i use LMAX too. They are very good in term of speed and major pair spread. I trade with my own ea on gold and so far i have no complain, although since they are the "real" deal compare to other shady one, the spread is kinda crazy during news and data time. The spread is 2 edge sword during news time.. you might earn extra or you might lose it more.

Yes their swap is quite high lol, but if your trade is swing type and profiting then it's not a big deal i guess. The longest trade i ever held is about one whole week and it was a big floating loss so i have no choice but wait till the correct timing to break even and close the trade, so yeah the swap fees added another burden at that time for me to solve.

So now i prefer to open and close the trade before swap time.. less preassure anyway. I have seen my friend's swap free account from other broker get burnt after holding multiple gold trades for weeks

And one the reason i switch to intraday trade is LMAX people told me if i want to get higher leverage, they will review my trade strategy before they approve for it and holding overnight trade is consider higher risk to them.

To me the swap is more like a additional spread, i trade with gold usually and LMAX gold swap long is -15.92 per lot so that is about 1.59 pips of spread to me regardless of the trade size. If you hold a loss trade for a week that is about 8 additional pip i need to gain to break even.

But then i dont hold trade overnight anymore so im cool with the swap

i was seeing some profit after NFP when gold price hit bottom but when the north korea missile rumor came out, i barely make it out without loss.. very bad decision making during panic mode..

Tommorow BOE interest rate decision who's gonna Long GBP? Reward ratio 1:5 i think...

Heh so the BOE increase the interest rate few hours ago but the Pound took a "pounding" lol. I waited till it was announced to enter the trade... bit late but still book some profit on EUR/GBP.