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BJF TRADING GROUP · OPEN RESEARCH
A public, browser-based scanner that monitors how far retail forex brokers lag behind a fast reference feed in real time. No download, no signup, no email wall — open the page and the dashboard loads. Built by BJF Trading Group as a community research asset, like our open-source BEQI broker audit toolkit and our existing free crypto arbitrage scanner.
Yes — it’s a real, free, browser-based scanner. The dashboard at /arbitrage-stats/ shows every detected arbitrage opportunity between a fast reference feed and four anonymized retail brokers, across nine of the most-traded forex and index symbols. No software to install. No account to create. No payment. The data is open to anyone with the URL.
The scanner does not execute trades. It is a measurement and discovery tool: it shows you which brokers lag, which symbols have the densest opportunities, what time of day to focus on, and how the lag changes over weeks and months. What you do with that information is up to you.
The dashboard is organized into six analytical sections, all of which are filterable by date and time range, symbol, broker, minimum differential, and minimum opportunity duration. The default view automatically loads the last seven days of data.
1 · KPIs
Opportunity count, average differential in pips, average duration in milliseconds, single-largest differential, total theoretical pips, and the automatically-detected best time-of-day window for the selected period.
2 · HEATMAP
A 7×24 grid showing where opportunities cluster across the trading week. London is open, and the London–New York overlap dominates visibly; Asian-session activity is sparser.
3 · HISTOGRAMS
Two bar charts: one showing the distribution of opportunity sizes in pips, the other showing how long opportunities stayed open in milliseconds. Useful for sizing strategy thresholds.
4 · SESSIONS
Opportunity count and average characteristics per trading session. Confirms which session is most arbitrageable for the symbol and broker pair you have selected.
5 · SYMBOL RANKING
Ranking of which symbols generate the most opportunities on the chosen broker, with their average differential. Helps you pick which symbol to focus on.
6 · EVENTS TABLE
Every detected event: timestamp, symbol, direction (long/short), differential in pips, duration in milliseconds, broker, session. Paginated, exportable to CSV for offline analysis.
Two further charts — a broker lag profile (average opportunity duration by hour of day, a proxy for the broker’s processing speed at different times) and a cumulative theoretical-pips curve (the running total over the selected period) — complete the dashboard.
The detection logic is the same one that underlies serious latency arbitrage in retail forex. Two price streams run in parallel:
The detection engine walks both streams in chronological order. Whenever the broker’s mid-price diverges from the fast feed by more than a threshold in pips, instrument-adjusted, a state machine opens an „in-opportunity“ state and records the timestamp. When the broker’s quote catches up to within a tighter close-threshold of the fast feed, the state closes, and an event is emitted. Events shorter than a minimum duration are discarded as physically unreachable (your order could never have filled inside that window). Single-tick spikes that look like opportunities but are really feed noise are filtered out by a statistical spike filter.
The resulting event is what the scanner stores: timestamp, symbol, broker, direction (which side of the spread the divergence was on), magnitude in pips, and duration in milliseconds. From those four numbers, everything in the dashboard is derived — the KPIs, the heatmap, the histograms, the sessions, the ranking, the lag profile. For the broader execution-quality measurement framework these events sit inside, see our open-source BEQI broker execution audit toolkit.
The scanner is a measurement tool, not an execution tool. It identifies windows where arbitrage was theoretically possible against the monitored brokers; it does not place trades, manage positions, or guarantee that the same windows will be available to you in live conditions on your own account. Execution requires its own infrastructure — a co-located VPS, a fast feed subscription, and automated entry logic — which is a separate decision. The scanner tells you whether the opportunity exists; our software products handle execution.
The scanner currently monitors four retail forex brokers across the most-traded forex pairs, gold, and three index CFDs. Brokers are anonymized in the public dashboard (Broker A, B, C, D) for two reasons: to limit the legal exposure that comes with naming regulated entities in a comparative ranking, and to prevent broker-side optimization of the audit signal — a Goodhart’s law concern we discuss in our BEQI methodology paper. The methodology is open; downstream researchers are free to compile their own named leaderboards from the data.
The list is a starting set chosen for liquidity and arbitrage activity. We will extend it as the dataset matures — a tracker for adding new instruments is on our roadmap. If you have a specific symbol you’d like to add, the contact form at the bottom is the right place to suggest it.
Retail forex execution quality is the most opaque layer of the trading stack. Brokers compete on advertised spread; their actual execution behavior — matching latency, slippage symmetry, spread response to order flow — is invisible to the trader and unpublished by the broker. Third-party broker reviews score on user experience and withdrawal speed; nobody measures the variables that actually decide whether an arbitrage strategy survives in production.
We have been measuring this internally for years to build broker-dialect support into our commercial software. The free scanner, the open-source BEQI methodology, and our research on the anti-arbitrage plugins retail brokers use are all part of the same project: bring the measurements out into the open so the trader community has shared evidence, instead of forum-anecdote evidence, about what the broker layer is actually doing.
The scanner is therefore offered in the same way as an academic dataset: free, public, and reproducible, with deliberate choices about anonymization and methodology that we expect to defend in public. If you find a problem, the methodology page on our BEQI repository is where to open the discussion.
