CMC Markets is a renowned online forex and CFD broker, established in 1989. The headquarters of CMC Markets are located in the UK, and the broker is listed on the London Stock Exchange. In addition, CMC Markets is registered and regulated by top-tier regulatory authorities such as FCA, ASIC, FMA, MAS, BaFin, DFSA and IIROC.
CMC Markets offers thousands of trading instruments in CFDs and spread betting (UK only) from various asset classes such as forex, commodities, cryptocurrencies, shares, indices, treasuries and ETFs. The broker offers its exceptional proprietary “Next Generation” trading platform for the best trading experience. MetaTrader 4 is also available for clients who want simplicity in their trading. Moreover, the broker provides trading with minimal trading costs.
CMC Markets is packed with educational and research tools such as Economic Calendar, Market Insights, and more. I think they can be a great choice for professional traders and do provide free demo accounts for anyone who is thinking about giving them a try but do not yet want to make any financial commitment.
CMC Markets has many years of expertise in providing trading services for personal, institutional and professional trading accounts. The broker has 13 offices globally and is registered and regulated in multiple jurisdictions. CMC Markets is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange (LON: CMCX). CMC Markets provides thousands of trading assets in CFDs and spread betting to UK clients. The broker offers low forex fees and does not need any minimum deposit to get started. Moreover, there is no deposit or withdrawal fee. In addition to the well-known MT4, CMC Markets also provides its proprietary Next Generation trading platform with liquidity provided by top banks. On top of that, the broker provides negative balance protection. Finally, advanced educational and research tools support traders in making informed trading decisions.
CMC Markets does not hold a banking licence. Moreover, an inactivity fee is charged for staying inactive for more than 12 months. The broker has high fees for stock trading. CMC Markets does not provide customer support 24/7, and there are no dedicated research tools available. Finally, the broker does not provide swap-free Islamic accounts.
Let’s summarise the advantages and disadvantages of CMC Markets.
CMC Markets has a huge product portfolio of over 11,000 instruments consisting of CFDs and spread betting assets. The broker provides around 330+ forex pairs, 80+ indices, 14 cryptocurrencies, 100+ commodities, 50+ treasuries and 9,000+ stocks & ETFs.
However, CMC Markets does not have bonds and options in its product portfolio. But considering the number of trading products offered, traders have plenty of options to diversify their portfolios. If you are looking to trade bonds or options, AvaTrade might be worth consideration instead.
CMC Markets Instruments Summary
| Instruments | CMC Markets |
|---|---|
| Forex | ✓ |
| Stocks | ✓ |
| Indices | ✓ |
| Commodities | ✓ |
| Cryptos | ✓ |
| Options | x |
| Bonds | x |
| ETFs | ✓ |
| CFDs | ✓ |
Commission and Spread Fees
CMC Markets offers trading with low commission fees but I did not find the spreads to be the lowest as they start from 0.7 pips. You can get tighter spreads from as low as 0.0 pips with IG. There is a commission fee that is charged on shares trading starting from 2 cents or 0.10% per unit share.
| Fee | CFDs | Spread Betting |
|---|---|---|
| Commission (per standard lot per side) | $0.02/0.10% per share | $0 |
| Spreads from | 0.7 | 0.7 |
Deposit and Withdrawal Fees
CMC Markets does not charge any deposit or withdrawal fee from its clients. However, a withdrawal fee of £15 is applied to international bank transfers.
Inactivity Fees
CMC Markets charges £10 as an inactivity fee from the accounts that have been dormant for over 12 months. If you want to avoid inactivity fees then Freedom Finance do not charge any.
CMC Markets offers two trading platforms: MetaTrader 4 and the Next Generation trading platform. In addition, the broker offers various trading tools as well. Let’s have a look at each trading platform and tool in detail.
Next Generation Trading Platform
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced trader, the Next Generation trading platform can be easily customised to meet your specific trading requirements. The industry-leading charts include multiple chart types, over 115 technical indicators and drawing tools, pattern recognition, and a chart forum community to help you with your analysis.
The charting package includes 12 chart types, including the popular line, OHLC, and candlestick charts, as well as more advanced charts like Kagi, line break, and Renko charts. All charts include a variety of drawing tools for drawing support and resistance levels, making notes on charts, and highlighting key price moves and patterns. Recognise trend reversals, important price levels, and trading opportunities. There are over 30 overlays and 50 studies to choose from, including Bollinger Bands, SMAs, Ichimoku cloud, MACD, RSI, and many more.
