Differences between brokers and possible consequences.
In this post I’m looking at the differences I have observed between IC Markets (ICM) and Pepperstone (PS). I will also look at the impact this has on running the GRID bot.
IC Markets – Commission & Spread
https://www.icmarkets.com/global/en/trading-pricing/spreads
30 per million commission
Pepperstone – Commission & Spread
https://pepperstone.com/en-gb/trading/spreads-swaps-commissions/
35 per million commission
My observations are from running the same BOT (GRID BOT) on back test with the same parameter set on both demo and live accounts with both PS and ICM. The date window was 02/12/2020 to 04/02/2021.
The initial spread parameter was set to 0.4 (if the spread is above this value then no trades will be taken).
The parameters used were generated from an optimisation on a PS account.
Using a PS Europe Spread Betting account the back test did not run and no trades were taken. This was the same on both a demo and live account. I increased the Spread parameter to 1 for these accounts so that a similar number of trades were taken.
For simplicity and comparison purposes I used the same commission across all brokers. In reality you must back test with the correct commission set for your account.
The results of all my tests are below:
| Broker | Account Type | Commission | Spread | No. Trades | Net Profit |
| PS Europe | CFD – Live | 30 | 1 | 506 | 2225.09 |
| PS Europe | SB – Demo | 30 | 1 | 475 | 107.04 |
| PS Europe | SB – Live | 30 | 1 | 500 | 270.18 |
| PS Aus | CFD – Demo | 30 | 0.4 | 522 | 2868.65 |
| ICM Global | CFD – Demo | 30 | 0.4 | 551 | 1854.40 |
| ICM Global | CFD – Live | 30 | 0.4 | 548 | 1937.35 |
Conclusion
- If you are using a set of parameters then you need to be aware which broker and account type was used to generate this set.
- You must back test it on your own accounts to make sure that you achieve similar results.
- Optimisation results will vary between brokers and account types.
- Margin also varies between accounts from 1:30 to 1:500 and this will also impact your trading and back test results.
- A small change in the group profit parameter allowed us to achieve approx. the same result on both PS and ICM accounts.