In 2011, opening a raw-spread account from an apartment in Shibuya or a serviced office in Tanjong Pagar meant a wire transfer to a Cyprus IBAN, a scanned utility bill faxed to a support desk in Limassol, and a spread quoted in tenths of a pip that nobody outside of institutional prime brokerage had ever seen retail. FXTM had been trading for three months. Exness was three years old, still routing through a single liquidity pool. FBS was two years old. Fifteen years later, the question of which broker offers a raw-spread account in July 2026 has an answer — five of them, actually, in the grounded data on this desk — but the useful question is which one fits which trader. That is what the next three scenarios are for.

Nobody who has traded seriously through more than one cycle believes the answer to "which raw-spread account" is a single broker name. The answer is a function — of session, of style, of capital base, of whether the trader intends to hold overnight through Tokyo close into London open, of whether the account is denominated in a currency the broker actually books natively. Three composite illustrations, drawn to make the math legible. None of them are real people. All of them are the kind of trader this desk has seen described in industry surveys and public forum threads across the Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong sessions.

Scenario 1: The Tokyo Salaryman Running a 200-Trade Month on Exness Pro

Picture a mid-thirties systems engineer at a mid-sized Marunouchi firm. Married. One child. Trades from 22:00 to 01:00 JST most weeknights — which is to say, he trades London open and the New York overlap, the two liquidity windows an APAC-based scalper actually wants. His capital is roughly USD 15,000, funded originally in yen through a wire transfer he still remembers taking eleven days to clear back in 2019. He turns over about 200 EUR/USD trades a month, average holding time nine minutes, average size 0.3 standard lots.

The claim on the grounded sheet is that Exness Pro quotes EUR/USD at 0.1 pip average spread. Take that at face value. For a 0.3-lot round-trip on EUR/USD, one pip is worth $3. A 0.1-pip spread is a $0.30 transaction cost on the bid-ask alone. Multiply by 200 trades: $60 in spread cost for the month. Add whatever commission the raw-spread tier carries — grounded sheet does not specify commission for Exness Pro, so we hold that as an unresolved cost. Even doubling the number to account for a plausible $3-per-side commission gets you to roughly $360 in monthly friction on a $15k account. That is 2.4% of capital per month burned before P&L.

The relevant contrast is what the same 200-trade month costs on the Exness standard tier at 1.0 pip average. Same 0.3 lots: $3 per trade in spread, $600 in monthly spread cost. The raw-spread account, even with commission plausibility, saves this trader roughly $240 a month. Over twelve months, at his sizing, that is nearly a quarter of his account.

Which is why, for this hypothetical, Exness Pro is the correct answer. The 1:2000 max leverage matters less to him than the fill quality and the fact that his instant-withdrawal claim on the grounded sheet actually means he can move yen back to his home Japanese bank in a business day. The regulatory posture — FCA and CySEC tier-one exposure — is what lets him sleep on nights when the news cycle turns on some rumored FSA statement about offshore retail brokers.

The trap he needs to watch: 200 trades a month is on the low end of "actually needs raw spread". A scalper turning 800 trades a month sees the arithmetic multiply. A swing trader taking 20 trades a month is paying commission on account tier for a saving he never captures. The Tokyo salaryman is at the exact threshold where the tier switch pays for itself and not before.

The Nikkei closes at 15:00 JST. Nothing on his screen matters until 21:00. This is a small detail, but it structures his entire operating rhythm around the tier decision.

Scenario 2: The Singapore Doctor With $10k and Weekend-Only Screen Time on IC-Style FBS Zero

Imagine a general practitioner in her early forties working out of a private clinic in Novena. Six-figure SGD income. Deposits $10,000 as a first tranche of what she intends to grow into a longer-term book, roughly 20 to 30 trades a month, most of them opened Saturday morning her time — which, for the FX market, means Friday afternoon New York close, so she is actually holding positions across the weekend gap into Sunday evening's Sydney open. Her instruments of interest are USD/JPY and AUD/USD. Her time on screen is measured in hours per week, not per day.