Charts for major products cover up to 20 years of price history, allowing you to analyse price performance over the long and short term. You can quickly change between chart intervals ranging from one second to one month. Layouts, charts, and technical indicators are all fully customisable, allowing you to set up your charts and technical analysis exactly how you want.
Identify correlated products by dragging and dropping onto the open chart of another product to compare price action and performance over the same timeframe. Once you’ve customised a chart, save the configuration as default so that the same preferences are applied to it every time you load a new chart. You can save up to five charts for each instrument. As opportunities arise, open trades directly from the charts – you can simply click on a live price to open an order ticket and place a trade. You can also change or cancel any pending orders.
Next Generation Mobile Trading App
With the intuitive, native mobile trading app, you can access your account at any time and from any location. Create your own unique dashboard and trade with smartphone notifications, live streaming pricing, and advanced charting technologies. A customisable dashboard allows you to manage your account and track the markets that are important to you. The dashboard on the Android app is your own customised homepage that you can configure to match your own trading requirements. Simply resize, delete, or relocate the various tiles to create a layout that best matches you and your trading approach.
Using the notification centre, you may set up price, execution, market calendar, breaking news, and price-movers notifications. Receive notifications in-app, by push, SMS, or email, so you never miss an important market event. Price activity may be analysed using charts that have been optimised for smartphones, with more data points, a variety of technical indicators, and configurable chart extensions, allowing you to project analysis into the future. Get instant access to the extensive trade education content through the support section or the app. Sign up for future webinars, read articles, and view videos on platform features and trading strategies. Fingerprint login provides you with instant access to your account and markets, as well as the confidence that your account is always safe. View live streaming pricing and add over 40 popular technical indicators and drawing tools to your charts. The charts on the Android trading app allow you to develop a fully-integrated trading strategy, even if you’re away from your home computer.
Apply a wide choice of chart kinds, trading tools and default settings. When charts are accessed from a watchlist, the software automatically remembers your chart analysis for future use, helping you to respond more swiftly to market situations.
MetaTrader 4 (MT4) Desktop
You can trade CFDs on forex, indices, and commodities on MetaTrader (MT4), via the world’s most popular forex trading platform, at home or on the move. MT4 is one of the most used trading platforms in the world, with fully customisable online and mobile platforms to fit any trading style and a vast choice of currency, commodity, and index products. CMC Markets offers hundreds of products to trade on the intuitive MT4 trading platform. MT4 may be downloaded and installed on a Windows PC from the CMC Markets website. Mobile versions are freely available and may be downloaded and installed on iOS and Android devices.
The MT4 app can be an ideal solution for those of you who want to access your account and trade whilst on the move. They make it quick and easy to keep up to date with the latest market news at all times. It would be good if the broker would add support for the newer platform in MT5. You can get both MetaTrader platforms through some other brokers including Pepperstone.
Trading Tools
Client sentiment
The client sentiment feature displays the percentage of CMC Markets clients who have bought versus the percentage who have sold on a specific product, allowing you to better understand the expectations of other clients. The monetary value of these positions can also be displayed as a percentage. This can be a good way to get a feel for the market and the direction in which it may be moving.
Multiple layouts
Multiple layouts are available as platform trading tools, allowing you to create and save different trading layouts within the platform. This gives you a much bigger dashboard and allows you to make better use of the available space. Using the quick links in the top navigation toolbar, you can quickly switch between layouts.
Pattern recognition scanner
Another component of the platform trading tools is a pattern recognition scanner. Every 15 minutes, you can easily scan over 120 of the most popular products for developing and finished chart trading patterns, including wedges, channels, and head & shoulders. Set up automated notifications to be alerted of prospective trading opportunities and technical trade setups. This can be a great way to get inspiration for potential trade setups and save you from hours of studying the charts yourself.
Module linking
This feature allows you to combine various modules together so that if you change the product presented in one module, it will immediately update all of the other grouped modules to show the new product.
CMC Markets Platforms Summary
| Platform | CMC Markets |
|---|---|
| MetaTrader 4 (MT4) | ✓ |
| MetaTrader 5 (MT5) | x |
| cTrader | x |
| Proprietary | ✓ |
| Desktop | ✓ |
| Web | ✓ |
| Mobile | ✓ |
| Social Trading | ✓ |
| Other | x |
CMC Markets offers various educational resources and research tools to its clients, including Economic Calendar, News & Insights, Platform User guide, CMC TV, and featured charts. However, the broker does not provide dedicated research tools such as AutoChartist and Trading Central. If you are looking for those tools to help take your market analysis to the next level, you might want to consider Forex.com as they provide both free of charge to clients.
