector. 20m-1billion under management.

A market maker is always acting as the counter party, and if they want to make any money they are not usually laying off 100 percent of your position with a bank, especially if you are dealing sub 1 million units, since very few banks are going to want this type of business.

From a macro perspective all market makers in FX do the same thing, run a book. From Cit, DB, BOA, to the smaller companies in the retail sector. They all run on the same concept in some way or another just to varing degrees.

If it takes you longer to exit your trade than when you entered, sure that could be reading by the dealer. Look for brokers that publish same price stream to all clients. Call you dealer on phone, and get price on exit, compare to the platform. What do you see? Is he reading you? Delays of course can be attribured to many things but if it is significant you are right in that you may want to look elsewhere, unless of course you are a trader that has factored in a few pips into your trading strategy for the dealer. In that case you should be fine.