Eightcap

Eightcap runs two live accounts and both take a USD 100 minimum, so the choice is purely about pricing shape rather than account size.

Standard is commission-free on FX, indices, commodities and crypto, with EUR/USD quoted from 1.0 pip. On a standard lot that is about USD 10 per round turn if you actually get the headline spread, and more when liquidity thins.

Raw quotes from 0.0 pips and charges a commission per side per standard lot that varies with your base currency: 3.50 in AUD, USD, NZD, SGD and CAD; 2.75 in EUR; 2.25 in GBP. Two sides means roughly USD 7 round turn, plus whatever the raw spread actually is at the moment you trade. Independent testing puts Eightcap's average all-in EUR/USD cost near 1.0 pip on Standard and meaningfully below that on Raw, with GBP/USD around 1.2 pips, gold around USD 0.12 and Bitcoin around USD 12.

The arithmetic is simple: if you trade more than about one standard lot a month, Raw wins. Below that the difference is small enough that the commission-free simplicity of Standard is defensible.

• No inactivity fee is published, which is unusual and welcome in this segment
• No internal deposit or withdrawal fees on any rail, including PayPal and crypto
• Margin call at 80%, stop-out at 50%, order size 0.01 to 100 lots

The genuine gap is share CFDs. Eightcap's own comparison page says commissions apply to shares but never states the rate. That is a real transparency failure: you cannot price an equity CFD trade before you have an account. Overnight swap is likewise instrument-by-instrument and not summarised anywhere public, so anyone holding CFDs for days rather than minutes should pull the swap table from the platform before sizing a position.

This is the part of Eightcap that deserves the most attention, and it is not straightforward.

Eightcap's marketing states the group is "globally regulated in multiple jurisdictions, including ASIC, FCA and CySEC". All three licences hold up when you check them. What is missing is the signposting: the group's own legal-documents page names none of the three. What it names is:

• Eightcap Global Limited — Securities Commission of The Bahamas, SIA-F220
• Eightcap International Ltd — Seychelles FSA, SD100 (registration 8427413-1)
• Eightcap International Trading — Mauritius FSC, GB25204603 (registration 227050)
• CLMarkets Limited — St Vincent and the Grenadines, 24750 IBC 2018, trading as Eightcap International

The three supervised entities are documented elsewhere. The Australian licence is real and long-standing: Eightcap Pty Ltd, AFSL 391441, operating since 2009. The UK entity is confirmed by the FCA itself — Eightcap Group Ltd, FRN 921296, 40 Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 0BT, Companies House 12448314. The Cypriot entity is named on Eightcap's own About page as Eightcap EU Ltd (Cyprus company register HE329922) under CySEC licence 246/14, granted on 30 July 2014.

One warning belongs next to that: the FCA has published a clone warning for "Eightcap VIP" / eightcap.vip, a site that is not the authorised firm. Check the domain and the company name, not the brand.

Why it matters: the entity determines your protection. A CySEC-booked client gets 30:1 retail leverage and up to EUR 20,000 from the Cypriot Investor Compensation Fund. An FCA-booked client gets FSCS cover up to GBP 85,000. A Bahamas- or Seychelles-booked client gets neither, plus 500:1 leverage. Even the ASIC licence carries no compensation fund — Australia has never had one for CFD clients.

Structurally, Eightcap segregates client money, applies negative balance protection on the ASIC-, FCA- and CySEC-booked entities, and is not publicly traded, so there are no audited group accounts to inspect. Before funding, find the entity name on your client agreement and check that specific company on that specific regulator's register. Do not rely on the brand.

Eightcap does not build its own terminal, and has instead assembled the best available third-party set — which for this kind of broker is arguably the smarter choice.

TradingView is the headline. Eightcap is a native TradingView broker integration, meaning you place and manage live orders from the TradingView chart itself across 1,000+ Eightcap symbols, with the full indicator library, 15+ chart types and TradingView's alerting and social layer. Plenty of brokers claim TradingView support and deliver a read-only data feed; this is the real thing, and for discretionary chart-driven traders it is the single best reason to look at Eightcap.

MetaTrader 4 remains the default for anyone running expert advisors: 9 timeframes, 30 built-in indicators, MQL4, 1,024 symbol slots and the largest EA ecosystem in retail trading. MetaTrader 5 adds 21 timeframes, 38 indicators, unlimited symbols, a far better strategy tester and depth-of-market. Both run on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and browser.

TradeLocker is the newest option — a browser-first platform with 100+ indicators, TradingView charting embedded and unlimited symbols, built for traders who find MetaTrader dated but do not need EAs.

Execution is advertised at roughly 48 ms average, sourced from multiple liquidity providers.

The weakness is mobile. There is no Eightcap app. You use the MetaTrader, TradingView or TradeLocker apps, which means funding, verification and account administration live in a separate browser portal from your trading. For a broker whose main audience is phone-first retail traders, that is a real gap.

