Dukascopy Bank

Dukascopy prices trading like an institution and cash movement like a private bank. Understanding the difference is the whole exercise.

Trading runs on a raw-spread-plus-commission model. EUR/USD spreads on the SWFX marketplace start from 0.1 pips, and the cost sits in a published volume commission ladder quoted in USD per USD 1 million traded. Currency pairs start at USD 35 per million and step down through 33, 30, 25, 18, 16, 15, 14 and 10 to USD 5 per million above USD 3 million. Commodities, indices, metals and crypto run at 1.5 times those rates: USD 52.50 per million at entry down to USD 7.50 at the top. The important detail is that Dukascopy applies the lowest rate you qualify for on any of three criteria — net deposit, account equity, or 30-day traded volume — so a well-capitalised trader gets institutional pricing without having to churn for it. The ceiling is USD 100 per million at Dukascopy Bank SA and USD 75 at Dukascopy Europe.

Share and ETF exposure is CFD-only and priced per venue. The cheapest published European rate is 0.06% of trade value with a EUR 5 minimum; US share CFDs are USD 0.02 per share with a USD 10 minimum. Those minimums dominate small tickets — a EUR 1,000 European order costs EUR 5, an effective 0.5%.

Cash movement is where the bill lands. Bank transfers in are free; card deposits cost 1.5%–2.5%. Withdrawals by bank transfer are priced per currency and rail: CHF 2.3 over SIX up to CHF 15, EUR 2.3 over SEPA up to EUR 20, and USD 19 on shared charges up to USD 35 when the sender pays all charges — the USD 35 ceiling is a dollar figure, not a universal one. Minor currencies are nominally far higher: HUF 5,500, JPY 2,500, CZK 500, MXN 350, ZAR 280. Card withdrawals cost EUR 1.5 plus 2.5%. Currency conversion is 0.05%–1.00% over Dukascopy's spot rate depending on the amount converted, with the small conversions a retail trader actually makes sitting at the expensive end. That tier covers exchanges, deposits, withdrawals, transfers and other fees and adjustments that need converting. Trading profits, losses and commissions in a currency other than the account's base currency are converted separately for a flat fee of 0.5% at Dukascopy Bank SA (0.1% at Dukascopy Europe IBS AS), charged on the converted amount rather than on the size of the trade. Because the per-million volume commission is quoted in USD, every such commission on a non-USD account goes through that conversion.

Standing charges are modest but idiosyncratic. Opening and closing an account is free. Maintenance is free for 180 days, after which a fee applies only if no trades occur for 180 consecutive days, capped at CHF 100 per client per period. Dormant accounts are charged a minimum of CHF 500 but never more than the balance. Physical gold costs 1.5% a year of the average balance, quarantined crypto CHF 2,000 every six months, a bank guarantee used as collateral 1.25% a year, and SMS alerts EUR 0.07 each.

This is the strongest part of the case for Dukascopy, and it is not close among FX brokers.

Dukascopy Bank SA is licensed by FINMA both as a bank and as a securities firm. That distinction matters more than the marketing suggests. A CFD broker holds a permission to arrange and deal; a bank is supervised on capital adequacy, liquidity, governance and audited financial reporting under the Swiss Banking Act. Dukascopy sits under the second regime. The bank was established on 2 November 2004 in Geneva by Andre and Veronika Duka, who retain roughly 99% of the company, and it is headquartered at ICC, Entrance H, Route de Pré-Bois 20, 1215 Geneva 15. The group employs over 300 staff across Geneva, Riga, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Depositor protection. As a Swiss bank Dukascopy is a member of esisuisse, which protects privileged deposits up to CHF 100,000 per client if the bank fails. That is five times the EUR 20,000 an EU investment firm's compensation scheme offers, and it applies to cash balances rather than to trading outcomes. It does not cover trading losses, and an open leveraged position is not a deposit.

The EU entity is separate and weaker. EEA clients may instead be onboarded to Dukascopy Europe IBS AS (Latvian commercial register number 40003344762 — a company registration, not a licence number), a MiFID II investment firm supervised by Latvijas Banka — the central bank took over the Financial and Capital Market Commission's functions on 1 January 2023. Its investor compensation covers 90% of the loss, capped at EUR 20,000, for irreversibly lost instruments or unexecuted services, and explicitly excludes losses from price movements or illiquidity. Dukascopy Europe has offered negative balance protection since 10 August 2017, and both entities segregate client money from the firm's own funds. One detail worth checking against your own contract: the Latvijas Banka register gives the firm's address as Lāčplēša iela 20a-1, Rīga, while Dukascopy's own documents still show Marijas iela 2A.

