Darwinex Review

For this GKFX review, we have opened a standard account with the broker and deposited over €5,000.

We traded the popular instrument in each market to get the real spreads and placed a total of 15 trades.

We also reached out to customer support to solve the issues we faced.

Finally, we withdrew our funds to see if there are any issues with the withdrawal process.

What is GKFX?

GKFX is a United Kingdom-headquartered forex and contracts for difference (CFDs) broker established in 2010.

The broker group runs three retail brands: GKFX, GKFX Prime, and GKFX Cambodia. It also runs the GKPro brand, which serves only professional traders.

Retail offers in the broker include contracts for differences (CFDs) trading with forex, indices, commodities, stocks, and cryptocurrencies.

GKFX is well-regulated with operating licenses from the financial regulators in the United Kingdom, Malta, the British Virgin Islands, Australia, and Cambodia.

Some of the highlights of GKFX are:

Licenses and Regulations

GKFX holds licenses from regulators in 4 countries.

The broker is regulated in the UK, Malta, British Virgin Islands, and Cambodia. The UK’s FCA is considered as one of the top global financial regulators.

The full list of GKFX licenses is below:

The Malta-regulated entity operates with the tradename GKFX, the British Virgin Islands entity with GKFX Prime, the Cambodian entity with GKFX Cambodia, the Australian entity operates under FairMarkets, and the Indonesian entity operates with GKInvest.

UK regulated broker GKFX Financial Services Ltd only offers services to professional and institutional clients with the tradename GKPro.

Is GKFX Safe?

Yes, GKFX is a safe broker from a regulatory perspective.

The broker is well-regulated with a total of 4 licenses. It is also overseen by the UK’s FCA, which is a well-reputed financial market regulator and offers a compensation scheme of £85,000 to protect clients’ funds. Malta’s MFSA also offers a compensation scheme of €20,000.

For our tests, we opened an MT5 Standard account with AKFX Financial Services Ltd, which is regulated by Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) in Malta.

Fees and Commissions

Trading fees on GKFX are mostly built into spreads. The broker, however, charges commission on its higher-tier accounts with low spreads.

Spreads for forex, indices, commodities, and stocks on our trades were much below the average industry benchmark.

GKFX Spread Charged in Our Trades

For our tests, we have chosen popular instruments in each market. We placed 3 trades for each instrument to get a picture of the average spread.

Our test is based on GKFX’s Standard account. Spreads for our trades with forex, indices, stocks, and commodities remained stable with minor deflections for all asset classes.

Details of our trades are shown below the table.

Our testing finds that spreads on forex, indices, commodities, and cryptocurrency CFDs are lower than the industry average. Spreads on share CFDs are, however, on the higher side.

Other Fees

GKFX does not have any prominent non-trading fees. The broker does not charge any deposit or withdrawal fees, and there are no maintenance or inactivity fees either.

Account Types

The retail account types offered by GKFX vary with each regulated entity.

Details of all account types under AKFX Financial Services Ltd (regulated in Malta) are:

Details of all account types under International Finance House Ltd (regulated in the British Virgin Islands) are:

Details of all account types under GKFX Cambodia Co Ltd (regulated in Cambodia) are:

FairMarkets Trading Pty Ltd (Australian regulated broker) offers only one account type:

Details of account types offered by Global Kapital Investama Berjangka (regulated in Indonesia):

The Indonesian entity also offers a Multilateral account for commodities trading.

Account Opening

Our overall experience of opening a new account with GKFX was smooth and fast.

We opened a MetaTrader 5 Standard account for our tests under the Malta-regulated entity.

The process of registration of a new GKFX account:

1. Enter personal details like the first name, last name, country of residence, phone number, email, and declaration of non-US nationality.
2. Prove more personal details like date of birth, place of birth, residential address, nationality, and passport number.
3. Provide professional and financial information: employment status, annual income, total assets, liquid assets, source of assets, expected annual deposit amount and expected trading frequency.
4. Answer some questionnaires on trading knowledge and experience.

