Retail broker FXCM released a set of trade execution data this Thursday, which included slippage times, execution speeds and average spreads for several currency pairs and financial instruments.

Slippage, as most of our readers will know, is the difference between the quoted price a trader sees and the price at which an order is executed by the broker. For traders, less slippage is more likely to lead to better trading results.

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In the case of FXCM, 61.2 percent of client orders in December were made without any slippage. Another 27.3 percent of orders were made with positive slippage, meaning the price a client received was actually superior to the one they were quoted.

In terms of execution speed, things were better than they were back in September when FXCM reported an average execution time of 25 milliseconds. That’s because last month that figure was 17 milliseconds for the retail broker.

Cutting spreads

Turning to spreads, FXCM managed to tighten spreads in a couple of instruments when compared to those that the broker achieved in September.

For example, the average effective spread for BTC/USD traders in December was 30.3 pips. Looking back at September’s results, the firm reported an average effective spread of 43.9 pips.

“2018 was another eventful year in the FX and CFD markets and I’m sure 2019 will be no different,” said FXCM CEO Brendan Callan. “Here at FXCM we launched our HTML 5 web platform, expanded our Algo trading offering and focused a great deal on execution quality and bringing down our spreads to be extremely competitive. In 2019 we are looking to take some big steps forward in improving the overall customer experience as we truly take your feedback and request into account.”