Image © Adobe Images
Zero spreads are becoming part of the standard competitive toolkit in the modern CFD industry.
A zero spread used to sound exceptional. In the modern CFD industry, it is increasingly becoming part of the standard competitive toolkit.
BestBrokers.com's spread monitoring provides an unusually clear example. Its proprietary live-spread report notes that Fusion Markets frequently produces weekday forex quotes in which the bid and ask are identical. By contrast, some zero readings at FxPro cluster around weekends, when markets are closed. BestBrokers therefore provides a weekday-only filter so that genuine live-market zero spreads can be separated from closed-market observations.
A broker quoting 0.0 pips during active trading is effectively removing the bid-ask spread at that instant. Yet this does not mean the trade itself is free.
Fusion Markets' Zero account, for example, charges $2.25 per $100,000 of notional volume per side. In BestBrokers' live cTrader testing, its average EUR/USD spread was just 0.03 pips.
Pepperstone averaged 0.10 pips on EUR/USD through its Razor account but charged commissions as well. IC Markets averaged 0.06 pips on its cTrader Raw Spread account with a $6 round-turn commission per $100,000 traded.
The model is therefore straightforward: the broker sacrifices much or all of the visible spread and shifts revenue toward a transparent transaction commission.
For sophisticated traders, this can be attractive because the two components are easier to distinguish. The raw market spread reflects underlying liquidity conditions, while the commission represents the broker's explicit charge.
For brokerages, however, it changes the competitive environment. When several rivals can advertise spreads beginning at 0.0 pips, simply reaching zero no longer differentiates the product. The competition shifts toward how often zero spreads occur, average spreads over time, commissions, execution speed and slippage.
That is one reason BestBrokers.com created its Aggregated Live Spreads Across Trading Brokers tracker rather than comparing only advertised minimums. The tracker takes observations roughly every five minutes between 1 April and 30 September 2026 and calculates average, minimum and maximum spreads.
The business implication is significant. Price competition is making the visible spread increasingly similar to the headline interest rate in other financial products: essential for marketing, but insufficient for calculating the full economic cost.
A zero-spread quote can attract the customer, but commissions, execution quality and consistency determine whether the account is actually competitive.
The next stage of the spread war may therefore not be about who can reach zero. It will be about who can remain closest to zero for the greatest proportion of the trading day while maintaining a viable brokerage business.
