Eightcap.

Regulation is the first box to tick on any broker, and with Eightcap it's layered — which legal entity you sign with decides both your protections and your maximum leverage, so it matters far more than the badge on the homepage.

The Tier-1 licences are the ones that count. Eightcap Pty Ltd is authorised by Australia's ASIC (AFSL 391441); Eightcap UK Ltd is regulated by the UK's FCA; and an EU entity operates under CySEC in Cyprus. Clients onboarded to these get the protections that actually matter when something goes wrong: segregated client funds held apart from company money, negative-balance protection so you can never lose more than your balance, and access to a compensation scheme — up to £85,000 under the UK's FSCS, or €20,000 under the EU's Investor Compensation Fund.

Alongside those sit an offshore arm under the SCB (Securities Commission of The Bahamas) and a presence regulated by the SCA in the UAE. The SCB entity is where the headline 1:500 leverage lives — and, predictably, where consumer protection is thinner. None of this is unusual; nearly every global broker runs a tiered structure. The practical takeaway: before you fund, read which entity is named on your client agreement and confirm it's the one whose protections you want. The licence advertised on the homepage is not always the one you end up trading under. On track record, Eightcap has operated since 2009 without the regulatory blow-ups that sink weaker firms — meaningful reassurance in an industry full of names that don't last a market cycle.

Leverage and margin follow your entity too. Under ASIC, the FCA and CySEC, retail leverage is capped at the regulated 1:30 on major FX, 1:20 on minors and gold, lower on other instruments and as little as 1:2 on crypto; the offshore SCB entity goes up to 1:500. Be precise about what that does to your account: at 1:30, €1,000 of margin controls €30,000 of EUR/USD, and a move of just 3.3% against you wipes that margin out; at 1:500, a move of about 0.2% — minutes of work for EUR/USD around news — does the same. Eightcap applies a margin close-out that liquidates positions when equity falls too far, and regulated-entity clients have negative-balance protection as a backstop, but by the time either kicks in the damage is done. Treat high leverage as a way to commit less margin per trade, not as licence to trade thirty times bigger.

Two live accounts, both with a $100 minimum deposit. Standard is commission-free (spreads from ~1.0 pip); Raw adds a $3.50-per-side commission for spreads from 0.0 pips. A swap-free Islamic account and a free demo are available.

Eightcap keeps the account line-up refreshingly simple — two live accounts, both with a low $100 minimum deposit — so your choice is purely about how you'd rather pay your trading costs. Both can be opened as a swap-free Islamic account, and both are available as a free demo so you can measure the real spreads and execution before risking a cent. There's no premium "VIP" tier hiding better pricing behind a huge deposit: the Raw account's pricing is identical whether you fund $100 or $100,000 — fairer than the volume-tiered models some rivals run.

Now let's price it like a trader, not a marketer. The Standard account is commission-free: you pay only the spread, from about 1.0 pip on EUR/USD, widening on minors and exotics. Simple and predictable, but on a standard lot a 1.0-pip spread is roughly $10 per round turn — fine for occasional or swing trades, expensive once you trade size and frequency.

The Raw account is the one to take seriously. Spreads start at 0.0 pips on the majors and you pay a fixed $3.50 commission per side — $7 per round-turn lot. Add a typical raw spread of ~0.1 pip (about $1) and your all-in cost on a standard EUR/USD lot is roughly $8, i.e. about 0.6–0.7 pips. That's genuinely competitive and sits right beside the recognised low-cost brokers.

Now the costs that quietly add up. Leveraged positions held past the daily rollover incur an overnight swap — on a multi-day hold this can dwarf the spread you paid to open, so check the swap table before you carry a position. Crypto CFDs run wider spreads and higher financing, normal for the asset class but worth modelling if crypto is your main market. On the housekeeping side, Eightcap doesn't charge its own deposit fees on the main entities and there's no inactivity fee on the core accounts — a small but welcome detail many rivals get wrong. Bottom line: on the Raw account the all-in cost is low and transparent; the Standard account is only cheap if you trade rarely.

Eightcap doesn't try to reinvent the terminal — it gives you the platforms serious traders already use and makes sure they work. You get the full pair: MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, on desktop, web and mobile. MT4 remains the workhorse for forex and Expert Advisors (automated strategies); MT5 adds more timeframes, more order types, an integrated economic calendar and depth-of-market, and is the better pick if you trade several asset classes.

The real differentiator is the native TradingView integration: you can trade directly from TradingView's charts using your Eightcap account — the best charting environment in retail trading wired straight to live execution. For chart-led discretionary traders, that alone is a reason to shortlist Eightcap. For automation without code, Capitalise.ai lets you write strategies and alerts in plain English and have them executed, with no MQL programming — genuinely useful and rare at this price point. There's also a browser-based WebTrader for quick access from any machine. What you don't get is a slick in-house proprietary platform of the kind IG or eToro build; if you dislike MetaTrader, you're leaning on TradingView to carry the experience.

