Pepperstone Review

For this Pepperstone review, we opened a live account and deposited over €6,000.

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

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

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

What is Pepperstone

Pepperstone is an Australian Forex and CFDs broker founded in 2010.

The broker is licensed in Australia, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Germany, Bahamas, the UAE and Kenya.

Pepperstone offers the following tradable instruments: forex pairs, indices, stocks, commodities, ETFs, cryptocurrencies, and a currency index.

The broker’s product range is quite limited as compared to some of its peers.

Here’s a summary of Pepperstone’s key features:

Is Pepperstone Regulated

Pepperstone is licensed by 6 regulators worldwide including the top-tier UK’s FCA, Australia’s ASIC, Cyprus’ CySEC, Germany’s BaFin, Dubai’s FSA, the Bahamas’ SCB and Kenya’s CMA.

Here’s a full list of the licenses held by Pepperstone’s subsidiaries:

Is Pepperstone Safe

Yes, Pepperstone is safe to trade. The broker is regulated by the top-tier UK’s FCA and Australia’s ASIC, which have stringent rules and enforcement processes. See the list of Nigerian forex brokers like Pepperstone.

The FCA guarantees traders registered under the UK entity deposit compensation of up to £85,000 in case the broker declares bankruptcy.

The CySEC also guarantees investors deposit compensation of up to €20,000 if they are registered under the Cyprus entity, and the broker goes under.

We did not encounter any major challenges when trading with Pepperstone.

Pepperstone UK

For this review, we opened an account under Pepperstone Limited, the UK entity regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). We deposited funds into the account, placed trades, and finally, withdrew our funds.

We recommend that you open your account under the UK entity since it offers the highest deposit protection compensation of up to £85,000 guaranteed by the UK’s FCA, which is the best in the industry.

You can also open your account with the Cyprus entity, given that the CySEC guarantees investors compensation of up to €20,000.

Pepperstone Fees and Commissions

Pepperstone charges low fees for most of the instruments on offer except for cryptocurrencies.

The broker’s average spreads for the popular instruments in each market were below industry averages.

However, we found the spreads on Bitcoin trades to be way above industry averages, making the broker unfriendly to cryptocurrency traders.

Pepperstone Spread Charged in our Trades

For our tests, we chose to trade the popular instrument in each market. We placed 3 trades for each instrument to get a full picture of the average spread. We tested the Standard Account with Pepperstone Limited, which charges a spread on all tradable instruments. The spreads varied slightly as shown in the table below.

We tested all our trades via the MetaTrader 5 mobile application on our iPhone. Pepperstone offers the popular MT4 and MT5 platforms in addition to the cTrader platform.

Looking at the spreads charged in our trades, we found that most were lower than industry benchmarks. However, the Bitcoin spreads were more than double the industry average, which stood out. Spreads on all the other assets were lower than the average spreads charged by its peers.

Other fees

Pepperstone does not charge other non-trading fees such as account inactivity fees or deposit and withdrawal fees.

Pepperstone Account Types

Pepperstone offers 2 account types with separate fee structures, that is, the Razor and Standard accounts. See the differences below:

Pepperstone also offers swap-free Islamic Accounts that charge an administration fee for trades held for over 3 nights instead of the typical swap fee.

For our tests, we chose to open a Standard Account.

Account Opening

Pepperstone account opening is quite straightforward. We tested the entire process while opening our account, and it was fully digital.

Here are the 5 steps to opening a Pepperstone account:

1. Enter your country of residence, preferred language, client type, full name, email address, and phone number.
2. Enter your personal address including country of residence, State, city, Street name and number and ZIP code.
3. Provide your nationality and specify if you are a US citizen for tax purposes, your education level, employment status, nature of your business, and employer’s name.
4. Answer questions about your annual income, savings and investments, source of funds and trading objectives, and your expected deposit over 12 months.
5. Verify your identity and residential address using either a National ID or Passport and a bank statement.

The registration process took a total of 20 minutes, and our account was approved on the next day, as expected.

Our account was approved after submitting all the required documents. We were allowed to choose the entity under which we wanted to register our account.

We chose to open a standard account with Pepperstone Limited, which the UK’s FCA regulates.

 

Deposit and Withdrawal

Pepperstone offers fast deposits and withdrawals. There are various options for funding your account, including bank wires, credit and debit cards, and e-wallets such as PayPal.

Minimum Deposit for Pepperstone

Pepperstone has a minimum deposit of AUD $200 for both its Razor and Standard accounts.