FBS on the grounded sheet has a minimum deposit of $1 and a maximum leverage of 1:3000. She does not need either of those numbers, but the third figure — the 0.0 pip spread on the raw-tier equivalent, the FBS Zero-style pricing — is what pulled her into the comparison. On paper, zero-pip spread on USD/JPY is close to institutional pricing. In practice, the grounded sheet does not specify a commission structure for the FBS Zero-equivalent tier, and this is where the hypothetical trader has to do her own arithmetic before funding.

For 25 monthly trades at 0.5 lots on USD/JPY — call it $5 per pip — a zero-pip spread with a hypothetical $6-per-side commission means $12 round-trip in commission alone. That is $300 a month in pure execution friction on a $10,000 account. Three percent monthly, before P&L. Now compare against the FBS standard tier at 0.7 pip average: $3.50 in spread per trade, $87.50 for the month on the same volume. The raw-spread tier costs her more.

The lesson is one this desk has watched play out repeatedly in industry survey data. Raw spread does not equal low cost. It equals unbundled cost. The spread portion goes to zero; the commission portion appears. For a low-frequency swing trader, the bundled standard-tier spread is often cheaper than the unbundled raw + commission structure, because commissions are typically flat per lot while spreads are proportional. Below a certain trade frequency threshold — this desk's read of the arithmetic puts it somewhere around 50 trades a month — the standard account wins.

The regulatory piece matters for her too, and here it cuts differently than for the Tokyo scenario. FBS on the grounded sheet has ASIC, CySEC and FSCA regulation — the tier-one exposure is ASIC alone. For a Singapore resident, MAS is not directly regulating any of these offshore brokers, and she is trading under her own personal-account exposure. The doctor she is composited from would care about that. Her weekly hours on screen are not the constraint; her comfort with the counterparty framework is. FBS's Islamic-account availability is not relevant to her, but the ASIC exposure is what she would check first.

The realistic answer for this composite: she does not need a raw-spread account. She needs a standard tier with a reputable broker and a payment rail that lets her fund from a Singapore bank without three intermediary banks skimming SWIFT fees. If she insists on the raw tier for the psychological satisfaction of seeing 0.0 quoted on her ladder — and this is a real behavior pattern, not a hypothetical one — she should model her commission cost against her actual trade count before funding, not after.

The MAS wholesale market framework dates to 2008. The retail-facing enforcement posture has not materially changed since. She trades under that shadow either way.

Scenario 3: The Hong Kong Options-Curious Engineer Wanting AvaTrade Alongside a Raw-Spread Sleeve

Picture a hardware engineer at a chip design firm in Cyberport. Late twenties. Aggressive but methodical. Roughly USD 25,000 to allocate, of which he intends to run maybe $15,000 in a systematic directional book and $10,000 in an options overlay — he read about AvaOptions, wants to test cost-of-hedge on his FX positions, and is looking at whether he can hold a raw-spread account at one broker for the directional side and AvaTrade for the options sleeve.

The grounded sheet gives AvaTrade a 0.9 pip average on EUR/USD, an AvaOptions platform, and — this is the operative constraint — an explicit "scalping prohibited" weakness. It also carries a maximum leverage of 1:400, which is a fifth of what Exness or FXTM offer and one-seventh what FBS offers. The tier-one regulator on the AvaTrade sheet is ASIC.

For him, the two accounts serve different functions and the raw-spread question is only about the directional sleeve. AvaTrade is not the raw-spread choice — 0.9 pip spread is a standard-tier number, and the scalping prohibition would end the discussion anyway. But the desk cannot fault the reasoning that says: put the options playbook where the platform is native, and put the spot exposure where the execution cost is lowest.

The candidates for the raw-spread sleeve, from the grounded set, are Exness Pro (0.1 pip), FXTM Pro (0.1 pip), HF Markets Pro (0.0 pip), and FBS Zero (0.0 pip). His holding period is longer than the Tokyo scalper's — say 40 to 60 trades a month, average holding time three hours, sizing 0.5 to 1.0 lots depending on conviction. At the mid-point — 50 trades of 0.7 average lots, EUR/USD at $7 per pip — the raw-spread execution cost differential between 0.1 pip and 0.0 pip is roughly $3.50 per trade or $175 per month. Small money in absolute terms, but the interesting variable is not the pip. It is the withdrawal speed.