On mobile, you're using the standard MT4, MT5 and TradingView apps — mature, stable and full-featured, but the same apps every MetaTrader broker offers, so nothing here is distinctly Eightcap. If a polished proprietary app matters to you, some rivals do more on the phone.

On execution, Eightcap runs a market-execution model. In normal conditions, expect fills close to the quoted price with no pattern of requotes — which matches its reputation. The honest caveat applies to any market-model broker: in the seconds around high-impact news (Non-Farm Payrolls, CPI, central-bank decisions) spreads widen and slippage happens. That's the market, not a trick — but don't run tight stops straight into a release and expect the quoted spread to hold. You get the full order-type set (market, limit, stop, trailing stop) plus EA automation.

Research and education are functional rather than a selling point. You get a market-news feed and analysis through Eightcap Labs, an AI-assisted economic calendar, plus the considerable firepower you bring yourself via TradingView. The education library — e-books, articles, webinars and a "Trade Zone" — gets a motivated newcomer trading, but it isn't the structured, progressive academy that brokers like Capital.com or IG provide and won't take a true beginner from zero to competent on its own. If you're experienced this won't matter; if you're starting out, treat it as a supplement and learn the fundamentals elsewhere first.

A clean, no-frills environment: tight Raw-account costs, stable MetaTrader execution and TradingView on top. See Platforms above for the execution detail.

Mobile is handled by the standard MT4, MT5 and TradingView apps — reliable and full-featured, but not a proprietary experience.

Eightcap offers 800+ instruments, all traded as CFDs, across five asset classes — and the mix tells you exactly who it's built for.

• Forex: the full set of majors, a solid range of minors and a reasonable selection of exotics — enough for any FX strategy.
• Cryptocurrencies: the headline act. With 250+ crypto CFDs, Eightcap has one of the widest crypto line-ups of any regulated CFD broker, going well beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum into a long tail of altcoins. If you want to trade crypto price action with leverage on a regulated platform, this is a real reason to choose it.
• Indices: the major global benchmarks — US, European and Asian — are all covered.
• Commodities: metals (gold, silver), energies (oil, natural gas) and a handful of softs.
• Shares: single-stock CFDs are available, but this is the narrowest part of the offer — if you want thousands of individual shares, multi-asset rivals do more.

The pattern is clear: Eightcap is strongest where active traders live — forex and crypto — and thinner on the equity side. Remember these are CFDs: you're trading the price movement, not owning the underlying asset, and everything carries leverage and overnight financing. Match the asset to your strategy, and keep position sizes sane on the more volatile crypto and index markets where overnight gaps are common.

Retail leverage is capped at 1:30 on majors under ASIC/FCA/CySEC, up to 1:500 via the offshore SCB entity. See the Regulation section above for the margin maths and the risk.

Functional: Eightcap Labs news, an AI economic calendar and TradingView's own tools. See Platforms above.

E-books, articles, webinars and a "Trade Zone" — a starter library rather than a structured academy. See Platforms above.

Funding is broad and quick. You can deposit by Visa and Mastercard, the main e-wallets (PayPal, Skrill, Neteller), bank transfer, and — fitting for a crypto-heavy broker — directly in crypto (BTC, ETH, USDT). Card and e-wallet deposits are effectively instant; bank transfers take the usual day or two.

Withdrawals are a genuine strong point: most are processed within one business day, and requests made before the daily cut-off are often handled same-day. Eightcap doesn't levy its own deposit fees on the main entities, though your bank, card issuer or the crypto network may charge theirs. As with any regulated broker, withdrawals must go back to the original funding method first for anti-money-laundering reasons, so fund with a method you can also withdraw to.

Opening an account is fast and entirely online: a short application, the standard suitability and experience questions (required under ASIC/FCA/CySEC rules), then identity and address verification with a passport or national ID plus a recent utility bill or bank statement. Approval is usually same-day. During sign-up you choose your entity and your account type (Standard or Raw) — and, as covered above, that entity choice sets your protections and leverage, so it's the one decision worth slowing down for.

Fast, fully online, usually approved same-day. You pick your entity and account type at sign-up. See Deposits above.

Support runs 24/5, matching market hours, via live chat, email and phone, with multilingual coverage across English, German, Spanish and several other languages. On routine issues — funding, platform setup, account questions — it's responsive and gets the job done.

Where reviewers (and our own read of it) are lukewarm is depth: it's competent rather than exceptional, and complex or technical queries can take more than one contact to resolve fully. There's no 24/7 weekend cover, which matters little for FX/CFD traders but is worth noting if you trade crypto across the weekend, since those markets never close. For most traders the support is perfectly adequate — just don't expect white-glove handling on the hard problems.

See the Verdict for the full breakdown of who Eightcap suits and who should look elsewhere.