FBS

FBS ranks 10th of 10 on cost — and cost is not the whole bill

One instrument, one window, one profile of 10 lots a month, on an account we opened ourselves. Where FBS beats the broker we are paid by, that is printed too.

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

Where the $1 928 comes from

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: $1 860 of the $1 928. A commission-free account is not the same thing as a cheap account — at 1.55 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, $68 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.

These are not quoted prices. They are what one real account would have paid over a stated window at a stated volume - and volume moves the total more than any difference between brokers. 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 hourly breakdown, and why this account has none yet

FBS has no publishable hourly breakdown. The hourly table needs a continuous series from our own account for the whole window, and one that survived the feed audit. One of those two conditions is missing here. 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 hours that matter most are the ones nobody advertises. 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.

The rig behind FBS's numbers

The figures come from a single Standard · MT5 account at FBS — retail terms, public sign-up, nothing arranged on the phone. The terminal runs on a dedicated machine that stays awake around the clock. That sounds trivial and is not: the out-of-the-box power settings would have silently deleted the overnight window from every series.

Every quote is kept raw. Because a terminal stamps ticks with its own server's clock, the offset to UTC is derived from fresh ticks at each start — a hard-coded constant goes wrong twice a year, in a way that leaves every individual number looking correct. 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.

Order probes on this account did not produce a publishable sample. The reason is printed on the axis itself rather than hidden: an execution figure from a handful of orders is noise with a decimal point on it, and we would rather show nothing than that.

2026-08-27 to 2026-09-25, continuously, with coverage counted against calendar market hours rather than against the hours we happen to have seen.

Execution: an empty column, and the reason for it

No execution figure is published for FBS: account restricted 14.09 · sample too small. The gap is ours, and it is stated rather than papered over. The temptation is to reprint the broker's own claim about its execution quality and let the layout imply that we checked it — that is the most common dishonesty in broker comparison, and the axis says no data instead.

The measurement this section is waiting for: market orders at the smallest permitted volume, sent on a cadence through the session and tightened around scheduled releases, each recording what was requested, what was filled, the difference in pips, the round-trip latency and the broker's own status code. Slippage is signed from the trader's point of view, so a positive number is worse for you.

Until then the comparison rests on cost of ownership, which does not depend on order probes.

What FBS'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.

Eight axes, eight placings for FBS

FBS is in the better half of the table on 1 of the 6 axes it has figures for — last of 10 on annual cost; last of 10 on avg spread, 24 h; last of 10 on spread 21:00–24:00 utc. 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

Read the column of placings rather than any one row. Consistency across axes tells you what kind of account this is; a strong placing on one axis tells you almost nothing about the bill or the fills.

Questions about FBS

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.

• 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
• Check the source class on each number🔬 measured, 📊 third party, 📄 stated by the broker — and no ranking crosses those classes
• 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

If you find something wrong, tell us: desk@costcheckfxen.com. Corrections are published, and the bad rows stay in the store flagged — a tick cannot be collected twice, so deleting one destroys the evidence. A broker that disagrees with a number here is sent the query and the rows behind it; the editorial policy says how that works.