Brokers Offering Raw Spread Accounts

The two pricing models, stated plainly

An all-in account takes the price it receives from its liquidity providers and widens it before showing it to you. The markup is the revenue, and no fee appears on the statement.

A raw-spread account passes the price through with little or no markup and charges a commission per lot instead. Seven dollars per round-turn standard lot is the common retail figure; some brokers quote it as $3.50 per side, which is the same number.

The broker earns comparably either way. What changes is where the cost sits and how it scales.

When raw is genuinely cheaper

Convert both to one unit. On a standard lot of a dollar-quoted major, one pip is $10, so a $7 round-turn commission is 0.7 pips. Add a 0.2 pip raw spread and the total is 0.9 pips — against perhaps 1.2 pips on the all-in account. Raw wins by 0.3 pips, or $3 per lot.

That advantage holds on liquid instruments in liquid hours, where raw spreads sit near zero and the all-in markup is set wide enough to survive the worst part of the day. It narrows or disappears on thin instruments, where a 25-pip raw spread makes the fixed commission a rounding error, and during volatile windows when raw spreads widen and the commission does not.

What else changes on the tier

• Minimum deposit is usually higher, because the broker earns a fixed amount per lot and needs volume to justify the tier.
• Minimum position size may be larger, which matters more than the deposit for a small account — it sets the smallest risk you can take.
• Platform and instrument access can differ, in either direction.
• Client protection does not change. Segregation, compensation and negative balance protection follow the legal entity and your client classification, never the tier.

How to check the claim

Advertised spreads are the best moment on the most liquid instrument, not the average. Four steps settle whether a raw account is actually cheaper for you.

• Take your last hundred closed trades and group them by instrument and hour.
• Record the spread you were actually filled at, not the marketing figure.
• Add the commission, converted to pips at that instrument's pip value.
• Repeat with the all-in tier's published spread for the same instrument and hour, and compare totals.

Most traders find the gap is a fraction of a pip per trade, and that it is smaller than the cost of the entries they did not need to take.

The vocabulary problem

Raw, Zero, ECN, Pro and Prime are marketing labels with no industry definitions. Two brokers using the same word may mean different things, and the name tells you nothing about execution — a commission account can be internalised exactly as a standard account is. What the pricing model describes is how the broker bills, not where the order goes.

Execution policy is stated in the client agreement. Read it separately from the pricing table.

Costs the tier does not touch

Overnight financing, currency conversion on settlements, and deposit or withdrawal charges are unaffected by the pricing model. For a position trader holding for weeks, financing dwarfs the entry cost and the tier choice is close to irrelevant. For a scalper closing within minutes, the entry cost is nearly the whole bill. Establish which you are before spending time on the comparison.