I joined a Tokyo bank's spot FX desk in 2008, four months before Lehman, which is one of those start dates that teaches you very quickly that the platform under your hands is not a feature list. It is a piece of survival kit. The week the SNB removed the Swiss-franc peg in 2015 — by then I was in London — I watched two well-known retail brokers fail to fill stops for forty minutes. The execution-quality conversation never sounded the same to me after that.

I spent fourteen years between Tokyo (Mizuho, then a smaller prop shop) and London (a tier-one bank's G10 desk, then a quant FX house). I have been independent since 2022, primarily writing and consulting on broker selection and FX market microstructure for asset managers and family offices.

I joined Trader Alternatives because retail-side coverage of FX brokers is, almost without exception, scored on margin and spreads. Spreads are the cheapest thing to advertise. What the marketing pages never tell you is what the broker does in a fast market.

FX brokers, FX-native charting (MetaTrader 4 and 5, cTrader, NinjaTrader, the new generation of browser-first contenders), data-feed reliability, slippage testing, and anything to do with how a platform handles the moments where retail products historically break — gaps, news releases, low-liquidity sessions.

Off the beat: signals services, copy-trading platforms, "EA marketplaces," and any platform whose primary selling point is a leaderboard.