TradingClubsMan

As you know, I run a small YouTube channel about trading where I try to share insights from the trading industry.

Recently, I started receiving many messages from subscribers asking the same question:

Which Forex broker has the lowest spread for trading gold?

Instead of giving a simple opinion, I decided to run a large comparison between 20 popular Forex brokers.

I opened real accounts with each broker. Of course, I could have taken the easy route and simply compared spreads shown at a specific moment in Market Watch — but I decided to do something more meaningful.

How We Recorded and Analyzed Broker Spreads

To make the comparison as objective as possible, we created a custom indicator called Real Spread Monitor, designed to record and analyze real trading spreads directly from the platform.

Every tick (each price change) the indicator records the current spread value. To avoid generating extremely large datasets, the data is aggregated into 1-minute spread candles.

Each candle contains three key values:

• Minimum spread observed during the minute
• Maximum spread observed during the minute
• Average spread calculated from all spread readings

Instead of storing raw tick data, this approach creates a structured dataset of 1-minute spread candles, significantly reducing data size while preserving essential information about spread behavior.

The indicator visualizes spreads as a histogram:

🟢 Green bars — minimum spreads
🟡 Yellow bars — average spreads
🔴 Red bars — maximum spreads

It also calculates moving averages for each metric.

For broker comparison, our main focus was the overall average spread during the entire recording period, since roughly 60–70% of trades are executed around the average spread under normal market conditions.

The results were very interesting.

In several cases, the actual average spreads differed significantly from what some brokers display in Market Watch.

This analysis helps to:

• Identify periods of spread expansion
• Evaluate spread stability (and potentially liquidity providers)
• Better understand real trading conditions

Please check the attached screenshots — the dataset revealed some very interesting insights.

Questions to the community:

• Which brokers should we include in future comparisons?
• Which instruments should we analyze next?
• What additional metrics would you like to see added to this indicator?

#forex #trading #goldtrading #forexbroker #spread #xauusd #fintech #tradingtools