Plus500 Review

For this Plus500 review, we have opened an account with the broker and deposited over €6,000.

We traded the popular instrument in each market to get the real spreads and placed a total of 18 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 Plus500?

Plus500 Ltd was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Israel. Plus500 Ltd is listed on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange

The broker has a presence in the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Seychelles, Singapore, and Australia and holds licenses in all of these jurisdictions.

Plus500 offers trading services with forex pairs CFDs and CFDs of stocks, indices CFDs, cryptocurrencies CFDs, ETFs, and options. It targets both retail and professional traders. Professional traders lose their ICF rights-.

Some of the highlights of Plus500 are:

Licenses and Regulations

Plus500 holds 6 regulatory licenses from several top regulators, like the United Kingdom’s FCA, Singapore’s MAS, CySec, and Australia’s ASIC.

The full list of all Plus500 licenses is below:

Plus500’s Australian entity holds licenses from the regulators in Australia and South Africa.

Is Plus500 Safe?

Plus500 is a publically listed company. It has to publish its financial details every quarter to comply with UK regulations.

The amount of compensation payable to each covered Client is calculated in accordance with the legal and contractual terms governing the relation of the covered Client with the Company, subject to the rules of setoff applied for the calculation of the claims between the covered Client and the Company.

You can find more information here.

Plus500 Review

For this review, we opened an account with Plus500CY Pty Ltd, which is one of the CySec regulated brokers in Europe. We deposited money, placed trades, and withdrew deposits for our tests.

Plus500 Fees and Commissions

Plus500 is mainly compensated for its services through the “market spread”. For example, when trading EUR/USD, if the buy rate is 1.12078 then the sell rate would be 1.12072 respectively (which means a market spread of 0.6 pips, in this example). Unlike other service providers who also charge commissions on each trade, Plus500 does not charge commissions.

However, the following additional fees may be applied:

Overnight Funding – The overnight funding amount is either added to or subtracted from your account when holding a position after a certain time (the “Overnight Funding Time”).
The overnight funding time and the daily overnight funding percentage can be found in the “Details” link next to the instrument’s name on the main screen of the platform.

Currency Conversion Fee – Plus500 will charge a Currency Conversion Fee for all trades on instruments denominated in a currency different to the currency of your account.
The Currency Conversion Fee will currently be up to 0.7% of the trade’s realised net profit and loss and reflected in real time into the unrealised net profit and loss of an open position.

Inactivity Fee – A fee of up to USD 10 per month will be levied, should you not log in to your trading account for a period of at least three months. This fee will be charged once a month from that moment onwards, as long as no login is made to the account. The inactivity fee will be equal to the lesser of the remaining available balance in your account or USD 10 (or equivalent depending on your currency). This is to offset the cost incurred in making the service available, even though it has not been used. However, please note that the fee is only collected from the Real Money account and only when there are sufficient available funds in the account. In order to avoid this fee, simply log into your trading account from time to time, as this is deemed sufficient activity to prevent a fee from being charged.

Guaranteed Stop Order – if you choose this feature, please note that as it guarantees that your position (trade) closes at a specific requested rate (price), the trade is subject to a wider spread.

Account Types

Plus500 offers a single account type to traders.

Account Opening

Opening a new account with Plus500 is straightforward.

Registration of a new Plus500 account:

1. Enter your email and password (New traders can also register using existing Google, Facebook, or Apple account)

We had to go to the “account” section from the “menu” to complete the registration and verify the account.

1. Enter the first name, middle name (optional), last name, and date of birth.
2. Select country of residence (you have to declare non-US citizenship)
3. Enter the residential address.
4. Provide national registration card number.
5. Provide economic profile (employment status and field of work).
6. Provide financial details (annual income; savings and investments; source of funds).
7. Answer some “knowledge assessment” questions.
8. Accept terms and conditions, and risk disclosure.

Plus500 sends a letter at the residential address with a 3 digital code for address validation.

Traders have to make a minimum deposit via credit/debit card, PayPal, or bank transfer to activate their account.

We submitted the following documents to verify our Plus500 account:

1. Copy of national identification (both front and back)
2. Copy of passport
3. Copy of Bank statement as address proof

Overall, our account opening experience was smooth.

We had to open a second Plus500 account for our tests because of some verification issues with the first one.