We submitted the following documents to verify our GKFX account:

1. Copy of national identification (both front and back)
2. Copy of our bank statement

The registration process took around 12 minutes. Our account was verified in 1 working day.

Our account was registered on March 26, 2022, and approved on March 29, 2022.

Our overall account opening experience was smooth and without any issues from registration to verification.

Deposit and Withdrawal

Both deposits and withdrawals on GKFX are easy and fast. All our funding and withdrawal requests were completed without any issues.

The broker does not charge any fees for deposits and withdrawals.

Minimum Deposit

The minimum deposit on GKFX varies with the account types.

For Malta-registered entity operating as GKFX:

• Standard account: €200
• Premium account: €25,000

For the British Virgin Islands-registered GKFX Prime:

• Standard Fixed account: $0
• Standard Variable account: $0
• VIP Variable account: $5,000
• ECN Zero account: $0

Traders only need to maintain the minimum deposit balance on their accounts.

Deposit

GKFX supports deposits with bank transfers, credit and debit cards, two online wallets, Neteller and Skrill. There are no deposit fees.

The deposit methods also depend on the account jurisdiction.

We tested the deposit process on GKFX using a credit card, Neteller, and Skrill.

Details of our fund deposits are shown in the below table.

Withdrawal

GKFX allows withdrawals with bank transfers, credit and debit cards, and online wallets like Neteller and Skrill. It does not charge any withdrawal fee.

Overall, our experience with the GKFX withdrawal process was positive.

Details of our withdrawal requests are in the table below.

Markets and Products

GKFX offers CFDs trading services with forex, indices, stocks, commodities, and cryptocurrencies instruments.

The complete list of GKFX’s offerings are:

The markets and the number of offered instruments will depend on the account jurisdiction and also the type of account.

Trading Conditions

Trading conditions on GKFX are bad. The broker does not allow hedging and scalping strategies. Retail traders cannot even change leverage levels.

Only professional traders can change leverage levels.

Leverage

Leverages offered by the various entities of GKFX are detailed below:

Copy Trading GKFX Prime Review

The British Virgin Islands-registered GKFX Prime offers services with two third party copy trading platforms:

• Autotrade
• Zulutrade

Trading Platform

GKFX offers trading services on MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 platforms. These are industry standard third-party platforms developed by the company MetaQuotes Software.

Both these platforms are available on the web, desktop, and mobile.

GKFX MT4

We executed all our trades on MetaTrader 5 platform.

Research and Tools

GKFX offers excellent market research and analysis tools.

Tools offered by the broker include:

• Good charting tools
• Trading signals using Autochartist and Trading Central
• Economic calendar
• Forex VPS
• Trading automation with Tradeworks
• Market research articles and weekly videos
• Newsfeed

Education

GKFX offers good educational resources.

The broker’s educational materials include:

• Video tutorials for beginners and expert traders
• Details guides on trading and platforms
• Ebooks
• Webinars
• Demo account

Customer Service

GKFX has good customer support.

Traders can contact the broker via:

• Live chat
• email
• Phone

The support staff is available only on weekdays and takes questions in 14 languages.

Our experience with GKFX customer support was very good.

The support staff on both live chat and email was quick enough to answer our query accurately and in detail.

The broker also has a detailed FAQ section for frequently faced issues.

Conclusion

Our overall experience with GKFX was decent.

The broker offers attractive spreads on forex with fast execution. Commodity spreads also remained stable.

Account opening, deposits, and withdrawals are also smooth and fast on the broker. Our experience with customer support was again excellent as the responses were fast, clear, and detailed.

On the negative side, GKFX does not allow traders to run hedging and scalping.

We recommend GKFX to forex traders who run EA.

We recommend GKFX for traders who are

• Experienced traders
• Beginners
• EAs trading
• Trading through MT4

GKFX might not be a fit if you are

• Real Stock / Futures Trading
• Commission based trading
• Run Scalping
• Hedging
• Prefer other platforms rather than MetaTrader