Deposit

Pepperstone clients can deposit funds into their trading accounts using debit/credit cards, bank transfers, and e-wallets.

The payment options available to a trader depend on the entity under which their account is registered. The Australian entity provides the most payment options, followed by the UK entity, which provides three payment options.

The details of our deposits are shown in the table below:

All the deposit methods offered by Pepperstone are instant and free. However, a bank transfer could take a few business days to reflect in your trading account.

Withdrawal

Pepperstone processes client withdrawals via the payment methods available for deposits, making it convenient for clients to withdraw their funds.

Given that we registered our account under the UK entity, we had access to three payment methods: credit/debit cards, PayPal, and bank transfers.

We withdrew our funds via credit card and PayPal since we had not used bank transfers to deposit.

We noticed that the withdrawals were not instant and took between 1 and 2 days to arrive in our accounts.

Our withdrawals took between 1 and 2 days to arrive in our accounts, which as fine.

Markets and Products

At Pepperstone, you can trade CFDs on Forex pairs, stock indices, stocks, commodities, cryptocurrencies and a currency index.

Pepperstone CFD Review

Here’s the complete list of Pepperstone’s product offering:

Trading Conditions

The trading conditions at Pepperstone are good. You can run most trading strategies since the broker allows high-risk strategies such as hedging and scalping.

There are no time limits for how long you can keep your hedging positions open. Pepperstone also allows traders to use Expert Advisors (EAs).

Leverage

Pepperstone offers different leverage levels to its clients depending on the entity under which they registered their account.

Traders cannot change the leverage level of their account after registration.

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

Trading Platform

Pepperstone offers the popular MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5) platforms to its clients, as well as TradingView and the cTrader platform.

The broker does not have a proprietary trading platform. Traders can trade via the broker’s web platform provided by MetaTrader, as well as via the mobile and desktop MT4, MT5 and cTrader applications.

Pepperstone MT4

The lack of a proprietary trading platform may dissuade some traders, but the MT5 and cTrader platforms are great.

Pepperstone’s web platform can be customised to a great extent and generates a detailed fee report. However, it is a bit dated and can be slow at times.

Research and Tools

Pepperstone provides research tools via the in-built features on the MetaTrader 4 platform. However, the platform’s news feature is quite basic, and it does not provide fundamental data or trade ideas.

The broker provides trade ideas via Autochartist, a feature that is accessible within the secure client area. Traders can also download the plugin and connect it to the trading platform to get notifications on the go.

Pepperstone also offers detailed market analysis written by its in-house experts, such as its daily newsletter, “The Daily Fix”, and a “Chart of the Day” series.

The broker also offers the Smart Trader tools that work on the MetaTrader platform and include sentiment trackers, a correlation matrix, and a trade simulator, among other tools.

Education

The broker offers platform tutorial videos, educational videos, and webinars to suit all types of traders. Beginner traders also get to benefit from the detailed educational articles that are part of the brokers “learn to trade” section.

Pepperstone also have a YouTube channel that offers dozens of educational videos that cover different topics suitable for all levels of traders from beginners to advanced traders.

Pepperstone Demo Account

Pepperstone offers a demo account that allows traders to test their strategies and familiarise themselves with the markets without risking their own money.

Clients who deposit over $2500 get access to premium educational content and trading signals from BK Forex.

Customer Service

Pepperstone’s customer support team was helpful and provided direct and relevant answers to our questions. Our first interaction with the customer service team was via live chat we received an accurate answer to our question.

You can contact Pepperstone via email and live chat. We were connected to the customer service team almost instantly via the live chat function since we waited for less than one minute.

Our email query was answered within two hours, which was quite impressive, and we got a clear, direct and accurate answer to our question about the withdrawal process.

See the results of our tests below:

Conclusion

Overall, our experience with Pepperstone was smooth from the account opening, to the deposit, trading and withdrawal processes.

The broker offers a small number of tradable instruments compared to other brokers. We traded across 5 markets and apart from Bitcoin, the spreads on all instruments was lower than the industry average. Pepperstone allows scalping and hedging but forbids the changing of leverage after one has opened an account.

The responses from the customer service team were fast and they gave us high-quality answers to our questions. We encourage traders to use the live chat function when they encounter any issues given the prompt feedback we got using this method.

We recommend Pepperstone to open account with the UK, Australia or Cyprus entities if any is available to you. And traders who are

• Beginning traders
• Experienced traders
• Scalping or Hedging trader
• EA trader
• Trading CFD

Pepperstone might not be a fit if you are

• Trading Futures or Real Stocks