AvaTrade

Everything we measured at AvaTrade, including where it beats us

Standard · MT5 account, EUR/USD, 27.08–25.09. Both columns are printed for every broker on this site, ours included — the losses are what make the wins worth reading.

EUR/USD · 27.08–25.09 · our own account, 1 s bid/ask sampling

Adding up a year on this account: $1 690

The headline figure is one number, and one number is not checkable. Here it is in its parts, for 10 lots a month of EUR/USD on the Standard · MT5 account we opened:

One pip on one standard lot of EUR/USD is about $10; that conversion is the only constant in the sum, and it is the market's, not ours.

There is no commission on this account, so the whole trading cost sits in the spread: $1 620 of the $1 690. A commission-free account is not the same thing as a cheap account — at 1.35 pips average, this one pays for itself in the price rather than in a line on the statement, and the total is the number that can be compared.

The swap line, $70 a year, is the one component that does not scale with how often you trade — it scales with how long positions stay open. A A day trader who is flat overnight will pay almost none of it; somebody holding a position for weeks will pay more than our profile shows.

Nothing in this table is a quote. It is what our own account would have paid at a stated volume over the window we measured, and volume is the lever that moves it most. The per-lot components scale with volume and the swap does not, so the ordering between accounts is a function of how much you trade.

The rig behind AvaTrade's numbers

The figures come from a single Standard · MT5 account at AvaTrade — retail terms, public sign-up, nothing arranged on the phone. Its platform runs continuously on hardware we control, with sleep, hibernation and battery throttling all disabled — the defaults would have removed the thin-liquidity hours, which are the ones worth measuring.

Bid and ask arrive from that platform and are stored raw with the timestamp the server put on them. The server clock is not UTC — one broker in this set runs three hours from it — so the offset is measured from fresh ticks at every start rather than written down as a constant. Anything that is not seconds old after conversion is refused. That rule exists because a stale quote's age lands on a round hour roughly once an hour, so a whole-hour sanity check passes it cheerfully.

Execution is measured the only way it can be — by putting orders through the account: 4 787 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 207 were timed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases. Every probe was closed within seconds: an open position would collect swap and market risk and contaminate the next reading and the account is reconciled against the broker after each run.

Collection ran from 2026-08-27 to 2026-09-25 without interruption, and what counts as coverage here is the share of market hours in the window holding real samples. The looser definition — hours of the day ever seen — once let a dead collector report itself healthy for three and a half days.

Execution measured by sending orders, not by reading claims

A quote is an invitation; a fill is the transaction. The gap between them opens exactly when the market is moving. Out of 4 787 orders on this account 0.8% did not execute and the 207 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 1.3 pips on average — about $13 per standard lot every time one of those orders is placed.

Rejects are the broker's refusals, taken from its own status codes. Our own timeouts have a separate status and are not folded in — doing so would inflate a broker's rate with our latency. That separation is not pedantry: it is the difference between measuring a broker and measuring our own network.

Slippage measures where the fill landed relative to the request, with the sign pointing the way a trader experiences it — positive is money lost. Release-timed orders are the sample, deliberately. In a quiet hour almost any broker fills at the quote, and a measurement taken then flatters all of them equally. Those minutes are where execution quality actually exists - liquidity thins and every order in the market arrives together.

Every probe opens and closes within seconds at minimum volume, so what is measured is the fill and not a position. The execution price returned by an order and the quotes streaming alongside it are not always in the same units, so a probe whose fill disagrees with the quote stream by more than a couple of per cent is recorded as suspect rather than published.

Spread by hour on this account

There is no hourly series for AvaTrade yet. The hourly table needs a continuous series from our own account for the whole window, and one that survived the feed audit. This account either post-dates the window or failed that audit. An hourly table assembled from a partial series looks exactly like a complete one, which is precisely why it is not here.

The window-level figures are published; only the hour-by-hour cut is withheld. When a full series exists, this section fills itself from the same store as every other figure on the site — there is no second pipeline for presentation, which is the only reason a reader can trust that an hourly figure and an average come from the same ticks.

The interesting hours are the ones missing from every marketing page. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC the New York session closes, liquidity thins and spreads on every account we hold widen — several of them by a multiple rather than a margin. A broker quoting a single daytime average is quoting its best hour and leaving the arithmetic to you; the spread page carries the day-against-rollover ratio for every account in the table, including this one.

What AvaTrade's licence gives a client

Not established. We have not confirmed which of this broker's licensed entities would hold an account like ours, and without that there is no honest way to say what protection applies: a group can hold a European licence, an offshore one and several in between, and the client protections attached to them are not comparable. A licence number attached to the wrong entity is worse than no licence number at all, so this section stays empty until the broker tells us which entity our account sits under.

This matters more than it sounds. The compensation ceiling, the maximum leverage you may be offered, whether your losses can exceed your deposit and who hears a complaint are all properties of the entity, not of the brand on the website. Two clients of the same broker, onboarded through different entities, can have materially different protection with identical platforms and identical spreads.

Where we have established the entity, this section carries the regulator's own rule with the sentence it came from — see any of the brokers whose entity is confirmed. For this one, the measurements above stand on their own: they describe the account we opened, whoever turns out to hold it.

AvaTrade against the rest of the table, axis by axis

AvaTrade is in the better half of the table on 4 of the 8 axes it has figures for — best of 10 on commission per lot; best of 9 on withdrawal fee. Each placing is against the other accounts in the same source class, on the same instrument and window - not against a broker's claim, and not rolled into a composite score. A composite score is exactly where a site paid by one of these brokers would hide its thumb, so there is none.

Lower is better on every axis · 27.08–25.09 · ranking happens inside one source class only

The spread of placings matters more than any single one: an account that is first on cost and last on rejected orders is a different proposition from one that is middling on both, and a single number cannot carry that difference.

Questions about AvaTrade

Answers come from this account's own numbers. Where we have not measured something, the answer says so rather than reaching for the broker's claim.

How to check what is on this page

A measurement published by a site that earns a commission from one of the brokers it measures deserves scepticism, so here is where to point it.

• Recompute the billthe components and the profile are printed above; the arithmetic is deliberately simple enough to redo on paper
• Ask for the rowsthe data page says what we hand over, including the flagged readings we excluded
• Compare us with anybody else measuring the same thinga figure that only exists on one site is a figure nobody has checked, ours included
• Check the window, then the sort orderevery figure carries the window it was taken in; the cost table is sorted by cost, and our sponsor sits wherever that puts it
• Check that the losses are printedif the sponsor's losses ever stop appearing on this site, stop believing the rest of it

If you find something wrong, tell us: desk@costcheckfxen.com. A correction is published with a note of what changed, and the faulty rows are quarantined rather than deleted. Who may alter a published figure, and what happens when a broker disputes one, is written out in the editorial policy.