FXopen Review

There are three companies operating under the FXOpen logo. FXOpen UK is the trade name of FXOpen Ltd, a company that is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under register number 579202. The Australian company is called FXOpen AU Pty Ltd and is authorised and regulated by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC). There is one more company – FXOpen Markets Limited that is registered in Nevis and operates as an offshore organization and won’t be a subject of this review.

According to the website fxopen.co.uk, there are three accounts available: STP, ECN and CRYPTO. There are over 50 currency pairs plus Gold and Silver. In STP accounts the commission is included in the spread and all STP spreads are variable depending on the liquidity. The company claims that the most popular account is the ECN (Electronic Communication Network). It provides access to institutional liquidity and very fast order execution. The spread of EUR/USD is close to zero but there is a commission that depends on the Account Equity and the monthly Traded Volume, and if your account capital is below USD1,000 and the monthly traded volume is less than USD5 million, commission will be USD5 per one standard lot. The instruments available in the Crypto account are crypto pairs only. They can be traded with a leverage of 1:2.

FXopen offers direct access to interbank liquidity (DMA) and ECN trading via the award-winning MetaTrader 4 (MT4) platform. This popular forex trading platform is ideal for both newer and experienced traders, offering fully customisable features alongside advanced technical analysis. Trading terminal is available as a Desktop application for PCs, as a Web trader and MetaTrader for iOS and Android devices.

An option to use a Virtual Private Server (VPS) is also available. It gives the ability of accessing the MetaTrader 4 platform from any PC regardless of the client location. It also provides faster order execution that is very useful especially for scalping.

Clients can fund their accounts by credit or debit cards, bank wire transfers and e-wallets such as WebMoney, Skrill and Neteller. The minimum deposit amount is GBP300. There are also several partnership programs available, including the opportunity to become an Introducing Broker (IB).

Let us look at the legal documents. The Risk Warning document shows all types of orders can be filled at the first available price – with slippage. The good thing is that FXopen offers its retail clients negative balance protection that ensures they cannot lose more money than they have deposited. You should be careful what kind of account you are going to open, because the Terms and Conditions document shows that FXopen acts as principal and not as agent in all non-ECN deals, or as a market maker. That is not so bad because FXopen UK is regulated by the FCA, but this leads to a conflict of interest with its clients.

We can conclude FXopen is a strictly regulated brokerage company that offers one of the industry’s leading trading platforms – MetaTrader. Despite the high liquidity of the ECN model of order execution, spreads are relatively high. In addition, if you are dealing with a non-ECN account then you are dealing with a market maker.