Let’s have a brief look at each of these resources.
Economic Calendar
This customisable economic calendar is meant to assist you in making educated trading decisions by providing near real-time event data updates. I think it is vital to always check for any pending news releases before making any trade decisions.
News & Insights
This comprises daily remarks and video analysis as offered by CMC Markets analysts. It is available via the trading platform. The purpose is to provide traders advice on how to proceed based on the research and price movements surrounding the assets. The subjects addressed include Market commentary, chart analysis, weekly forecast, technical and fundamental analysis. This is compiled and delivered by the team of experts at CMC Markets.
CMC TV
CMC Markets offers CMC TV (Youtube channel) where they upload educational videos on market updates to keep you informed with what is happening around the global markets.
Videos
There are various training films available that cover a wide range of trading subjects such as fundamental analysis, technical indicators, forex and CFD trading, spread betting, and so on. The videos are divided into three categories: beginning, intermediate, and advanced traders. I found them easy to follow and they explain everything very well.
Guides
Trading tutorials and courses on forex, CFD, and cryptocurrency trading are available. There are also articles outlining the fundamentals of trading for those of you who are new to it.
CMC Markets Research and Education Summary
| Resources | CMC Markets |
|---|---|
| Market Analysis | ✓ |
| Guides | ✓ |
| Videos | ✓ |
| Webinars | x |
| Autochartist | x |
| Trading Central | x |
| Economic Calendar | ✓ |
| Other | x |
CMC Markets offers multiple payment options for deposit and withdrawal, including bank transfers, debit/credit cards, and electronic payment services. The broker offers 10 account base currencies, and clients can deposit and withdraw in those currencies to avoid currency conversion charges. However, the broker doesn’t accept or offer cryptocurrencies as a payment option. If this is something that you are looking for then you might want to consider FXOpen instead.
CMC Markets Funding Summary
| Payment Method | Deposit | Withdrawal |
|---|---|---|
| Wire Transfer | ✓ | ✓ |
| Credit/debit Card | ✓ | ✓ |
| Electronic Wallets | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cryptos | x | x |
CMC Markets is registered with multiple government regulatory authorities. Here is the list of CMC Markets regulations globally:
- Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK
- Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht (BaFin) in Germany/EU
- Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) in Canada
- Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) in Australia
- Financial Markets Authority (FMA) in New Zealand
- Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in Singapore
- Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) in UAE
CMC Markets Regulation Summary
| Regulator | CMC Markets |
|---|---|
| ASIC (Australia) | ✓ |
| IIROC (Canada) | ✓ |
| CySEC (Cyprus) | x |
| SFC (Hong Kong) | x |
| JFSA (Japan) | x |
| MAS (Singapore) | ✓ |
| FINMA (Switzerland) | x |
| FCA (UK) | ✓ |
| CFTC (USA) | x |
| Other (BaFin, DFSA, FMA) | ✓ |
CMC Markets Safety
Deposits from clients are kept in separate bank accounts. This money is held at leading European banks, including NatWest, Barclays, and Lloyds, as well as Ulster Bank in Ireland, Deutsche Bank in Germany, and Barclays in France. The Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers clients of CMC Markets in the United Kingdom and Europe (FSCS). CMC secures its trading platforms and websites with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption to safeguard users from identity thieves and cyber hackers.
CMC Markets offers customer support 24/5 via phone, email and live chat. I think this is an area in which they could improve by extending support hours to weekends like some competitors such as EXANTE do.
CMC Markets is a well-known online broker that has withstood the test of time and continues to implement cutting-edge trading technology for traders who demand professional platforms, tools and conditions. The broker possesses many rules from various agencies and strictly adheres to the tough regulatory standards. Individuals, corporations, and foreign traders are all catered to with an excellent asset selection of over 10,000+ products. There is no minimum investment; therefore, anybody is welcome regardless of trading money or expertise. When compared to other brokers, the spreads are slightly higher which may not be great for scalping or automated strategies that rely on small pip movements. I would also like to see them include MT5 and either Autochartist or Trading Central to assist traders with their market analysis. Other than that, they are certainly worth consideration alongside some of the top brokers in the industry.
