If you are looking for the forex brokers with the fastest execution speed, you are probably a scalper or you use automated trading or EAs so you need a broker that other than having a fast order execution, it has a competitive cost of trading such as low spreads and commission.

Either way, you are in the right place because I’ve collected these brokers from 100 brokers with the best cost of trades and calculated their execution speed using two EAs.

We use a third-party website that you‘ve probably heard of called myfxbook, because we wanted to gather unbiased data — not just the data from the brokers’ websites.

We also paid attention to the regulation of the brokers because we wanted to select our brokers from the well-regulated ones. Brokers with no or somehow weak regulation are not on our list even though they might have low spreads or commissions.

For more information about the methodology of the brokers’ selection, you can check the post that I wrote about the best brokers for scalping.

What Is Order Execution Speed

Order execution speed is basically the time between you send your orders to your broker and receive the answer from it by filling your orders or in other words, opening your positions or placing your pending orders.

When you press the buy/sell button, the broker takes your order and tries to find a match with it through its liquidity providers that can be banks or any other financial institutions if the broker is NDD and via internal matching if the broker is a market maker or DD.

All the process in normal situations takes milliseconds depending on the quality of the brokers’ software and of course the strength and number of the liquidity providers of the brokers.

If a broker uses state of the art technology for running its software, the execution speed of its platform increases. Other than that, if they have rich liquidity providers, they can fill your orders faster.

When Does Execution Speed Become Slower

We said that executing orders take milliseconds in normal situations but there are some occasions that it takes more than a few seconds and sometimes tens of seconds for your orders to be filled.

It happens on two occasions. Either the market is too volatile or the market doesn’t have enough liquidity.

Sometimes the market gets volatile when an important news event is about to come out and players of the market are trying to guess the direction of the news and consequently the market, so you see larger moves with faster speed.

Other times it happens when an important news event such as NFP is released and makes the market too wavy and volatile.

It’s very hard to get your favorite price on those occasions because the price is changing rapidly and finding and matching orders for brokers becomes more difficult even for highly liquid brokers.

On the other hand, you see a dent in speed when the market is exactly in the opposite state of the previous situation where it’s too slow as a result of low liquidity.

You can see that for example, at the end of the New York session. We see a dramatic decrease in the liquidity of the market at those times.

Either way, the execution becomes slower and in some situations like very volatile news, you can lose a few trades because of the slowness or you get drastic slippages.

Having a reputable and well-regulated broker that uses up to date technology can help a trader to receive those kinds of problems less frequently and with smaller impacts.

How to Test the Order Execution Speed of Forex Brokers

We used two EAs to test the MT4 execution speed of the brokers, one for limit order execution speed and one for market order execution speed.

Note: The tests were conducted on the demo accounts of the brokers. On demo accounts, you get better results or at least the results of normal situations where the marker is neither volatile nor low liquid. You also have neat charts without slippages or requotes. I did the test on the live accounts of some of the brokers that I have live accounts and the results were one and a half to twice higher than the results of demo accounts, however, the results were sometimes the same as demo in some cases.

As you know we have two types of orders:

Limit orders which include: buy limit, sell limit, buy stop, and sell stops.

Market orders, which happen when you want to open a position at the market price or instantly.

Testing Limit Orders

For limit orders, we use an EA called Ex Test ForExpat that places several limit orders (buy and sell) and calculates the time between sending orders to brokers and receiving an answer from them or executing the orders.

It’s a helpful examination for those traders who run EAs that places several limit orders in a very short period of time so speed is crucial especially if they do that in highly volatile situations.

We did this test several times for 4 weeks and our final results are an average of all the tests. You can do that both on demo and live accounts; it doesn’t affect your equity because the EA places orders and deletes them before they are triggered.

Testing Market Orders

Having a fast market order execution not only is important for the traders running EAs but it can also be valuable for the scalpers who try to squeeze a few pips out of the market and milliseconds matter in some trades.

The fewer pips you try to get in trades the more important execution speed becomes, especially in volatile situations.

For testing market order execution speed we used an EA called Broker Latency Tester. It opens 25 positions at the market price and shows the average speed of the last 20 orders.

Unlike the previous EA, this one opens positions so be careful if you decide to run it in a real account because you’ll lose a few bucks.

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These are not the final results or the real execution speed because you probably have latency to your broker that needs to be deducted from the results produced by the EAs.

What Is Latency and How to Find the Final Execution Speed?

Latency here is the time distance between your platform, MT4, and the broker server. If you are in the UK and your broker’s server is in Australia, the speed of your orders being executed is slower than if you were in Australia.

If the server of your broker is in your town, you probably have less than 10 milliseconds and if it’s in a place next to your home, the latency would be less than 5ms.

You have to find your ping which is your latency to your broker and then deduct that from the EAs’ results. You can find the ping in two ways:

First, open your MT4 and go File → open an account, and then you can see the ping on the right column.

Alternatively you can find that from the right corner at the bottom of your MT4 by clicking on connection status.

For finding the order execution speed, both market and limit, you need to deduct the ping from the results produced by each of the EAs.

