Ten brokers later, my checklist is in a different order

I have opened accounts at around ten brokers over the years. Not because I was searching for a perfect one — mostly because something went wrong with the one I was using.

I still look at the same things I looked at in the beginning. What changed is the order.

What I used to check first

I scalp and trade intraday, so spread was the first thing I looked at. For that kind of trading it genuinely matters, and it is the easiest number to compare — every broker puts it on the front page.

The second thing was the minimum deposit, and how much I would have to add later. Some brokers set that bar high. When you are new, that is not a detail. You are being asked to put real money into a company you have never dealt with, before you know whether deposits and withdrawals work, whether support answers, whether the platform stays up. Most of that you can only learn by using it.

So for a beginner, those two questions are rational. They are about the money you can lose before you have learned anything. But they are the wrong two to put at the top, and it took me a long time to see why.

The day the platform froze

I had a position open when the platform stopped updating. I refreshed. I restarted it. When it came back, several candles were simply missing. It ran normally for a short while, then froze again.

I closed the trade and emailed the broker. The answer came a few days later: our server is fine, check your side, uninstall the platform and install it again.

By then I had already uninstalled and reinstalled it. I also had another broker's platform running at the same time on the same machine, on the same connection, and it was working normally throughout.

That exchange is why support moved to the top of my list. Not because a broker should never have problems — every broker will have problems. Because when something does go wrong while your money is in a position, a few days and a form letter is not a response. You find out how a broker handles that exactly once, and it is always at the worst possible moment.

Withdrawals belong in the same category. Small amounts usually move without trouble anywhere. Larger ones are where you learn what a company is actually like — I have seen withdrawals slow down or meet resistance in a way that deposits never did.

What news releases actually showed me

Slippage and spread widening are the main reason I became cautious around news. I have watched a stop on an open position get filled several times further away than where it was placed. Some brokers widen far more than others, and for a scalper or a day trader that difference is not cosmetic — it is the whole margin of the trade.

I do not think that means never trading news. It means I do not trust a new broker's behaviour there until I have seen it myself, with the smallest size I can use, watching what the fill actually does compared to what the chart showed. If the widening is small and consistent, that is something I can plan a stop around. If it is not, I know something about that broker that no spread table was going to tell me.

Demo and live

I do not think the two accounts differ much technically. The difference is in the trader.

Plenty of people trade a demo well and cannot repeat it live, and it is not because the prices are different. A demo trains your hands on the platform. It does not train the part of you that has to sit with a real loss. My own view is that demo is for learning where the buttons are, and that real experience starts on a live account with an amount small enough that losing it teaches you something instead of ending you.

The thing I was wrong about for years

When I was new, I was sure the market was reaching for my stop. It felt personal — price would run just far enough, take it, and turn around.

That feeling went away. My stop is one order of an unremarkable size in a market that does not know it exists. I do not think anyone talks a beginner out of that belief; you just stop holding it at some point, and the change is in you, not in the market.

A smaller worry than I expected

Server time and candle boundaries differ between brokers, and I expected that to cause trouble. It did not. I compared the broker's clock to my own once, wrote down the offset, and that was the end of it. Candle-to-candle differences between brokers have been small enough not to matter in my own trading.

The order I use now

1. How fast and how honestly support answers when something is wrong
2. Whether deposits and withdrawals are reliable, including larger ones
3. How far spreads widen under pressure, and how much slippage I actually get
4. Whether the platform stays up and whether fills match what the chart showed
5. Spread in normal conditions
6. Minimum deposit

The first four can cost you a trade, or an account. The last two only cost you a little on every trade. When I was starting, I had that backwards, and the reason is not complicated: the last two are printed on the website, and the first four are not.

This article is for information only. It is not trading advice.