Eightcap Forex Review

Eightcap Ratings at a Glance

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 the Bahamas called Eightcap Global Ltd entity.

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 on WebTrader. Eightcap was recently awarded Best Global Forex MT4 Broker at the 2020 Global Forex Awards. You can also connect with a TradingView account.

Eightcap lets you trade over 800 financial instruments over a wide range of asset classes, including forex, commodities, indices, shares and cryptocurrencies. 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. 

Additional tools include:

• AI Economic Calendar—allowing you to review the historic impact of over 1,000 events that will inform your current investment decisions
• Flash Trader—Offering automatic risk management and movement with the markets, you can take control of multiple positions, ensure that you take the profits you want and trade with 1 click
• Eightcap Trade Zone—Here, you will find experts who offer their trading insights that you can copy or modify to meet your needs
• Trading Outlook—Offering market forecasts for investors of all skill levels
• Trade Ideas—Inspiration for any investors
• Eightcap Labs—All the educational tools you need to build and maintain your portfolio
• Events and Webinars—Illuminating novice and experience traders alike
• TradingView Accounts—Access to charting through a TradingView makes it that much easier to complete a technical analysis on any asset

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 3.5 AUD, USD, NZD, SGD, CAD, 2.25 GBP or 2.75 EUR per standard lot traded per round trip 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, phone and email assistance team is available 24/5 (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 and WebTrader, along with connecting to TradingView accounts, 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 Bahamas entity called Eightcap Global Ltd that allows its account holders to access up to 500:1 leverage. 

Eightcap Global Limited is regulated by The Securities Commission of The Bahamas (SCB) (SIA-F220). Eightcap Pty Ltd (ABN 73 139 495 944) is regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (AFSL 391441). Eightcap Group Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 921296. Eightcap Group Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with registration number 12448314 and registered address 40 Gracechurch Street, London, EC3V 0BT. Eightcap Limited is incorporated in the Seychelles with registration number 196744. Eightcap EU Ltd, is incorporated in Cyprus with Registration Number HE329922, authorized and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) under license number 246/14, with Registered Office Address Aiolou & Panagioti Diomidous 9, Katholiki, 3020, Limassol, Cyprus.

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. Plus, the broker offers negative balance protection that many traders have come to expect for safety reasons.  

Eightcap vs. Competitors

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, negative balance protection is available.  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. 

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