Tickmill

Tickmill, measured rather than reviewed: cost, spread by hour, execution

Raw · 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 Tickmill gets to $1 108 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 Raw · 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.

On this account the commission is the larger half of the bill: $720 of $1 108, or 65%. That is the thing a spread table cannot tell you. Tickmill quotes a raw spread of 0.28 pips, which looks almost free, and then charges per lot for the privilege. Whether that is cheaper than a wider spread with no commission depends entirely on how much you trade, which is why the profile is stated rather than assumed.

The swap line, $58 a year, is the one component that does not scale with how often you trade — it scales with how long positions stay open. A Flat overnight, you pay almost none of it; holding for weeks, you pay more than this profile implies.

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. 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 the Raw · MT5 account

Every hour of the day, as measured on this account: the mean of one-second samples falling in that hour across the whole window. The widest hour is 22:00 UTC at 1.65 pips, the tightest is 13:00 UTC at 0.05.

The rollover window, 21:00-24:00 UTC, averages 1.22 pips against 0.06 through the London and New York hours — about 18.9 times wider. That ratio, not the daily average, is what decides whether an overnight strategy is viable on this account, and it is the number a marketing page never carries.

Hourly mean of 1 s bid/ask samples · 27.08–25.09 · our own Raw · MT5 account · how the hours compare across brokers

What we ran, and for how long

What sits behind these figures is one retail Raw · MT5 account at Tickmill, obtained the way a reader would obtain one. 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.

Ticks land in the store unmodified, and the one transformation applied to them — the shift from broker-server time to UTC — is measured per session rather than assumed. 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 by sending orders not by reading a chart: 4 790 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 208 were timed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases. Positions were closed at once and the account reconciled afterwards so that what is measured is the fill and not an accidental trade.

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.

What Tickmill did with our orders

Spread is what a broker quotes. Execution is what you get and the two part company precisely when it matters. Out of 4 790 orders on this account 0.9% did not execute and the 208 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 1.4 pips on average — about $14 per standard lot every time one of those orders is placed.

We count as a reject only what the broker itself refused, by its own status code. Orders that simply never came back inside our waiting window are our problem, filed as no answer, and kept out of the broker's figure. 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. Only orders aimed at scheduled releases count towards it. Execution quality is invisible in calm markets — that is the whole reason brokers can advertise it freely. Outside those windows almost everything fills at the quote, which is why an evenly spaced sample says nothing.

Every probe opens and closes within seconds at minimum volume, so what is measured is the fill and not a position. 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 Tickmill's licence gives a client

The protections attached to Tickmill in this table are the ones that come with 278/15, held by Tickmill Europe Ltd. They are properties of that entity, and they are worth reading before any spread figure on this page.

Read together, those four lines describe a fairly specific deal. Your losses on a CFD account cannot exceed the money in it, because negative balance protection caps aggregate liability at the account balance. Positions are closed out when equity falls to half the required initial margin, which is a floor under how far a bad position can run before somebody intervenes. Leverage on major currency pairs is capped at 30:1 — the same broker group may legally offer several hundred to one through a different entity, and that is one of the clearest practical differences between the licences a single brand can hold. And if the firm itself fails owing you money, the compensation scheme pays up to €20,000, which is a ceiling worth knowing against the size of a deposit rather than after it.

None of that is a judgement about Tickmill. It is the floor the licence puts under any firm holding it, and the reason this site records the entity rather than the brand: the measurements above would be identical under a different entity, and the protections would not.

📄 stated by the regulator · read on 2026-10-11 · we quote the rule, not a summary of it, because a summary is where this kind of fact usually goes wrong

One caution about reading protection as cost. The regulated European entity is often not the cheapest venue a group operates: the same brand's offshore entity may quote tighter and lever higher. Our figure of $1 108 a year is for the entity above, on the account type above, and it is not transferable to a differently licensed arm of the same company.

Eight axes, eight placings for Tickmill

Tickmill is in the better half of the table on 8 of the 8 axes it has figures for — best of 10 on annual cost; best of 10 on avg spread, 24 h; best of 10 on spread 21:00–24:00 utc. Placings are computed within one source class only, on identical instrument and window, and deliberately left unaggregated. 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 this page should answer

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

We are paid by one of the brokers in these tables. That is a reason to check the work rather than to trust it, and these are the places where checking is cheapest.

• 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
• Compare us with anybody else measuring the same thinga figure that only exists on one site is a figure nobody has checked, ours included

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. Who may alter a published figure, and what happens when a broker disputes one, is written out in the editorial policy.