A week after the forex world turned upside down due to the Swiss National Bank removing its peg on the EUR/CHF exchange rate, the market braced itself for more volatility as the ECB was set to meet last Thursday. Prior to the meeting, nearly every major broker either temporarily increased margins or warned their clients about pending activity. The anxiety prior to the event ultimately was with merit as the EURUSD sank to eleven year lows, with prices dropping below 1.1200 on Friday from a previous level of above 1.1600 on Thursday.

But how were trading spreads during the meeting for the EURUSD from forex brokers?

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Using data provided to Forex Magnates from a new trading community called TradeProofer, we get a glimpse of how broker spreads reacted to the move. The data comes from TradeProofer users who connect the spreads and execution of their MetaTrader 4 accounts to the community for analysis. Using the data, TradeProofer provides crowdsourced broker spread and execution analysis which members can use to determine the execution quality of the broker.

In this first image, we get to see spreads move in real time right before and after the ECB released its prepared stated at 12:45 GMT. The x-axis are EURUSD spreads and the y-axis is the amount of brokers quoting each spread point.

In this image, we get average spreads during the 12:40-12:49 period from brokers being tracked by the TradeProofer community network. (click to enlarge)