Broker selection

What really amazes me is that most of the people think that everything depends from the Broker... And that 90% of the brokers are there to fool them... Well, brokers are there to make money - that's obvious, but don't need to steal it... There are three kind of brokers:

• MM (Market Makers, basically they are adding they commission into the spread) 
• STP NDD (Straight through processing, without dealing desk)
• ECN (well I haven't seen a true, retail ECN broker for small accounts... With an ECN broker, after placing an order, it should appear in the market depth breakdown... Does it happen? I haven't seen it so far...). 

Everyone moans around Market Makers. People say that Market Makers b-book trades (explanation: a-book trades are the trades executed on the inter-bank market, while b-book trades are trades that broker doesn't pass to inter-bank, but matches with other orders and positions he has). Of course they do, but if someone wants to sell and someone else wants to buy, why they should put this kind of order on the inter-bank? You think they do not have enough orders to do it? Well, look here: http://www.myfxbook.com/forex-broker-volume - some brokers have on average over 80 lots per minute on EURUSD and this only includes accounts monitored by MyFxBook. They must have hundreds if not thousands of lots traded per minute... You still think they are not able to much the orders on their side? Of course, how much trades is a-booked and b-booked... Nobody knows... 

Secondly, people often claim, that the charts are different at MM brokers... Yes, they are, but this what I love in those brokers. The charts have less peaks, are more smooth, there is also less ticks usually.. I especially prefer 4 digit brokers. Those are perfect condition for SOME automated trading systems. 

Thirdly, MM brokers often have fixed spread, on average the spread is worst than at an STP NDD broker. But fixed, means fixes, also during nights. Find me an STP NDD broker with 1pip spread on EURUSD through the entire night (+ commission)...!

In regard to the STP NDD brokers, the largest advantage of a STP NDD are tight stop / take profit levels (often 0 pips) as well as much faster execution times (very often close to 200ms per order, which for a retail broker is a top notch result). 

Trading style

Currently I mostly use automated strategies. I stared from Metastock software (I know most of you don't even know what it is...) and created first systems based on some simple technical indicators in 2004 and 2005. Right now I am focusing almost exclusively on MetaTrader 4. It's not a perfect platform, especially the strategy tester, however the best one available for the retail market in my opinion. The things I am missing in particular are:

• more classical approach to strategy testing & optimization: two data sets: training and probe one. Testing parameters selected during optimization on training set should be then verified on the probe one. I am not even mentioning Walk Forward Analysis...
• simple way to support tick data backtesting, without it, it's almost impossible to test any kind of HFT scalpers.. The only way is forward testing.
• concurrent backtests on several currencies / timeframes.

Biggest pros? Ability to link external dll's.