Markets.com Review

For this Markets.com review, we opened a live account and deposited over €4,500.

We traded the popular instrument in each market to identify the actual spreads and placed a total of 12 trades.

We contacted the broker’s customer support team to resolve the challenges we faced.

Finally, we withdrew our funds to find out if the withdrawal process was smooth.

What is Markets.com

Markets.com is a global Forex and CFDs broker founded in 2008 as GFC Markets but rebranded to Markets.com after its parent company Safecap Investments Limited merged with Playtech Plc (LON: PTEC).

The broker is licensed in the United Kingdom, Australia, Cyprus, South Africa, and the British Virgin Islands.

Markets.com offers thousands of instruments to traders in the following categories, Forex pairs, indices, stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies.

The broker offers a wide range of over 2,200 tradable instruments compared to most of its peers.

Here’s a summary of Markets.com’s main features:

Licenses and Regulations

Markets.com is licensed by 5 global regulators, including the tier 1 UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The broker is also regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), South Africa’s Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), and the B.V.I Financial Services Commission (FSC).

Here’s a full list of the licenses held by Markets.com’s subsidiaries:

Is Markets.com Safe

Yes, Markets.com is safe to trade. The broker is regulated by the top-tier ASIC and the UK’s FCA, which have stringent rules and enforcement mechanisms. The broker is also licensed by Cyprus’ CySEC, South Africa’s FSCA and the B.V.I’s FSC.

The UK’s FCA guarantees investors’ deposit compensation of up to £85,000 if the broker goes under, while the CySEC guarantees investors’ deposit compensation of up to €20,000 if the broker becomes insolvent.

The broker is also a subsidiary of Playtech Plc, a publicly listed company. Hence, it is considered to be very safe given the transparency required of public companies.

For this review, we opened an MT5 CFD account with Safecap Investments Limited, regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC). We deposited funds into the account, placed trades, and finally withdrew our funds.

We recommend that you open your account with the UK or Cyprus entities since they are the only ones that offer deposit protection to traders if either is available to you.

Markets.com Fees and Commissions

Markets.com charges mostly high fees for trading the main instruments on offer, including Forex pairs, indices, stocks, and commodities.

The broker’s average spreads for trading the popular instruments in most of the markets listed above were much higher than those charged by its peers.

The fees for trading indices, stocks and commodities were much higher than industry averages. However, the fees for trading Forex pairs were lower than the industry average.

Spread Charged in our Trades

For our tests, we traded the most popular instrument in each market. We placed 3 trades for each instrument to arrive at an accurate estimate of the average spread. We tested Markets.com’s MT5 CFD account, which charges a spread on all instruments. The spreads were quite high, as shown in the table below.

We executed all our trades via the MetaTrader 5 mobile app on our iPhone.

A deeper comparison of the spreads charged in our trades revealed that most of the spreads were higher than industry benchmarks. Only one of Markets.com’s average spreads was below industry averages.

Other fees

Markets.com charges a monthly inactivity fee of $10 after three months if there are no new or running transactions on an account. The broker does not charge deposit or withdrawal fees.

Account Types

Markets.com offers 5 account types that offer slightly different features. The accounts are the CFD, investment strategy builder, MT4 CFD, MT5 CFD, and share dealing accounts.

See the differences below:

Markets.com also offers swap-free Islamic Accounts to Muslim clients. Such accounts do not have a swap fee for positions held overnight, but trades held for over 3 nights are charged an administration fee.

For our tests, we chose to open the MT5 CFD Account with Safecap Investments Limited.

Account Opening

Markets.com account opening is fast and seamless. We completed the entire process digitally within a few minutes.

Here are the 5 steps to opening a Markets.com account:

1. Enter your email and password, confirm the password, choose your account type and account currency.
2. Provide your full name, phone, date of birth, residential address including ZIP code/post code, city, country, and citizenship status.
3. Enter your country of tax residency, TIN number, do you have another tax residency and are you a US citizen?
4. Provide details of your profession and financial position including your education level, employment status, annual income, savings and investments, purpose and nature of trading, and the source of your trading funds.
5. Enter the number of trades you took over the past two years in Forex, shares, bonds, indices, and commodities including the number of leveraged trades.

The registration process took only 6 minutes, and our trading account was approved on the same day.

 

For this test, we opened the MT5 CFD account with Safecap Investments Limited, regulated by CySEC.

Deposit and Withdrawal

Markets.com offers free and fast deposits and withdrawals. Traders can use the following payment methods to deposit and withdraw from their accounts, bank wires, credit and debit cards, and e-wallets such as Skrill, PayPal and Neteller.

The broker does not charge a fee on deposits and withdrawals.

Markets.com Minimum Deposit

Markets.com has different minimum deposit requirements depending on the account type chosen by a client. The investment strategy builder account has a minimum deposit of $/€/£ 10 while the CFD and MT4 CFD accounts have a minimum deposit requirement of $/€/£ 100.

The share dealing account has a minimum deposit of $/€/£ 200 while the MT5 CFD account has a minimum deposit of $/€/£ 500.

Deposit

Markets.com’s clients can deposit funds into their trading accounts via bank transfers, debit/credit cards, and e-wallets such as Skrill, PayPal and Neteller.

The table below shows the details of our deposits:

Markets.com does not charge a fee on deposits. The broker asked us to provide our ID in order to process our PayPal deposit. Our Skrill deposit was also scrutinized to ensure that we were using our own account.