For example, in the above picture showing broker latency tester results, the average latency is 294ms. Let’s say the ping is 194ms, therefore, the market order execution speed of that broker is 100ms — you can do the same for the limit order execution speed.

How to Decrease Latency and Increase Execution Speed

There are some measurements you can take to decrease the ping to your broker and also improve the execution speed of it.

Ping Reduction

For reducing the ping, you can either pick a broker that has a server in your hometown or at least in your country, or use VPS (Virtual Private Server).

Most brokers have servers in New York and London so you will have the least ping if you live there. Many brokers also have different servers in different parts of the world and you can figure that out just by asking them and it’s not hard to find out.

But most of the time even if they have servers in your city or especially in your country, you still have ping so using VPS is the best solution to eliminate ping to a great extent.

If you are in New York and the server of your broker is in Sidney, you have a ping like 200ms while if you use a VPS that its servers are located in Sidney, you get a latency like 0.1 or 0.2ms which is negligible and you can say you have no ping.

Moreover, using VPS keeps you always connected to the server of your broker and you don’t get disconnection anymore even if your computer or any of your devices are off — that comes in handy when you are using a 24/5 EA.

Most forex brokers offer free VPS with one of their plans/accounts. Some have different VPS plan (RAM, hard space, processor) for their different types of accounts.

For example, if you deposit $1000 you get a VPS plan with 500MB RAM, 25G hard space and a one-core CPU. If you deposit five grand, you can get a VPS with 2G RAM, 50G hard space and a 2- core CPU.

If your broker doesn’t offer VPS or their VPS plan is not match with your deposit or even if the plan that they offer doesn’t have the quality and specifications you need, you can purchase VPS from the companies providing various VPS hosting plans.

I’ve done a complete search and examined many VPS providers in order to find the best forex VPS. I found some that are reputable and have high quality.

You can find them on best forex VPS post.

Device Enhancements

Besides getting a VPS to eliminate the latency to your broker, there are other things that you can do to increase your connectivity and the execution speed of your orders.

Internet speed: It is an important factor that affects the execution speed of orders. It also can improve the quality of your VPS.

I have VPS myself. The first time that I ran the VPS, it was too slow because I was running that through my laptop in a place with a 1G internet speed. I went home and ran that via my PC and everything got fixed and normal, no slowness.

Other than having more internet speed at home, my PC  is much faster which brings the next factors.

CPU: having a fast processor can help the improvement of execution speed to a great extent. It also has an effect on the speed of your VPS. Normally a 4 core (quad-core) CPU for your PC and a 2 core (dual-core) for VPS suffice unless you want to run several EAs simultaneously.

RAM: RAM is also an important factor for both your device and VPS. Something between 4 to 8 GB for your PC and 2 to 4GB for VPS would be good; however, 1GB is enough in many cases.

Hard Drive: This is not a crucial factor nowadays especially for desktop computers because they have enough disc space but if your hard drive is stuffed, it can lower the speed of your device and consequently can have a negative impact on execution speed. 100G free space is more than enough.

Use a VPS and enhance all the above factors, then you’ll get the fastest execution speed possible.

Order Execution Speed Comparison

After testing each broker several times within a one-month period, we’ve got to the following numbers. You may obtain different speeds based on the subject we discussed, internet speed and hardware components, however, the rankings would probably be the same as what you see here.

Market Order Execution Speed Chart

Limit Order Execution Speed Chart

Best Execution Forex Brokers

According to the study, the forex brokers with the best and fastest execution are:

• FP markets
• Roboforex
• Pepperstone
• PFD
• Axitrader
• Intertrader
• Global Prime
• FXOpen
• HotForex
• Go Markets

Although these are the top 10 execution brokers, the other 10 brokers can be included in the category of best forex execution brokers as well and have shown very good results in the tests.

Forex Brokers Execution Speed Comparison Table

In the following table, you can sort out the brokers based on their execution speed, both market and limit orders. Click on the market and limit order execution speed headers to sort the brokers from the lowest execution speed to the highest and vice versa.

If you want to know the other conditions of the brokers such as spreads and commission, you can check the best brokers for scalping.

Brokers	limit order execution speed	market order execution speed	Broker Details	broker website
FP Markets	80	85	General Info	Visit Website
RoboForex	85	85	General Info	Visit Website
Pepperstone	100	100	General Info	Visit Website
AXITrader	100	130	General Info	Visit Website
Rakuten Securities	150	150	General Info	Visit Website
InterTrader	110	130	General Info	Visit Website
Just2Trade	100	500	General Info	Visit Website
PFD	100	110	General Info	Visit Website
Tickmill	150	160	General Info	Visit Website
Go Markets	130	140	General Info	Visit Website
Admiral Markets	105	150	General Info	Visit Website
FBS	170	290	General Info	Visit Website
ATFX	160	160	General Info	Visit Website
IC Markets	130	180	General Info	Visit Website
Global Prime	115	140	General Info	Visit Website
FX Open	125	150	General Info	Visit Website
FXTM	140	170	General Info	Visit Website
FXCM	125	150	General Info	Visit Website
Alpari	130	150	General Info	Visit Website
HotForex	150	145	General Info	Visit Website

The Bottom Line