FXTM

What a year on FXTM actually costs, measured on our own account

Advantage · 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

How FXTM gets to $1 452 a year

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 Advantage · 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.

The spread is the larger part of this bill — $660 of $1 452, 45% — with $720 of commission on top. Both are paid on every lot, so both scale linearly with volume: double the volume and the first two lines double while the swap line stays roughly where it is.

The swap line, $72 a year, is the one component that does not scale with how often you trade — it scales with how long positions stay open. A It is a cost of holding rather than of trading, and our profile sits between the two extremes.

The table is an invoice reconstructed from measurements, not a price list. Change the volume and every per-lot line moves with it. At a tenth of this activity the commission line shrinks to a tenth while the swap line barely moves, and the ranking between brokers can invert.

Spread by hour on this account

FXTM 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. 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 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.

How this account was measured

What sits behind these figures is one retail Advantage · MT5 account at FXTM, obtained the way a reader would obtain one. The broker's own platform runs on a machine that does not sleep, does not hibernate and does not throttle on battery; all three defaults had to be turned off explicitly, because each would have cut exactly the overnight hours this site exists to measure.

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. A tick that is not seconds old after the offset is subtracted is not stored at all, which is the guard that closed the hole through which a frozen Friday quote once arrived stamped as Saturday.

Fills are measured not inferred: orders go through this account on a schedule: 4 768 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 204 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.

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: fills, rejects and the seconds that matter

A quote is an invitation; a fill is the transaction. The gap between them opens exactly when the market is moving. Out of 4 768 orders on this account 1.6% did not execute and the 204 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 2.1 pips on average — about $21 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. Keeping them apart is what makes the figure comparable between brokers at all.

Slippage is the difference between the price asked for and the price filled, signed from the trader's side: positive means worse for you. It is measured only on release-timed orders because that is where the number has meaning. A grid of probes spread evenly through a quiet afternoon reports that every broker on earth is identical. The whole of execution quality lives in the few minutes a day when liquidity thins and everybody has orders arriving at once.

Probes are minimum size and closed at once — the measurement is not supposed to take a market view, and an open position would contaminate the next reading. Fills and quotes do not always arrive in the same units on the same connection; a probe that disagrees with its own quote stream is flagged suspect instead of becoming a slippage figure.

What FXTM'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.

Its place in the table, measured rather than scored

FXTM is in the better half of the table on 1 of the 8 axes it has figures for — last of 10 on swap per year; last of 9 on withdrawal fee. Placings are computed within one source class only, on identical instrument and window, and deliberately left unaggregated. No overall score is computed, because an average is the easiest place to bury a loss.

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 this page should answer

Each answer is derived from the figures on this page. None of them is a general statement about brokers.

Auditing this page

The incentive on this site runs one way, and the only honest response to that is to make the figures easy to attack. Start here.

• 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. We publish the correction and keep the wrong rows, flagged and excluded, because a record of our own faults is worth more than a clean-looking database. Who may alter a published figure, and what happens when a broker disputes one, is written out in the editorial policy.