Japan is served by Dukascopy Japan K.K., a Type-1 Financial Instruments Business Operator acquired from Alpari Japan in 2015 and supervised by the JFSA under domestic leverage caps.

Two honest qualifications. Dukascopy is privately held, so while it publishes audited accounts as a Swiss bank, there is no listed-company disclosure regime and no share price to read. And the entity you sign with — Swiss bank, Latvian investment firm or Japanese broker — determines both your protection and your leverage. Check the contract, not the homepage.

JForex 4 is why experienced traders put up with everything else on this list. It is a Java desktop terminal with roughly 270 built-in indicators, depth-of-market drawn from the SWFX liquidity pool, complete order-type coverage, and — the part that separates it from every MetaTrader clone — a native strategy API with tick-level historical data. You write strategies in Java, backtest them against Dukascopy's own tick archive rather than broker-reconstructed bars, and deploy them against live liquidity. For a systematic FX trader that combination is worth more than a hundred basis points of commission.

Visual JForex is the bridge for traders who have rules but not Java. It is a drag-and-drop strategy builder that compiles into a real JForex strategy, and it is a considerably more serious tool than the "no-code bot" panels most brokers ship.

JForex Web 3 puts most of the charting and order functionality in a browser. The strategy engine and parts of the depth tooling do not survive the port, so the web build is a convenience layer rather than a peer of the desktop.

JForex mobile on iOS and Android covers quotes, charting and order management competently. It is clearly the junior partner: nobody is running a Dukascopy workflow from a phone by choice.

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 exist for traders who cannot leave their expert advisors behind — MT5 was added in June 2024. Both carry a USD 1,000 minimum against USD 100 for a JForex ECN account, and both expose a small fraction of the JForex instrument universe. Choosing MetaTrader at Dukascopy means paying more to get less; it only makes sense if a specific EA is non-negotiable.

API access is the sleeper feature. The JForex API is available broadly, and FIX connectivity opens up for accounts above roughly USD 100,000. Retail brokers almost never offer FIX at that threshold.

The honest cost of all this is the learning curve. JForex is dense, Java-flavoured and unapologetically built for people who already know what they are doing. A first-time trader will find MetaTrader easier and an app-first broker easier still.

Dukascopy's range is wide in count and narrow in kind: roughly 25,000 tradable instruments, of which almost everything outside spot FX is a contract for difference.

• Forex — over 60 currency pairs traded on the SWFX Swiss FX Marketplace, the core product and the one the whole platform is built around
• Share CFDs — around 25,000 listings across Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA
• ETF CFDs — 84 funds across US, UK, French, German and Hong Kong markets
• Index CFDs — 20 stock index trackers
• Commodity CFDs — 14 instruments covering three grades of oil, gas, copper, platinum, palladium and six softs
• Bond CFDs — 3: German Bund, UK Gilt and US T-Bond
• Crypto CFDs — around 18 coins, plus Dukascopy's own Dukascoin
• Binary options — a small set of FX pairs; banned for EEA retail clients under ESMA rules
• Physical gold — held with the bank, charged at 1.5% per year of the average balance

What is missing matters as much as what is present. There are no exchange-listed equity or index options, no centrally cleared futures, no mutual funds, and no real share ownership. Every share, ETF, index, bond and crypto position is exposure to a price via a CFD with Dukascopy as your counterparty — no dividends as a shareholder, no voting rights, no delivery, and a financing charge for every night the position stays open.

For a German, Austrian or Swiss reader the practical translation is blunt: Dukascopy is not a Depot. You cannot build a long-term buy-and-hold portfolio here, you cannot run a Sparplan, and the tax treatment of CFD gains differs from that of shares in all three countries. It is a trading account attached to a bank, and it is excellent at being exactly that.

Opening is fully online with video identification, but it is a bank onboarding rather than a broker sign-up, and it feels like one. Expect more documentation, more questions on source of funds and a longer wait — typically one to three business days — than the same-day approval a CFD-only broker manages. That friction is the price of the licence, and it is worth knowing before you start rather than halfway through.

