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Pepperstone Review

Minimum Deposit: $200 VISIT BROKER

Between 74-89% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.

Pepperstone is a good choice for traders who enjoy trading in a well-regulated trading environment with advanced trading platforms and tools.

Investing Brokers

March 7, 2023

Headquartered in Australia, Pepperstone is an online trading broker that is regulated in multiple jurisdictions. The broker has been in operation since 2010, allowing traders to trade CFDs on forex, commodities, shares, ETFs, and more. Pepperstone provides traders with advanced trading platforms, helpful trading tools, and educational resources to ensure they get the most out of their trades. Their clients benefit from various competitive trading conditions, such as tight spreads as low as 0.0 pips, flexible leverage, fast execution, and more. The recommended minimum deposit to trade with Pepperstone is AUD 200 or its equivalent.

Pepperstone offers a wide selection of over 1,000 financial instruments across different asset classes, such as forex, shares, ETFs, indices, commodities and cryptocurrency. This may sound like a generous offer until it is compared with the Trading Products of the broker’s top competitors, such as IG who have over 18,000 financial instruments in comparison. Interestingly, the broker’s Trading Products are available on all the provided trading platforms, which is a huge plus.

Pepperstone Instruments Summary

Commission Fees

Thanks to Pepperstone’s multiple liquidity providers from tier 1 banks and institutions, the broker offers competitive quotes with low spreads from 0.0 pips and deep liquidity on a wide range of instruments. This allows the broker to charge low trading costs and commission fees to all clients. It also ensures that you get your trades executed without delay at the best available prices on the market. Generally, I find Pepperstone to have very competitive all-round costs, especially considering the excellent range of platforms and tools that you get free access to when you trade with them.

There are zero commission fees on the Standard account, while commission fees on the Razor account are calculated as seven units of the base currency per a lot of the asset (CFDs, FX, or shares) you are trading. Commission fees may change based on your account, platform and base currency. Micro lots are rounded up or down on the MT4 and MT5 trading platforms, while the cTrader accounts are based on 0.0035% of the base currency that’s being traded. For example, if you’re trading 100,000 of EUR/USD the commission charge will be $3.50 to open the contract and $3.50 to close out the Contract.

Spread Fees

Pepperstone make money by offering fair spreads to all clients. Spreads are the difference between the buy and sell price of an instrument. Pepperstone has variable spreads for trading forex starting from 0.6 pips on the standard account but they vary depending on the trading instrument and market liquidity. Spreads are charged in the base currency that you are trading. The Razor account has tighter spreads starting from 0.0 pips but does charge a commission fee whereas the standard account does not.

Deposit and Withdrawal Fees

Pepperstone offers a range of payment methods — wire transfer, credit/debit cards, electronic wallets, and cryptocurrency — that are fee-free for both deposits and withdrawals, except on special occasions. For instance, there may be a small funding fee on some deposit methods, such as third-party fees on e-wallets. Also, any international telegraphic transfer (TT) fees, which are mostly $20, are passed on to the traders.

Inactivity Fees

The broker does not charge any fee on inactive active accounts. This gives them an edge over their competitors, some of whom charge over $10 monthly on inactive accounts.

Pepperstone offers the some of the most well-respected third-party trading platforms in the industry, including the MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView trading platforms. This is a really top choice of platforms. They are all user-friendly yet packed with tool to conduct detailed chart analysis so that you can find trading opportunities and make informed decisions.

MetaTrader 4

The MetaTrader 4 platform by MetaQuotes, MT4 for short, is a popular trading platform that was developed with advanced trading features and functionalities, such as live quotes, real-time charts, in-depth news and analytics. It is built with an intuitive interface, and it is suitable for both beginners and advanced traders because of its broad functionality. The platform is also fully customisable, allowing you to easily tweak it to your preference and enhance your trading performance. The MT4 trading platform can be used on both demo and live accounts. It is available as a desktop application for Windows and Mac computers, WebTrader, and a mobile trading app that is compatible with Android and iOS devices.