Four practical uses for the scanner output, ranked by effort.
There are paid forex arbitrage scanners on the market, and there are free pseudo-scanners (correlation indicators marketed as arbitrage tools, GitHub demos based on triangular-rate Bellman-Ford). The free BJF scanner sits in a different category from both.
| Feature | Free BJF scanner (this page) | Paid commercial scanners | Free pseudo-scanners |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | $500–$2,000+ license | Free |
| Real broker lag data | Yes — live measured | Yes | No — correlation only |
| Browser-based | Yes | Standalone Windows / VPS | Mixed (most need a terminal) |
| Public historical data | Yes — 365 days | No — private to subscriber | No |
| Direct trade execution | No — research only | Yes | No |
| Methodology open / auditable | Yes — BEQI repo | No — closed | Mixed |
The free BJF scanner is intentionally not a replacement for paid execution software; it is the layer of visibility that until now did not exist in retail forex. If you want to act on the opportunities the scanner shows — with co-located infrastructure, fast feed subscription, and automated entry — the footer of this page links to our paid execution products.
The dashboard loads in your browser with the last seven days of detected arbitrage events. Filter by symbol, broker, and date range. Export events to CSV. No signup. No email. No download.
Yes. The dashboard at /arbitrage-stats/ is a public page; anyone can open it. There is no signup wall, no email opt-in, no free-trial countdown. We run the detection program ourselves and pay the infrastructure cost; the dashboard is offered as community research, like our open-source BEQI broker audit toolkit and the existing free crypto arbitrage scanner.
No. The scanner is entirely browser-based. The page is plain HTML and JavaScript served by our WordPress site; the data is queried from a public REST endpoint and rendered with Chart.js. It works on any modern desktop or mobile browser. You do not need a terminal, a VPS, or any platform-specific software to see the scanner. Execution of trades is a separate matter and would require its own infrastructure — see the comparison table above.
Every measurable instance during the selected time period where a monitored retail forex broker’s quoted price for a monitored symbol diverged from a fast reference feed by more than a configurable threshold for longer than a configurable minimum duration — together with the size of that divergence in pips, the direction (long or short), and the duration in milliseconds.
The detection program continuously writes events to the public database, batched every few minutes per broker per symbol. When you load the dashboard or click Analyze, you are querying the most recent batch. There is no caching layer that delays visibility; what the program has written, the dashboard shows immediately.
Up to 365 days of history is available. The „from“ and „to“ date-time pickers in the filter bar default to the last seven days but accept any range within the retention window. Older events are automatically pruned by a daily maintenance job to keep query performance acceptable as the dataset grows.
Four retail forex brokers, anonymized in the dashboard as Broker A, Broker B, Broker C, and Broker D. We do not publish the names for two reasons. First, public ranking of regulated financial entities by an unregulated third party invites legal exposure disproportionate to the research value. Second, naming brokers creates the incentive for them to optimise for the audit signal rather than for execution quality — a Goodhart’s-law dynamic that would compromise the dataset’s integrity. The methodology is open; anyone is free to do their own attribution by running their own detection.
The scanner does not connect to your account, does not see your trades, and does not place orders. It is a read-only public dashboard that displays measurements collected by our infrastructure, not by yours. Your broker has no way of knowing you visited the scanner or which data you looked at.
What is marketed as a „free arbitrage scanner indicator“ for retail trading terminals is almost always a correlation indicator — it highlights when two correlated pairs diverge from their normal correlation. That is statistical arbitrage (see our pairs trading pillar) and a useful tool in its own right, but it is not latency arbitrage — it does not measure broker lag against a fast feed. The BJF scanner measures actual latency-arbitrage opportunities: divergence between a fast reference and a slow broker, in milliseconds. The two tools answer different questions.
No. The scanner identifies and visualises opportunities; it does not execute. Execution would require a separate setup — a co-located VPS to minimize round-trip latency, a fast price feed subscription, automated entry logic with broker-specific dialect support, and live risk management. Our paid products SharpTrader Pro and SharpTrader Crypto handle that execution layer (see footer below).
The forex scanner on this page is forex-only. We run a separate free crypto arbitrage scanner that detects cross-exchange opportunities across more than 30 crypto exchanges. The two scanners share the same philosophy — public, free, measurement-only — but cover different asset classes.
New articles, research papers, scanner methodology updates, and product releases — delivered when we publish them.
The scanner is live now. No signup. No download. Filter, explore, and export to CSV directly from the browser.
From scanning to execution
The free scanner shows where retail brokers lag and where arbitrage windows open. Acting on those windows in live trading requires co-located infrastructure, a fast price feed, and execution software that handles broker-dialect quirks at single-millisecond timing. That is what we build commercially.
SharpTrader Pro — the full-feature forex and crypto arbitrage execution engine with Latency, DominionForce, and Hedge strategies, broker-dialect support across most major retail venues, and a configurable risk layer. SharpTrader Crypto — the focused crypto edition built on WebSocket API, with Latency + Hedge strategies and integration with US-accessible exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Bitstamp).