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Trading costs are quoted in two incompatible units. A commission-free account hides its cost in a wider spread, measured in pips. A raw-spread account shows a near-zero spread and charges a commission, measured in dollars — and half the industry quotes that commission per side while the other half quotes it round turn, a factor-of-two difference sitting unannounced in the small print.

Convert everything to one number — dollars to open and close 1.0 standard lot of EUR/USD — and the picture resolves. On the published figures, the lowest all-in cost among the venues we could verify is the IUX Raw account at $7.00 per round turn.

Three tricks make broker cost tables untrustworthy, and all three are technically true statements.

• Quoting a minimum as if it were typical.A spread of “from 0.0 pips” describes the best tick of the quietest hour. It says nothing about the spread you will actually pay. An average, measured over a stated window, is the only figure that means anything — and it is the figure most venues avoid publishing.
• Comparing across account types.Setting a raw-spread account’s 0.0 pips against a rival’s commission-free 1.1 pips hides the commission entirely. Like must be compared with like, or converted to a common unit first.
• Leaving commission ambiguous.“$7 per lot” means $7 round turn at some venues and $14 at others. Every commission on this page is stated round turn, and the per-side figure is shown alongside it.

Plotting commission against spread separates the two components of cost and makes the trade-off visible. Each dashed line joins every account that costs the same to trade once both components are combined: a venue sitting on a lower line is cheaper, whatever mix of spread and commission it uses to get there.

Two shapes of account appear. Along the left edge sit the commission-free accounts, paying entirely in spread. Along the bottom sit the raw-spread accounts, paying almost entirely in commission. The IUX Raw account sits at the corner — effectively no spread, and the same $7.00 round-turn commission its closest rivals charge.

The frontier collapsed to a single ranking: what it costs, in dollars, to open and close one standard lot of EUR/USD.

The three raw-spread accounts charge an identical $7.00 round-turn commission. The difference between them is entirely spread, and it is worth $1.00 per round turn against the cheapest competitor. For a trader doing fifty round turns a month, that is roughly $600 a year on identical trades — and against the dearest account here, $2,400.

Stripping commission out shows the raw pricing each venue receives and passes on. This is the component a broker actually controls through its liquidity relationships.

Two venues in this comparison never publish an average. Exness quotes “from” a spread on every tier; XM quotes “spreads as low as”. Those are floors — the best tick of the quietest hour — and putting a floor on the same axis as an average would flatter them at everyone else’s expense.

So here is the one quantity all five venues do publish: the best case. Every venue’s own minimum spread, converted to dollars per round turn and added to its commission. This chart flatters everyone equally, which is exactly why the average chart above is the one that decides the page.

Gold is where spread differences are widest and where cost comparisons are most often dodged. Only two of the five venues publish a gold figure at all on their public pages.

A dollar per round turn sounds like nothing. Multiply it by your actual trading frequency and it stops sounding like nothing.

Cost is not the only term that matters. Deposit minimums, leverage, and the level at which a venue closes your position all change the shape of the account.

One row deserves attention: the stop-out level. A 20% stop-out means a position survives until margin falls to a fifth of requirement; a 50% stop-out closes it at half. On the same account balance and the same trade, the lower figure gives a position materially more room before it is closed against you.

Every venue in this comparison publishes its own execution figures. IUX states an average of approximately 30 milliseconds and does not guarantee execution speed. Pepperstone states that most orders execute in under about 30 milliseconds. IC Markets states an average under 40 milliseconds. XM states that it does not re-quote or reject orders.

Not one of these claims — ours included — has been verified by an independent third party. None of the five venues publishes fill rates, slippage distributions, rejection rates, or the measurement methodology behind its headline number — not what was measured, not from where, not over what period, not at which percentile. There is no way for a trader to check any of it, and a comparison page that ranked these claims against each other would be ranking marketing copy.

So this page does not rank them. It reports each claim, attributes it, and states plainly that the evidence does not exist. When a venue in this market publishes an audited execution report — the kind of latency distribution and slippage-symmetry data institutional desks expect — that will be worth comparing. Until then, cost is the part of this market that can actually be verified, which is why this page is built on it.

A comparison is only honest if it declares its holes. These are ours.

• Exness and XM publish no average.Both quote only a floor — “from 0.2 pips”, “spreads as low as 1.6”. We read their published terms in full and they appear throughout this page, but they cannot be placed on an average-spread axis without misrepresenting them, so they are compared separately on the minimum that all five venues do publish.
• Exness gold. Exness publishes no per-instrument gold spread on its account pages, so its gold cell is empty rather than estimated.
• IC Markets’ spread table. IC Markets publishes a live spread table whose major-currency rows are internally inconsistent — the Standard account's stated minimum sits above its stated average, which cannot both be true. Rather than guess which column is which, this page uses the figure IC Markets states in its own prose on the same page: an average EUR/USD spread of 0.1 pips. Its metals rows are self-consistent and are used as published.
• Stop-out and margin-call levels. Pepperstone and XM do not publish these on the pages reviewed, and IC Markets publishes a stop-out but not a margin-call level. Blank cells reflect that.
• Regional variation. Every venue here operates several legal entities with different leverage caps and different protections. Each column names the entity its figures belong to. Your own terms depend on where you are.