We deposited a total of EUR 5,000 into our account, but EUR 3,000 was to our CFD account denominated in Pounds, which reduced our total deposit to EUR 4,862.53 after the necessary conversions.

Withdrawal

Markets.com allows its clients to withdraw funds from their accounts using the same payment methods available for deposits, which makes it easy for traders to access their funds.

Markets.com does not charge a fee on withdrawals unlike many brokers who have withdrawal fees.

We did not encounter any difficulties during the withdrawal process, which was quite smooth. However, our PayPal withdrawal of EUR 2,000 was split into two with EUR 1,633.67 going back to our credit card and EUR 366.33 being sent to our PayPal account.

We finally received the entire withdrawn amount with the broker explaining that the above split was in-line with its withdrawal policies.

Markets and Products

Markets.com offers a massive number of tradable instruments in the Forex, indices, stocks, commodities and cryptocurrencies markets.

Here’s the complete list of Markets.com’s product offering:

The broker offers a significant number of stocks CFDs to its clients.

Trading Conditions

The trading conditions at Markets.com are excellent. Traders can execute most trading strategies since the broker allows high-risk strategies such as hedging and scalping.

Traders can keep their hedging positions open for as long as they would like. Markets.com also allows traders to use Expert Advisors (EAs).

The broker allows hedging strategies on all account types.

Leverage

Markets.com clients can access different leverage levels depending on the entity under which they register their account.

Traders can also change their account’s leverage level after opening the account.

The table below shows the different leverage levels available to clients:

Bonus

Markets.com offers a 20% deposit bonus to its clients registered under the Australian and British Virgin Islands entities.

The bonus program is based on the following criteria:

Markets.com Trading Platform

Markets.com offers traders two proprietary trading platforms known as Marketsx and Marketsi. The broker also offers the popular MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5) platforms.

The Marketsx and Marketsi platforms have premium features such as Trading Analysts Recommendations, Bloggers Opinions, Insider Trades, Hedge Funds Investment Confidence, Trends In Trading, Advanced Alerts, Acuity News Alerts, Acuity News Trading Sentiment, Signals, Advanced Charting, Related Instruments, Financial Commentary, Thomson Reuters Stock Report and Dow Jones News.

The MT4 and MT5 platforms offer the standard features that made them extremely popular among investors but offer none of the above premium features, which are only found on the broker’s proprietary platforms.

Traders who prefer to trade on proprietary platforms can choose between the Marketsx and Marketsi platforms. Traders who prefer the MetaTrader platform can choose between the MT4 and MT5 platforms.

We found the MT5 platform to be satisfactory for traders who prefer to trade the popular MetaTrader platform, while the Marketsx platform was the best of the two proprietary platforms.

Research and Tools

Markets.com provides its clients with trade ideas that indicate clearly where to buy or sell a certain instrument and the expected price targets. However, the broker does not provide the reasoning behind the trade signals.

The broker also provides stock trading recommendations from analysts and experts at top-tier banks such as J.P.Morgan and Goldman Sachs. The analysts are ranked according to their past performance, helping traders chose the best performing experts.

Traders get access to the insider trades sentiment section that has a record of trades made by company insiders such as CEOs and top managers. The hedge fund sentiment section provides details of portfolio adjustments made by the top hedge fund managers in the past quarter.

We found the broker’s fundamental company data to be quite shallow as important financial ratios and past earnings results are not provided.

The broker’s Marketsi platform is licensed from Saxo Bank and bears a close similarity to Saxo’s TraderGO platform. However, the news feed is quite different.

Education

Markets.com has an entire section known as the Knowledge Centre that provides ongoing education to traders. The centre has Analysis, News, XRay, and Webinar segments. The XRay segment is a live stream service that offers daily market analytics and discussions of market-related developments.

However, the XRay service is only available on Markets.com’s proprietary trading platforms. The broker’s news segment offers fresh content and discussions of breaking news stories and their impact on the affected assets.

The broker offers 60-minute webinars that are useful for beginners and a few introductory articles on market fundamentals. We think this section could be more detailed to be at par with industry leaders.

Customer Service

Markets.com’s customer service team was accommodating and gave us direct answers to our questions. We first contacted the team via live chat and received a prompt but inaccurate response to our question.

You can reach Markets.com’s customer service team via email and live chat. The customer service team answered our live chat query within 1 minute, which was very impressive.

We submitted our second query to the customer support team via email and received a clear and direct answer within two hours.

Here are the results of our test below:

Conclusion

Finally, we had a positive experience with Markets.com starting from the account opening to the deposit, trading and withdrawal processes.

Markets.com has spreads that are higher than industry averages, except for Forex spreads, which were below industry benchmarks. The broker’s response time for live chat requests was quite fast with email queries being answered quickly as well.

However, traders should ensure that their queries are well understood by the customer support agents, especially for live chat requests.

The broker offers fast deposits, but traders must provide documents proving their ID and residential address. Traders should be aware that inter-account transfers from GBP denominated accounts to EUR accounts will result in lower amounts than expected.

We recommend Markets.com for traders who are

• Forex traders and Stock traders
• Beginners in trading
• Experienced traders
• Scalping or hedging traders
• EA trader
• High-risk strategies trader

Markets.com might not be a fit for

• Comission based trading
• Trading Futures or Index