Regarding the Trade Leader program (which arguably is superior than going the TOS route indirectly for system developpers), the choice of forex brokers is very narrow right now.
Could Collective2 (re)consider FXCM and maybe a new addition: LMAX (one of the best FX venue) through AMP brokerage ?
LMAX would be valuable for investors / AutoTrading as well. As an exchange with no last look allowed for their liquidity providers, the trading executions are of excellent quality, without rejections and little slippage.
For now, Interactive Brokers is a bad choice for strategies with conservative leverage and risk control since they charge a minimum commission of $2 for every order whereas the regular fee should be actually $0.2 for one minilot. Consequently, it can be a very large handicap (up to close to 3.5 pips more per roundturn which is nasty!) to trade with IB with any quantities below 10 minilots at a time, both for developpers and also for followers… This poor context encourages to start strategies with a lot higher initial capital to balance the minimum commission effect, which is unlikely to attract as many investors and sad since forex is usually good to offer more scalability and lower investment opportunities.
FXCM and LMAX don’t have such minimum commissions and their interbank spreads are competitive and similar to those of IB.
Gain Capital is the least attractive of them all with dealing desk type trading conditions.
