Trading costs matter, particularly if you trade intraday timeframes and scalp. In particular, scalpers and high frequency traders (HFT’s) need to make sure trade entry costs such as the spread and commission are competitive, or it will erode away profits and negatively skew their reward to risk ratio’s.

For example, a scalper who risks 5 pips on EUR/USD and aims to ‘scalp’ 5 pips profit wouldn’t want to be paying a 2-pip spread. Therefore, the Pro account where spreads start at 0.0 pips and charge $7 per lot commission (equivalent to 0.7 pips) would make a more sensible choice.

That said the negative impact of the spread reduces significantly to traders of much higher timeframes, therefore a standard account with our tight spreads should be sufficient to the trader.