Brokers
Choosing a broker for automated trading
Advertised spread is the first thing every broker shows you and close to the last thing that decides your result. When a bot places hundreds of orders a month, the things that quietly matter are execution, stability and how easily you get your money back out.
Does the broker actually allow what your bot does?
Check the account terms for hedging, scalping and expert advisors before anything else. Some accounts prohibit holding opposite positions on the same symbol, which breaks a hedge recovery system outright. Others restrict orders held for less than a set number of seconds. A strategy that is against the terms will be profitable right up until the profits are voided.
Execution beats spread
A raw account showing 0.1 pips looks better than one showing 1.2 — until you add commission and measure how often you are filled away from the requested price. Run a bot on a small live balance for two weeks and compare the fills in the trade history against the entries the strategy asked for. That difference, not the marketing figure, is your real cost.
Two weeks of live data from a small account is worth more than any spread comparison table.
Server stability during news
The moment that reveals a broker is the first minute after a big US release. Requotes, a frozen terminal or a rejected stop-loss modification in that window will cost more in one day than a year of slightly wider spreads. Ask other traders how a broker behaved during the last few high-impact releases — not how it behaves on a quiet Tuesday.
Withdrawals
Test this early with a small amount. Speed and predictability of withdrawal tell you more about how a broker is run than any regulatory badge on the homepage. A firm that pays within a day, every time, has its operations in order.
The brokers we use
We keep accounts with Vantage, XS, XM and Exness, and we run the same bot on more than one so a single broker's outage never takes the whole book offline. These are partner links — opening through them costs you nothing and supports the free tools we publish.The boring checklist
- EAs, hedging and scalping explicitly permitted on your account type
- MT4 or MT5 offered natively, not through a bridge
- Swap rates you have actually read for the symbols you trade
- A server in the region your VPS is in
- Support reachable in your language, at the hours you trade
- One completed withdrawal before you scale the balance up
Nothing on that list is exciting. All of it shows up in the equity curve eventually.
Need help picking? We'll tell you honestly.
Message on WhatsApp