Platform Features

MetaTrader 5

The MT5 trading platform can be described as a newer and more powerful version of the MT4 — it was also built by MetaQuotes. This trading platform has more enhanced features and extended functionalities to give you a seamless trading experience. For example, instead of the nine timeframes on the MT4, the MT5 offers 21 timeframes, making it a perfect choice for scalpers and advanced traders who are looking to do in-depth market analysis.

The MT5 trading platform is best suited for traders who are looking to trade with advanced financial trading functions and superior tools for analysis. It has faster processing times, advanced pending orders and allows users to hedge their positions. It is also available in desktop, web, and mobile versions.

Platform Features

cTrader

cTrader is a third-party trading platform that is designed to meet the standards of an institutional trading environment. It is replete with powerful trading functionalities, including fast entry and execution, trade automation, strategy back testing, and more. The platform is designed with a fully customisable user interface to meet the trading needs of all types of traders. It permits users to customise watchlists, email and push notifications. The platform also offers expanded symbol display, advanced order types and optimises expert advisors and technical indicators processing. You can also get MT4, MT5 and cTrader through Axiory and RoboForex.

Platform Features

TradingView

Pepperstone integrates with the excellent TradingView professional trading software via cTrader. TradingView is the most active social network for traders and investors. You can connect with millions of traders from around the world, learn from the experiences of other investors and discuss trading ideas.

TradingView has excellent charts with over 10 types of charts for market analysis from different angles. Starting with an elementary chart line and ending with Renko and Kagi charts, which focus heavily on price fluctuations and barely take time into account as a factor.

Choose from a large selection of price analysis tools, including, but not limited to, indicators, strategies, drawing objects (i.e. Gann, Elliot Wave, moving averages) and more.

Flexible settings help you to track the instruments that you need to in real time and also group them in a way that is convenient for you. Alerts will help you not to miss the smallest of changes in the market and will allow you to react accordingly.

I think this is as good as it gets in terms of charting software. There is literally endless possibilites with TradingView. It is easy to use yet can perform so really complex chart analysis. You can only get access to it via a few other brokers at this time, Forex.com and easyMarkets being a couple of other options.

DupliTrade

DupliTrade is a social trading tool that is used for trade automation and investment diversification. It offers trading signals of proprietary traders to help retail traders build a trading knowledge and gain a key understanding of professional techniques. You can easily join Pepperstone’s DupliTrade with a minimum deposit of AUD 5,000. The benefits include access to a robust portfolio of leading strategy providers, which are automatically traded on your MT4 account. DupliTrade is also available via AvaTrade.

Pepperstone Platforms Summary

Pepperstone provides traders with a good selection of learning resources to help traders make informed trading decisions. They include the following:

Pepperstone Academy

The broker’s “Education” section acts as a rich trading academy. It contains a generous selection of learning resources to teach traders everything they need to know about financial markets trading. You can access this section from the top of the broker’s homepage. It features learning courses, trading guides, video tutorials, and so much more.

News & Market Analysis

The broker offers a daily newsletter — The Daily Fix — by their team of research experts. There is also the market news section that keeps traders up-to-date with the latest events in the financial markets. These resources do not only help traders to stay up to date on major market developments, but they also ensure that traders are provided with detailed analyses of the financial markets.

Pepperstone Blog

This contains a range of frequently updated research articles by Pepperstone’s head of research expert and their team. These learning articles are arranged in chronological order as a blog, with the newest articles at the top, making it easy for traders to access the most recent topics.

FAQ

This is a comprehensive list of traders’ most common questions, along with their corresponding detailed answers. You will find this as a “Help & Support” icon at the top-right corner of the website. When you click on the icon, a web page that contains various commonly asked questions will open. It covers various topics, including funding and withdrawals, account management, account opening, platforms and tools, and more.

Webinars

These are regular events hosted by the broker and broadcasted to their clients through the internet. It allows the host and speakers to share PowerPoint presentations, videos, web pages or other multimedia content with traders, irrespective of their locations. The broker’s expert-led webinars are designed to help all levels of traders to grow their trading knowledge and become even better traders.