The entry ticket is low. A JForex ECN account opens from USD 100, available to clients of both Dukascopy Bank SA and Dukascopy Europe. Access tiers then step up: FIX API and bank-guarantee collateral above USD 100,000, while the JForex API is available at any account size. MT4 and MT5 accounts require USD 1,000 from the start. Accounts can be denominated in a wide set of currencies including USD, EUR, CHF, GBP, AUD, CAD, JPY, NZD, CZK and AED, with more available on request.

Funding is free by the slow routes and expensive by the fast ones. Bank transfers in cost nothing, as do crypto deposits. Payment cards cost 1.5%–2.5%, which on a EUR 5,000 deposit is EUR 75 to EUR 125 before you place a single trade. Skrill and Neteller are supported.

Withdrawals are the weak point of the entire proposition. Bank transfers out are priced per currency and rail — CHF 2.3 to CHF 15, EUR 2.3 to EUR 20, USD 19 to USD 35 — and nominally much more in minor currencies, where the schedule reaches HUF 5,500, JPY 2,500, CZK 500, MXN 350 and ZAR 280. Card withdrawals cost EUR 1.5 plus 2.5%. Settlement takes one to three business days once approved. Layer currency conversion at 0.05%–1.00% on top and a trader who funds in euro, trades in dollars and withdraws monthly can lose more to the plumbing than to the spread.

The rational way to use Dukascopy follows directly: fund by bank transfer, in your account's base currency, in large infrequent amounts, and withdraw rarely. Used that way the tariff is unremarkable. Used the way most retail traders actually behave, it is punishing.

Dukascopy's research operation is unusual for a broker of its size, and its education is thin in exactly the place where its platform needs it most.

Dukascopy TV is a genuine in-house financial television studio in Geneva producing daily market coverage, interviews and commentary in several languages. Very few brokers of any size run their own broadcast operation, and the output is closer to trade press than to marketing collateral.

Market data is the real asset. Dukascopy publishes an economic calendar, pivot-point tables, a market-sentiment index built from its own positioning data, and — most valuably — historical tick data from the SWFX marketplace. That archive is used across the industry for backtesting well beyond Dukascopy's own client base, and it is the foundation of what makes JForex's strategy testing credible: you are testing against recorded market ticks, not against bars a broker reconstructed after the fact. Combined with the philosophy of transparency pages showing SWFX volume and liquidity statistics, this is the most open market-data disclosure among retail FX venues.

Education is where the offering falls down. There are written articles, video tutorials, webinars and a wiki-style reference, but there is no structured beginner curriculum, no graded learning path and little material that takes a newcomer from zero to competent on JForex specifically. Given that JForex is one of the steepest learning curves in retail trading, this is the wrong gap to have. A first-time trader arriving at Dukascopy will find plenty of market commentary and almost nothing that teaches them the platform in front of them.

The net result is a research stack aimed squarely at people who already trade. If you want positioning data, tick history and a daily broadcast, it is excellent. If you want to be taught, you will do better at a broker that treats education as a product rather than a page.

Support is competent, multilingual and reachable — and, like everything at Dukascopy, more bank than broker in tone.

Coverage runs 24/7 through the trading week across phone, email, live chat and a ticket queue, from offices in Geneva, Riga, Tokyo and Hong Kong. The site and support are available in a long list of languages including English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese, Czech and Latvian, which for a DACH reader means German-language support without routing through an offshore call centre.

Reported experience is generally positive on substance and mixed on speed: phone and email queries about account mechanics, tariffs and platform behaviour tend to be answered accurately by people who understand the product, while live chat quality varies more. Compliance and documentation requests are handled strictly. Under Swiss banking supervision, source-of-funds questions and periodic document refreshes are not negotiable, and they arrive more often than at a lightly regulated CFD broker. That is the licence working as intended, but it reads as friction if you were expecting broker-style onboarding.

The area where support genuinely earns its keep is the tariff. Dukascopy's fee schedule is long, layered and full of conditional charges — the volume commission ladder, the per-venue share CFD rates, the conversion band, the dormancy rules. Asking support to confirm in writing what your specific account, currency and withdrawal route will cost before you commit capital is the single most useful thing you can do with them, and in practice they answer that question properly.

One structural caveat: because the group runs three separate regulated entities, a question that crosses jurisdictions — leverage, protection scheme, product eligibility — depends entirely on which entity holds your account. Establish that first, and every subsequent answer becomes much clearer.