What is ECN?

ECN stands for Electronics Communication Network.

The same environment is also referred as STP in another way though, both words refer to the similar conditions of trading environment.

With the ECN environment, your trade will be directly sent to the actual exchange market with no interference and no price manipulations.

Just like a STP(Straight Through Environment), in this case the broker does not cover(hedge) your trades.

Being an ECN broker also means that it is not an OTC(over the counter) broker.

Titan FX Official Website

What is the merit of ECN?

The first merit is, if you are trading in an ECN environment, your trades are actually sent to the exchange market.

Which means that your trade is one factor which affects the exchange prices.

So it is not like a trading with OTC broker, where you are just exchanging prices with the broker.

The second merit is, that there is no conflict of interest between traders and brokers in ECN environment.

This is because the broker is just acting as a middleman for traders and the markets, and the broker does not interfere any trades of its clients.

No conflict of interest means that there is also no restrictions on its trading platform neither profit cancellation afterwards.

So generally speaking, if you are not looking to trade in certain unauthorized way with a broker, you may not need to choose ECN brokers necessarily.

What is raw spread?

Raw spread is the spread provided by the liquidity providers without markup spread by the brokers.

So each STP/ECN brokers have got their liquidity providers(banks) which offer the broker with the access to the exchange markets.

When these brokers get the access to the exchange markets, there is already a markup spread by these liquidity providers.

And before the broker provides its traders with the access to the exchange market, these brokers also add markups on the spread as their commissions.

So normally the spread you are looking at is probably the spread which is added markups twice by the liquidity providers and the brokers.

But TitanFX is willing to offer the raw spread which the broker hasn’t added any markups on it.

Instead, TitanFX charges you 7 dollars per 1 standard lot as their commissions.

But still you are able to trade with the raw spread and can benefit from it.

Titan FX Official Website

What is the merit of the raw spread?

Well the merit of trading with raw spread is  that it is a preferable situation for traders who mainly trade scalping.

There is an additional commissions charged so you need to be aware of the cost at all times though, still the trading costs are quite low.

TitanFX Blade account

TitanFX offers two different account types and through the “Blade ECN Account”, you can trade with the raw spread with the account.

The raw spread starts from 0.1 pips, and commission is 7 dollars per 1 standard lot.

So the actual trading costs including all commissions would be 0.8 pips.