Exness on the grounded sheet has instant withdrawals. HF Markets has one-day. FXTM has one-to-three days. For a trader who is actively rebalancing between a directional sleeve at one broker and an options sleeve at another, withdrawal cycle time is a real cost — it is capital sitting in transit not deployed. Over a year, at the frequency this composite implies, the instant-withdrawal broker saves him more time-value than the 0.1-pip spread difference costs him.

The HKMA linked exchange rate has held since 1983. Nothing in the current cycle threatens it operationally. But a Hong Kong-based trader booking accounts offshore in USD is not exposed to the HKD peg — his risks are broker-side and payment-rail-side, and the concentration of both on the Cyprus / Mauritius / Seychelles offshore-license perimeter is the real supervision gap. He should size accordingly. Neither of his two accounts should exceed roughly a third of his liquid trading capital at any point.

The realistic answer for him: AvaTrade for the options sleeve, Exness Pro for the raw-spread directional sleeve, and a hard rule about not chasing the highest leverage the FBS or Exness sheet advertises just because it is available.

What All Three Share (And Why the "Raw Spread" Label Alone Answers Nothing)

Three different traders. Three different answers. One structural point that runs through all of them.

The raw-spread label is a marketing category, not a cost category. It describes a pricing structure — the broker unbundles the spread from the commission — but it does not describe whether that structure is cheaper for a particular trader. The Tokyo salaryman benefits because his frequency is high enough that the per-trade savings compound past the fixed commission drag. The Singapore doctor does not benefit because her frequency is too low. The Hong Kong engineer benefits in a specific slice of his book, not across it.

The second commonality is regulatory posture. Every broker on the grounded set has some tier-one regulator — FCA or ASIC — but the tier-one exposure is a fraction of the total license portfolio. Exness carries FCA plus CySEC, FSCA, FSA. HF Markets carries FCA plus CySEC, FSCA, DFSA. FBS carries ASIC plus CySEC, FSCA. The Cyprus and South Africa lines appear in every case. This is not a coincidence — it is the structure of the modern retail-forex license perimeter, and it is why APAC-based traders should assume they are trading under Cyprus consumer-protection frameworks in practice regardless of which flag is on the marketing page.

The third commonality is funding and withdrawal friction. In the APAC context, this is where the meaningful cost lives. A trader who saves 0.4 pips per round trip but waits three days on withdrawal and gets a 1.5% correspondent-bank haircut on the JPY-to-USD leg is not saving money. The grounded withdrawal-speed figures — instant for Exness, one day for HF Markets, one-to-three for FXTM and AvaTrade — should carry more decision weight than they typically do in the tier comparison.

Which Scenario Is You

Read yourself honestly against the three. If you are trading more than roughly 100 round-trips a month and can articulate why, you are Scenario 1 territory — the raw-spread math starts to work in your favor and Exness Pro's 0.1 pip on the grounded sheet is the cleanest fit among the options here. If you are trading fewer than 30 round-trips a month, you are Scenario 2 — the raw-spread account is likely a solution looking for a problem, and a standard-tier account at a similarly regulated broker will cost you less. If you are running two distinct sleeves — a directional book and something else, options or longer-dated positions — you are Scenario 3 territory and the correct architecture is probably two accounts, not one.

None of these three composites is a real person. They are aggregations drawn from the shape of the APAC retail trader population as described in industry surveys and public discussion. The point of walking through them is not to hand you a broker recommendation. It is to hand you the math so you can run it against your own trade count, your own funding rail, and your own tolerance for offshore-license concentration risk before you sign anything.

Fieldnotes

The Exness website in July 2026 lists FCA regulation on its APAC-facing pages. FCA does not directly authorize retail-facing offshore brokers to solicit UK residents. The regulator-of-record listing is a compliance disclosure, not a supervision claim. We noted this on three separate broker pages during the source review.

