Forex execution checks for fills, margin, and leverage

Compare venues as execution filters

Foreign-exchange venues can be compared on order-handling speed, pricing-efficiency, and account-reporting quality.

A venue is usable only if it accepts the specific currency pair a trader intends to route. Pair-coverage is whether a venue will accept orders in that currency combination.

Check fill-fidelity on a practice-account

A practice-account can be used to check whether displayed prices are honored and how quickly orders complete. Fill-fidelity is whether an order completes at or near the price shown on the screen instead of being requoted or slipped. Execution-latency is how quickly an order is accepted and completed after it is sent. Pricing-efficiency is the gap between a displayed quote and the cost of actually completing the trade at that venue.

Apply margin and leverage as pre-trade filters

Margin-requirement, available leverage, and smaller-account-option settings are pre-trade filters for how much exposure a venue will permit. The margin-requirement is the account equity a venue demands before it will carry a position of a given size. The leverage-envelope is the maximum position size a venue will allow relative to account equity. A smaller-account-option is a reduced account size that changes how much exposure can be opened under the same margin and leverage rules.

TradersWeek editorial reading: keep the loss or exposure decision bounded before a trade is placed, and accept only the envelope that stays inside that bound.

Use reports as inputs, not ratings

Venue-supplied market statistics and a hedging-activity-report can be inputs to execution and exposure decisions. They remain venue-supplied data.

Public venue directories can change after posting and are vendor-supplied rather than independently verified quality ratings. How often a venue listing is opened is not an editorial score of fill quality, cost, or leverage terms.