Broker comparison: XAUUSD average spread during London killzone

[LondonScalper]

Gold into the London killzone is where my cost sheet either justifies the trade or quietly kills it.

I keep a simple comparison row for XAUUSD: average spread and a rough slippage hint across the accounts I actually use, tagged for the first 90 minutes of London cash. Marketing screenshots do not sit in that sheet. Only my timestamps do.

How I read the killzone cost
1. Spread at decision, not the overnight fantasy print.
2. Fill distance on market orders under 0.2R targets — gold eats small edges fast.
3. Whether the "raw" label still looks raw when the metal starts running.

If broker A is 0.15 cheaper on a quiet open but blows out on the first impulse, it loses the week. Killzone average without a volatility tag is theatre.

I am curious how others build a gold-only cost comparison for London — do you weight the open heavier than the rest of the session, or keep one flat average and accept the noise?

I keep killzone rows separate from all-day gold average because the open is where my scalps live. If a broker only looks cheap in the quiet afternoon, it does not win the comparison for my desk. A short note on whether partial fills showed up that week sits next to the spread number.

[PropScalpDesk]

Rather than weighting the open, I'd stop using the average for gold altogether. What hurts at the London open is the spread when you actually enter or get stopped, and that happens disproportionately when the spread is widest. The 90th percentile over the first 15 minutes tells you more about a venue than the mean over 90.

The practical difficulty is getting the numbers. MT5 doesn't record the spread at the moment of your fill, so I run a small logger that writes bid, ask and time on every tick for XAUUSD between 07:55 and 09:30 London. After a couple of weeks you can compare venues on exactly the minutes you trade.