Spread is the gap between the buy and sell price of an instrument at that moment — a cost you pay the instant you enter, before the market has moved at all. On a prop account it counts twice: it reduces your net profit, and it eats into your daily loss limit, because every trade opens already down.

From each firm’s own demo account. A separate MT5 terminal runs per firm, reads the live bid and ask directly and posts them every few seconds. Brokers use different point sizes, so we ignore the spread figure they report and recompute it from raw prices against one canonical point size — otherwise the firms would not be comparable at all.

Because each firm sources its liquidity differently and may add its own mark-up. Some quote a tighter spread but charge commission per lot, and some do the reverse, so spread alone is not the full cost — the TC Score weighs both together.

Every row carries the time it was captured, and freshness is judged when the page loads rather than from a stored flag. A stale row shows no price at all, and if nothing is fresh the page says so. Showing an old price instead of nothing is the worst thing a live spread board can do.