2023 Eightcap Forex Review • Pros, Cons & More • Benzinga

Award-winning Eightcap Forex was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2009 and has as its stated mission “to deliver an unrivaled trading experience to our clients and provide you with one of the best trading environments in the financial world”. That’s why Benzinga offers this Eightcap forex review.

The broker maintains offices in the UK, Bulgaria, Vietnam, China and Australia, as well as an offshore entity based in Port Vila, Vanuatu called Eightcap Global Ltd entity. The broker is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and the Vanuatu Financial Services Commission (VFSC).

Eightcap makes use of the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 (MT4/5) trading platforms, so if you’re an experienced forex trader, you’ll most likely be familiar with these two excellent platforms. If you’re unfamiliar with the MetaTrader platforms, they have an intuitive and easy to use interface that new traders can quickly learn to use. Eightcap was recently awarded Best Global Forex MT4 Broker at the 2020 Global Forex Awards. 

Eightcap lets you trade over 200 financial instruments over a wide range of asset classes, including forex, commodities, indices and shares. The broker’s multilingual customer service team is available during the trading week and can be reached through email, live chat or telephone. If you’ve never traded and want to practice or just check out the broker’s trading services, you can open a demo account funded with virtual money. Eightcap also offers educational resources for new and inexperienced traders. 

Eightcap takes clients from over 194 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania. In North American, Canadians and Mexicans can open a trading account with Eightcap, but not U.S. based retail traders. Find out more about this broker in our Eightcap review below.    

Like most online forex brokers, Eightcap makes money on its clients’ transactions by widening the dealing spreads from those it can obtain in the wholesale marketplace. That amount is factored into the broker’s wider Standard account type dealing spreads, but the broker also charges a $3.50 commission per trade made in Raw accounts that feature narrower spreads.

The broker’s lowest dealing spreads for all of the major forex pairs is 1 pip in its Standard account and 0 pips in its Raw account. The lowest spreads for crosses of the major currencies vary between 1.1 and 1.4 pips in a Standard account or 0.1 to 0.3 in a Raw account, depending on the specific cross involved. The only exotic currency pair offered is USD/SGD, which has a minimum spread of 2 pips for Standard account holders and 1 pip for Raw account holders. 

Eightcap offers multilingual customer service in English, Chinese, Thai, Korean, Vietnamese, German, Spanish, Italian and French via telephone to 61 3 8375 9700, email to customerservice@eightcap.com and live chat. The broker’s live chat service does not operate 24 hours during the trading week, so it was not tested for this review. 

While the broker’s website boasts of its decent review profile of 4.7 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot, most of the recent positive reviews come from reviewers who have only ever left 1 review on the service, so they might have been paid for or otherwise solicited by the company. 

Also suspicious was that many of the good Eightcap reviews seem to come in batches from similar locations. Notably, there were several credible complaints about a “bad tick” in the broker’s price feed causing unfounded losses that the broker apparently dragged its feet about correcting. Another reviewer located outside Australia mentioned ping issues that could delay trade execution via Eightcap, although the broker claims to use US-based Equinix data centers for its execution servers in order to provide “lightning fast execution” times. 

Since Eightcap supports the MetaTrader 4/5 trading platform suite from MetaQuotes, it also allows trading via the MetaTrader mobile trading app that is available for both iOS and Android mobile operating systems. That app has decent charting, account management and trading capabilities and effectively serves as the industry standard for mobile online forex trading. 

Eightcap supports the MetaTrader 4/5 suite, so any trader already familiar with that trading software should have a consistent user experience. New traders should find this popular trading platform very well documented and can take advantage of its large user community to obtain advice online.

If you’re interested in automating and backtesting your trading plan outside of those well-known capabilities of MT4/5, Eightcap has recently partnered with artificial intelligence world leader Capitalise.ai to create a platform specializing in trading automation and analysis. This strategic partnership will allow Eightcap users to access Capitalise.ai’s automation and analytic tools that include loop strategies, backtesting and smart notifications. Eightcap users will also be able to download Capitalise.ai’s mobile apps for Android and iOS. 

The main benefits of using Eightcap to trade forex consist of the broker’s decent dealing spreads for the majors and major crosses, as well as its support for the industry standard MetaTrader trading platform suite to trade forex pairs on. Eightcap also allows trading in a limited number of CFDs on commodities and indices via the MT4/5 suite and shares only via MT5.

In January 2022, Eightcap added to its offerings, pushing the platform over 1000 financial instruments. These new assets begin with:

• Zinc (XZNUSD) on the MT5 platform
• Nickel (XNIUSD) on the MT5 platform

There are also expanded CFD offerings that include:

• 310 ASX Share CFDs
• 100 NASDAQ Share CFDs
• 100 NYSE Share CFDs
• 105 LSE Share CFDs
• 45 German Share CFDs

Also, both Standard and Raw account types are available to suit less frequent or very active traders respectively.  For traders who want to use higher leverage than the maximum 30:1 ratio allowed by the broker’s Australian subsidiary Eightcap Pty Ltd, the broker conveniently has a Vanatau entity called Eightcap Global Ltd that allows its account holders to access up to 500:1 leverage. 

Eightcap’s Melbourne, Australia subsidiary is strictly regulated by the ASIC, while its Port Vila, Vanuatu subsidiary is less strictly regulated by the VFSC. Both entities segregate client money from the broker’s own funds. Note that this broker does not offer negative balance protection that can prevent a trader from losing more than their account balance in case of an adverse market move.

Overall, Eightcap operates as a rather basic forex and CFD broker that offers decent minimum dealing spreads in two account types and supports the popular MT4/5 trading platform suite. The broker also has some helpful educational services for new traders and maintains an offshore entity in Vanatau that lets traders holding accounts there access more risky leverage ratios of 500:1. On the downside, the broker does not offer negative balance protection that many traders have come to expect for safety reasons.  

Relative to its competition, Eightcap’s offerings seem consistent with that of a very basic forex and CFD broker. On the plus side, Eightcap provides support for the MetaTrader platforms and offers a generous maximum leverage ratio of 500:1 if you can open an account with their Vanatau entity. 

Your margin deposit with Eightcap could be at risk, however, due to the lack of negative balance protections that many of its competitors offer.  Also, if you open a Raw account with Eightcap to take advantage of its very tight dealing spreads, prepare to pay the $3.50 charge per trade on top of the dealer spread. Although that fee may seem reasonable, active traders can see their transaction costs mount considerably. 

Another area where Eightcap lags against its competition is its limited types and numbers of tradable assets that include only a limited selection of shares and commodities and lack futures and options trading entirely. If you plan on trading in markets other than those offered by Eightcap, you might be better off with an international broker.