The Foreign Exchange market is very big with high liquidity. There are plenty of Forex broker and this makes it so confusing especially for novice traders. Almost no Forex broker publishes any information that provide an impression of the broker’s size, costumers etc. Everybody claims they are “the largest broker” with “hundreds of thousands happy costumers”. This could be true but for most Forex broker it’s far away from the truth.
It makes sense to take a look at the Forex broker’s size although this is not the best criterion when it comes to determine the “best” Forex broker. But the size tells us that there are a lot of costumers with this broker and they seem to trust him. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in business with this broker.
A large Forex broker is also committed to the market and has more pressure to keep certain standards like licences and regulations. A new and small Forex broker could quit the business quick and nobody would really miss them. So the size of a Forex broker doesn’t make the broker serious but it’s a factor you have to consider when you want to choose a proper Forex broker that fits your needs.
How to measure a Forex brokers size?
The problem is to find out how large a broker really are when there are no public information available. We made some analysis that works with indirect measures. We focused on the Forex broker we list in our comprehensive Broker Reviews. We chose three factors that are indicators for the brokers size. When we add these factors together we found our “largest Forex broker”.
Google searches: The Google searches tell us how many people are looking for the exact brand name of a Forex broker. The more people are searching for the brand, the higher is the brand recognition. This is only an indicator of course. But there’s at least a correlation between Google hits and the brand recognition. What we’re looking for is how many people where searching for “eToro” and how many for “Instaforex”.
Google search results: When you type in something in the Google search engine it shows you how many results have been found. If you’re googeling for “eToro” it shows you about 5 million results. This means that Google found the term “etoro” on 5 million websites. Our thoughts are that a Forex broker is larger when it shows more results. Again, this is only an indicator.
Alexa rank: With the Alexa toolbar you can find out how the traffic of a site looks like. This is a nice tool but also not very reliable with low trafficked websites. It’s possible that one site shows an Alexa rank of 1 million and has twice as many visitors in reality than a website with an Alexa rank of 200,000. When it comes to high traffic websites Alexa is more accurate. So if Alexa shows 4000, it’s highly likely that the website has more traffic than a site with an Alexa rank of 10,000. This is the case with the largest Forex broker and that’s why Alexa is a pretty accurate way to determine the traffic of a Forex brokers website.
It’s true that not all indicators are absolutely reliable but we think that when we put these three indicators together we get a pretty good picture and can at least determine what Forex broker is larger than the other. So we have a solid ranking of the largest Forex broker:
| Ranking | Forex Broker | Google searches | Search results | Alexa Rank | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  | 1 | 1 | 1 | www.etoro.com |
| 2. |  | 4 | 2 | 2 | www.instaforex.com |
| 3. |  | 3 | 6 | 3 | www.avafx.com |
| 3. |  | 2 | 5 | 5 | www.easymarkets.com |
| 5. |  | 5 | 4 | 4 | www.forexyard.com |
| 6. |  | 6 | 3 | 6 | www.fx4you.com |
| 7. |  | 7 | 7 | 7 | www.finexo.com |
| 8. |  | 8 | 8 | 8 | tradeviewforex.com |