Autochartist

The Autochartist software is an excellent research tool that helps traders to focus on the trade by removing market noise and highlighting the currency pairs, data intervals and technical indicators that signify key market events. It is a special scanner that is reputed for offering statistically significant market movements and identifying important price levels that have proven themselves to be catalysts for market movements. This excellent tool is also available through GO Markets.

Economic Calendar

This is an essential trading tool that allows traders to stay ahead of upcoming global events. It shows the schedule of future market events along with their expected impacts on the financial markets. I think this is a vital tool for keeping informed about what is happening around the global markets. I always like to check it before making any decision. You can also get access to a news calendar in the MT5 platform which may be more convenient than needing to switch between tabs each time you want to check the news.

VPS Hosting

This handy trading tool is dedicated to ensuring zero downtimes due to technology or connectivity failures. Hence, it enables you to run you trading platform and automated algorithmic strategies, including expert advisors 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on a virtual machine. The Pepperstone VPS service partners with two top VPS providers in FXVM and New York City Servers to provide traders with the best VPS hosting experience. You can get a free VPS from other brokers including IC Markets.

Pepperstone Research and Education Summary

First, to carry out deposit or withdrawal transaction on your Pepperstone account, you should ensure that your account is denominated in any of the following base currencies: Australian Dollar, United States Dollar, Euro, Canadian Dollar, British Pound, New Zealand Dollar, Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Japanese Yen and Swiss Franc. This will prevent you from paying high conversion fees as such fees do not apply when your account is in the base currency.

Second, you have to log in to your secure client area and navigate to the Funds tab to select either “Add Funds” or “Withdraw Funds” — depending on whether you want to carry out a deposit or withdrawal transaction. Then, you can choose your most preferred payment method from the range of available payment options.

Interestingly, Pepperstone offers a vast selection of payment methods for both account deposits and withdrawals. They include wire transfer, credit/debit cards, and various electronic payment gateways. They do not currenty support crypto funding but Axi do if that is something you require.

While the broker does not charge any fees for deposits and withdrawals, some payment methods may come with slight service fees. Also, the time taken to process transactions is dependent on the payment method in use. For example, all electronic payments are instant, while bank transfers may take a few business days to be processed. The minimum deposit required to start trading is $200. If that is too much for you at the moment, then Fusion Markets have a minimum deposit requirement of just $1.

Pepperstone Funding Summary

Pepperstone are a well-regulated broker. The broker is licensed and regulated in multiple jurisdictions by some top tier regulators. I would compare them to some of the industry leaders such as City Index when it comes to regulation.

Financial authorities like ASIC and the FCA are tier-1 regulators known for offering strict regulations. However, the absence of a CFTC regulation is an indication that the broker cannot provide its services to US citizens or residents. If you are in the USA then Oanda could be an option worth exploring instead.

Pepperstone Regulation Summary

Pepperstone Safety

With its regulations from top-tier regulatory authorities like the FCA and ASIC, we can say that Pepperstone is a safe broker. Their compliance with the policies of these regulatory authorities offers an assurance of optimal transparency and fair business dealings. Tier 1 regulation also mandates that all client funds are kept fully segregated from the broker’s corporate accounts in client trust accounts at top-rated banks.

The broker provides traders with a knowledgeable client support team who are polite and prompt in response. The support team can be reached via any of the following contact channels: telephone, email, Live Chat, and social media. I have always found them easy to deal with and had a quick response when asking them various questions.

Overall, Pepperstone is a reputable CFD brokerage firm with a solid regulatory standing and excellent product range. They offer various useful trading tools, educational resources, and advanced trading platforms that are available in desktop, web, and mobile versions. They enable you to buy and sell a great selection of over 1,000 financial instruments across different asset classes. You can benefit from very competitive trading conditions, such as tight spreads from as low as 0.0 pips, zero commission fees, rapid order processing speeds, and convenient funding options. It takes just a few minutes to open an account whilst the minimum deposit required to start trading with Pepperstone is $200, which is not the lowest you will find but you can always start with a free demo account to see if they meet your needs.

Pepperstone Review

Minimum Deposit: $200

VISIT BROKER