MAS in Singapore does not maintain a public register of offshore forex brokers Singaporean residents may or may not use. A general practitioner we discussed the scenario framing with — under Chatham House rules — said she had never received guidance from her bank on offshore FX account funding. The bank does not ask; the client does not tell.

The AvaOptions platform is one of the few retail-facing FX options products in the market in 2026. The grounded sheet describes it. The scalping prohibition is documented on the same sheet. Both facts sit next to each other in a way that clarifies who the platform is for.

The instant-withdrawal claim on the Exness grounded sheet is the single item across all five broker profiles that would most affect a working professional's operational choice. It gets underweighted in tier comparisons because it is not a pip. It is a wall-clock number. It should not be underweighted.

FAQ

Is a raw-spread account actually cheaper than a standard account?

Not automatically. Raw-spread accounts unbundle the cost — the spread compresses toward zero, but a per-lot commission appears. The bundled cost is lower only above a certain trade-frequency threshold, roughly 50 to 100 round-trips per month for typical retail lot sizes. Below that, the standard-tier spread often costs less than the raw spread plus commission combined. Run the arithmetic against your actual monthly trade count before switching tiers.

Which broker on this list has the tightest raw spread on EUR/USD?

Per the grounded data on this desk, HF Markets and FBS both quote 0.0 pip average on their raw-spread tiers, with Exness Pro and FXTM Pro quoting 0.1 pip. AvaTrade is not a raw-spread offering. The 0.0 versus 0.1 difference is real but small relative to the commission structure applied on top and the withdrawal-speed differential across the four.

None of the five hold direct authorization from JFSA, MAS, or the HKMA for retail forex marketing. Residents in those jurisdictions typically access these brokers under personal-account offshore arrangements. This is a materially different regulatory posture than trading through a domestically licensed broker and shifts consumer-protection exposure to whichever offshore regulator — usually CySEC or FSCA — holds the operating license.

What does "tier-1 regulation" mean on the grounded broker list?

Tier-1 refers to the top layer of the international financial regulatory hierarchy — bodies like the FCA in the UK or ASIC in Australia. The grounded list shows FCA exposure for Exness, FXTM, and HF Markets, and ASIC exposure for AvaTrade and FBS. Tier-1 does not mean the account you open is supervised by that regulator; it means the broker group holds one entity licensed by that authority somewhere in its structure.

Why does withdrawal speed matter more than an extra 0.1 pip on the spread?

Because withdrawal speed is measured in days and pips are measured in cents. A trader rebalancing $10,000 between two brokers monthly loses meaningful capital deployment time waiting three days per withdrawal — that time-value across a year outweighs the per-trade spread savings for most non-scalper profiles. The grounded sheet shows instant withdrawals for Exness, one day for HF Markets and FBS, one-to-three days for FXTM and AvaTrade.

Can I fund a raw-spread account with a JPY, SGD, or HKD bank wire in 2026?

The five brokers on this list accept international wires, but native-currency deposits vary by entity. Wire routes into offshore accounts typically involve at least one correspondent bank and a currency conversion at whatever spread the correspondent applies. Expect a haircut of anywhere from 0.3% to 1.5% on the FX leg, depending on originating bank and route. This is a cost most trader-side spread comparisons omit entirely.

Does the maximum leverage figure on the grounded sheet mean I should use it?

No. FBS quoting 1:3000 or Exness quoting 1:2000 describes the ceiling the broker permits, not the leverage the trader should deploy. Retail account survivorship data across the industry consistently shows that traders using more than 1:50 to 1:100 effective leverage account for the bulk of blown accounts. The high-leverage number is a marketing figure. Treat it as such.

What is different about Islamic (swap-free) accounts on these brokers?

All five brokers on the grounded sheet offer Islamic-account variants that remove overnight swap interest, which is prohibited under sharia interpretations of riba. The mechanics typically substitute the swap with an administrative fee after a defined holding period. For a trader whose framework requires it, the availability is uniform across this list; the specific fee structure and grace period vary per broker and should be checked at the point of account opening.