Some thoughts on spreads and brokers FX forex trading

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Missed my AUDUSD short entry at 1.1013.. I show the high, on FXCM, as 1.10122..

Big deal.. it happens to all of us.. I'm told.. Get over it..

And yeah.. it does happen to all of us.. It happens to me over and over.. It's like the slippage I used to experience on FXCM.. It always went in only ONE direction.. against me.

Every time I used to hit a stop loss I would lose anywhere from .01 to 1 pip to slippage. However when/if I hit a limit order to take profit I NEVER experienced slippage in my favor. I used to talk about this and how it seemed obvious that the deck was stacked against you.

We were "told", by brokers, on the one hand that market volatility/conditions made slippage unavoidable and I experienced slippage, as I said, virtually 100% of the time.

But only in ONE direction, against me. "Market volatility/conditions", it seemed NEVER caused slippage in my favor.. I always thought that to be very odd..

FXCM "fixed" that.. where now slippage goes in your favor as well as against you..

Now I have a new pet peeve..

And it STILL concerns limit entry / exit orders..

And like the previous "issue" with slippage it seems to work against me the vast majority of the time. So much so that it seems a mathematical anomaly to me..

I scale into positions sometimes and so many times I seem to miss my last add before a turn by the width of the spread.. And, on the other end, so many times I miss hitting a profit target by the thinnest of margins, 2, 3 or 4 pips.

If it happened in BOTH directions it wouldn't bother me.. If I, roughly, 50% of the time got in or out on my limit order and 50% of the time I missed it would make sense..

However when/if we consider that our broker, whoever that might be, controls the spread and we realize that we miss that important entry or that important exit much more often than not it's makes a guy think..

It makes a guy wonder..

Greg

This post is not only about FXCM, though they are mentioned within it. We all experience the same issues with a large variety of broker/dealers.