Hey Markmuffin. This is great since I’d just covered forex brokers about an hour ago in the education section of the website. The purpose of the broker to my knowledge, is somewhat of “liason” between retail traders and the groups way above us such as the big banks and whatnot. The great thing is that there’s so much competition going on behind the scenes that we get very competitive(great) prices. There are also different types of brokers such as ECN, market makers, STP(which I believe often fall under ECN, but I could be wrong(check the education area, it’s fairly easy to find).