CharterPrime Review

CharterPrime is a registered business name of the Australian brokerage company Charterprime Pty Ltd. It was founded in 2012 and is authorised and regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) with Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL) number 421210. The home page presents several awards won in recent years including the Best STP/ECN Broker award in 2017 and Best Liquidity Provider.

Trading assets include currency pairs, commodities (precious metals and energy products), ETFs and global indices.

Customers can trade through two of the most popular terminals worldwide – MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5). MT4 is the market standard platform for trading forex and CFDs, analysing financial markets and using Expert Advisors. The user interface is friendly and intuitive, and this makes it the perfect option for new and experienced traders. MT5 was developed as a next level multi-asset platform. Charterprime offers the MT5 platform with its advanced trading functions, as well as superior tools for both technical and fundamental analysis. Expert advisors take the main place in MT5 and together with the MQL5 language you can customize them according to your needs.

The maximum offered leverage is 1:100 and customers can fund their account by bank transfer, Skrill and Neteller.

The Client Agreement document shows that the company will deal with you as principal and not as agent on your behalf. This means that any trades are agreed directly between you and the company and it will be the counterparty to all of your trades. In the Product Disclosure document, it is also written: “Charterprime will regularly state, via the electronic trading platform, the price at which it is prepared to deal with you as principal. This is known as being a ‘market maker’. When dealing in Margin FX and CFDs, as with all over-the-counter derivatives, Charterprime is the issuer and a market maker, not a broker. These two documents confirm that the company is a market maker, despite the claim it is a Straight Through Processing (STP) broker. The same document also informs that Charterprime may choose to hold the risk of transacting with you on its own books or it may conduct transactions to hedge its liability to you in respect of your Margin FX or CFD positions by undertaking transactions in the underlying currencies. This creates a conflict of interest between the market maker and the client. The company wins when the customer loses, not just from the spread, as it claims.

The Product disclosure document also says that clients may lose more than the amount of funds in their Margin FX or CFD account, and should only invest risk capital (that is, capital you can afford to lose). This means that clients are not covered by negative balance protection and you may owe money to this company.

We found out the stop loss orders are not guaranteed, and all orders are subject to slippage. It is written that stop losses are not guaranteed and the execution of such orders will depend on market volatility and liquidity. So, whilst stop losses generally allow you to control potential losses should the market move against you, please be aware that stop loss orders may not always limit your losses the way you anticipate. There are no guarantees in relation to stop-loss orders, and due to the speed at which prices can move, they may be filled at a different price (known as slippage) or not at all.

In general, Charterprime does not share much information on its website. It does not specify any trading conditions, such as offered instruments, spread or even the minimum deposit amount. Although the company claims to be an STP/NDD broker and has been awarded for it, the legal section shows that Charterprime is a market maker. Australian brokers are not required to provide protection against a negative balance and this company is no exception. Lack of information is not the way to attract new customers.