Eightcap advertises over 800 CFD instruments. Independent counts give roughly 40+ forex pairs, around 590 share CFDs, 100+ cryptocurrency CFDs, 17 indices and 16 commodities — about 763 in total, so the advertised figure is not fully accounted for by the categories anyone has counted.

The crypto range is the standout. 100+ coins as CFDs is far more than most FX-first brokers carry, and the pricing is competitive. But read the word CFD carefully: you never own a coin. There is no wallet, no withdrawal of assets, no staking. You hold a leveraged contract that pays or charges swap every night and closes when you close it.

The same applies across the board. The 590 "shares" are share CFDs — no ownership, no voting rights, dividends handled as cash adjustments, and financing charged on long positions held overnight. That is a legitimate instrument for short-horizon directional trading; it is the wrong instrument for building a portfolio.

What is missing is significant for anyone comparing Eightcap against a full-service broker:

• No ETFs at all, in any wrapper
• No bonds, no mutual funds, no listed options, no exchange-traded futures
• No spot crypto, no fractional shares, no real equity ownership
• No spread betting, so UK clients get no tax-advantaged wrapper

Eightcap is an execution venue for leveraged directional trades. Judged on that basis, 800 instruments across five asset groups is a respectable range. Judged as an investment account, it does not compete, and no amount of instrument count changes that.

Opening is the frictionless part. The process is three steps — online form, ID and proof-of-address upload, then funding — and approval is typically within one business day. The minimum deposit is USD 100 on both Standard and Raw, and there are seven base currencies: AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD, SGD and USD. A demo account is available without funding.

Funding is unusually broad for a broker this size, and Eightcap charges no internal fees on any of it:

Regional rails are added on top: INTERAC in Canada, PIX in Latin America, UnionPay in China, Thai QR and several Asian e-wallets. PayPal support in particular is rare in this segment.

Two caveats. First, "no internal fees" does not mean free — card acquirers, wallet operators and correspondent banks all take their cut, and Eightcap explicitly disclaims those. Second, there is no published FX conversion markup, which matters if you fund in EUR and trade USD-denominated instruments: ask for the applied rate rather than assuming interbank.

Research is competent rather than deep. The Knowledge Hub carries market insights, an economic calendar, trading-hours reference and instructional articles. There is no in-house analyst desk producing daily calls, no third-party research marketplace and no screener worth the name — for fundamental work you will be using TradingView's tools rather than Eightcap's.

Education follows the same pattern: platform how-tos, instrument primers and risk-management basics, aimed at getting a new account trading rather than at building a curriculum. It is honest, unglamorous material. Traders who want structured, certificated learning will find deeper libraries at larger brokers.

Support is a genuine strength. Eightcap staffs live chat, email and phone across 24/5 market hours in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Thai and Indonesian, and response quality is generally reported as fast and human rather than scripted. For a broker of this size, that coverage is above average, and the German-language desk matters for DACH clients who would otherwise be routed to English-only chat.

Two structural notes. The prop-trading arm (Eightcap Challenges) and the affiliate/IB programme run through separate portals, so support boundaries can blur if you hold several relationships with the group. And because account administration lives outside the trading platforms, most support contacts start in the client portal rather than in the app you were actually using — an avoidable friction that the missing proprietary app makes worse.

This is usually the decisive question for DACH readers, and the answer is unambiguous: Eightcap is not a German or Austrian tax agent.

Germany. Eightcap does not withhold Abgeltungsteuer. No German paying agent is involved, so there is no automatic deduction of the 25% flat tax plus 5.5% Solidaritätszuschlag and any Kirchensteuer, and no Jahressteuerbescheinigung lands in your inbox in February. You declare everything yourself in Anlage KAP and, for foreign accounts, typically Anlage KAP-INV or the relevant foreign-income lines. You must also apply the German treatment of Termingeschäfte — CFD losses fall under a restrictive offsetting regime that permits netting only against gains from the same category, and only up to a statutory annual ceiling. That rule has been the subject of repeated litigation and legislative change; if CFDs are more than a small part of your activity, this is a conversation for a Steuerberater, not a comparison site.

Austria. No KESt is withheld either. Austrian residents holding a foreign broker account are in the Auslandsdepot regime and must declare capital gains themselves; the automatic-withholding convenience of a domestic bank does not apply.

Switzerland. There is no withholding to arrange, but the more important issue is status: Swiss residents who trade CFDs frequently and with leverage risk being reclassified from private investor (gewerbsmässiger Wertschriftenhandel) — which converts tax-free private capital gains into taxable income and triggers social-security contributions. Frequency, leverage and holding period are exactly the criteria the tax authorities look at, and CFD trading scores badly on all three.

None of this makes Eightcap unsuitable. It does mean the true cost of using it in the DACH region includes your own bookkeeping and, quite possibly, an accountant.