FX Intelligence (formerly FXIntel), a recently launched site (still in Beta), provides a very interesting tool that allows traders (and brokers) to compare live spreads from various brokers.
The Live tool allows you to monitor broker performance by tracking down their rates for various currency pairs over a time span of a few hours and up to one day. The most useful and immediately attractive tool is the table which compares 16 currency pairs and 14 brokers who provide their quotes. The tightest spreads are highlighted in green and they immediately let you see who the brokers with the best rates are. The more green ‘cells’ the broker has the better its spreads are across several instruments.
For those interested in more in-depth analysis FX Intelligence provides several visual charts which display top 5 brokers for a given currency pair and top 5 brokers in the past 12 or 24 hours. Each currency pair has its leader but the top 3 brokers with the most ‘green’ cells at the time I reviewed the site were FXOpen MT4 ECN (I wrote about the platform here), ATC Brokers (an introducing broker) and UMGFX (which was ordered to withdraw from its NFA membership back in 2007) .
This is an important tool that finally takes the broker review sites to the next level: instead of reading biased and non-biased reviews traders are able to track broker performance real time. Hopefully the platform is connected to live accounts and not demo ones otherwise the tool won’t be 100% accurate as some brokers tend to display different spreads at their demo and live accounts.
Kudos to FXIntel for pulling together this list of brokers. Integral in a related move publishes real-time tick-by-tick market data on http://www.TrueFX.com. We are not a broker but a neutral technology vendor. It makes for an interesting comparison!