For our first account, we had to verify our debit card after making the first deposit. We provided a photocopy of our debit card, where the name, last four digits of the card number, issue/expiry date, and the logo of the issuer are visible.

Our verification was not successful even after 20 back and forth emails and submitting 5 different photos and a video recording of the card over a couple of months. We finally withdrew our funds and closed the account.

For our second account, the experience was completely the opposite (in a good way).

Before making any deposits this time, we approved our bank account and debit card, and it was done in minutes.

Additionally, kindly note that the demo account could be opened within some minutes.

Deposit and Withdrawal

Both deposits and withdrawals on Plus500 are fast, easy, and without any fees. All our funding and withdrawal requests were smooth.

Plus500 Minimum Deposit

Plus500 requires a minimum deposit of $100 with a credit/debit card, ApplePay, and PayPal, while it’s $300 for bank transfers.

You have to make a minimum deposit each time you fund your account, not just for the first time.

Deposit

Deposit methods on Plus500 are limited to credit/debit cards, bank transfers, and two popular electronic wallets, PayPal and Skrill.

We tested the deposit process on Plus500 using multiple payment modes.

There was no deposit fee and the fundings were instant.

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

You have to verify your credit/debit card or bank account when making the first deposit.

Withdrawal

Plus500 allows withdrawals via credit/debit cards, bank transfers, PayPal, and Skrill.

Overall, our experience with Plus500’s withdrawal process was positive.

However, the broker credited our funds to credit/debit card when we requested withdrawal on PayPal.

Details of our withdrawal requests are in the table below.

Markets and Products

Plus500 offers CFDs trading services in many popular markets, including forex, indices, commodities, stocks, cryptocurrencies, ETFs, and options.

The number of instruments in each market is also good.

The complete list of Plus500 offerings are:

Crypto

Plus500 is a popular broker for cryptocurrency CFDs trading.

It offers contracts with popular digital currencies and a crypto index. All Plus500 crypto CFDs are:

• Bitcoin
• Ethereum/Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Crypto 10 Index
• Litecoin
• NEO
• IOTA
• Stellar

The offered leverage on such contracts is decent and in compliance with regulators. We have elaborated on Plus500 leverages here.

Trading Conditions

Plus500 does not allow hedging or scalping. It does not even allow traders to change leverage levels.

Plus500 defines scalping as a trading strategy based on which traders open and close numerous transactions within two minutes to accumulate quick profits from small price changes. This strategy is not allowed.

Leverage

Leverages offered by Plus500 on various asset class on all its platforms are detailed below:

Trading Platform

Plus500 offers its own trading platform. The platform is user-friendly, but cannot be customized.

The broker offers its trading platform on web and mobile, there is no desktop-specific client.

We executed our trades on Plus500 web client.

Research and Tools

Plus500 offers not so great market research tools. It offers some excellent charting tools.

Some of the tools offered by the broker are:

• Economic calendar
• Trading indicators and charting tools
• Price alerts
• Analysis of major economic events
• Good risk management tools

The broker does not offer fundamental market data or trading signals.

Education

Plus500 offers only a few basic videos to educate novice traders. It also provides demo trading accounts.

Customer Service

Plus500 has decent customer support.

Traders can contact the broker via:

• Live chat
• email

Our experience with Plus500 customer support was mixed. Though the broker representatives were quick to answer, all of our issues were not resolved.

We exchanged over 20 emails with Plus500 support throughout our test. Most of them are related to card verification. We are getting an answer the same day or the next working day.

The issue was not resolved and we ended up opening a second account.

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

Conclusion

Our experience with Plus500 was mixed.

There was a stark difference in experience between our first and second accounts. Our card verification failed even after exchanging over 20 emails with our first account, but we did not face any such issue with the second account; we opened both accounts with the Australian entity.

Plus500 lacks decent educational material and has no account manager to support traders. It does not allow hedging or scalping as trading strategies.

On the positive side, the broker holds six regulatory licenses. It is also listed on London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

It also offers a huge list of CFD instruments across several markets with attractive spreads on forex pairs.

We recommend Plus500 for traders who are

• Experienced traders
• Trading CFD

Plus500 might not be a fit if you are

• Scalping trader
• Hedging trader
• EA trader
• Trading through MT4/MT5 platform
• Commission based trading

CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 82% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.