FP Markets

FP Markets does not have one fee schedule, it has three, and knowing which one applies to you is the whole game.

MetaTrader forex and CFDs. Two accounts: Standard at spreads from 1.0 pip with no commission, and Raw at spreads from 0.0 pips plus USD 3 per lot per side (USD 6 round turn). Independent testing in July 2026 measured typical spreads of 0.1 pips on EUR/USD, 0.1 on GBP/USD, 0.2 on AUD/USD, 0.3 on USD/CAD and 0.4 on USD/JPY. A standard-lot EUR/USD round turn on Raw therefore costs roughly USD 7 all-in. That is good, but not the sharpest in the market — IC Markets and Pepperstone quote 0.0 pips on the majors and Fusion Markets charges USD 2.25 per lot. Index CFDs are spread-only, with S&P 500 measured at 0.4 points and Euro Stoxx 50 at 1.6. Share CFDs on MetaTrader run at USD 0.02 per share with a USD 2 minimum.

Iress DMA CFDs. A completely different, exchange-by-exchange schedule, quoted per side:

Futures CFDs cost USD 15 per contract per side on E-mini S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, EUR 15 on DAX and Euro Stoxx 50, AUD 15 on the SPI 200 and USD 17.50 on the USD-denominated Nikkei. Financing runs at the FP Markets base rate plus 3.0% for retail and plus 2.0% for wholesale or professional clients. Those are the only two Iress tiers — there is no balance ladder that buys a cheaper rate, and both open from an AUD 1,000 balance.

Real ASX shares, available through the Australian entity, cost 0.11% with an AUD 14.95 minimum, or 0.08% with no minimum on a non-leveraged account.

Then there are the platform costs. MetaTrader is free. Iress Trader / ViewPoint costs AUD 85 per month including GST, waived if you trade fifteen times or generate AUD 150 in monthly commission; ViewPoint Essential and Iress Mobile are free. ASX live data costs AUD 25 per month, rebated at AUD 50 of commission; delayed data is free. There is no custody fee anywhere. The inactivity fee depends on the entity. FP Markets Ltd, the Saint Lucia-registered entity that operates the international and the Swiss website, charges USD 10 per month (or the equivalent in the account currency) on a dormant account with available funds; an account counts as dormant after a continuous 90 days with no trading, no open positions, no deposits or withdrawals, or no login to the trading platform. The fee stops once the balance reaches zero and never takes the balance negative. At the CySEC entity the dormant fee is currently EUR 0 until further notice, and the Australian entity's current account terms, PDSs, FSG and Key Policies contain no inactivity fee.

FP Markets has been trading since 2005, which in a sector where five-year-old brands routinely call themselves established is a meaningful distinction. Twenty-one years and multiple market cycles is real evidence of operational durability.

The licence map, taken from FP Markets' own group page:

• First Prudential Markets Pty Ltd — ASIC AFS Licence 286354 (Australia). Top-tier supervision, segregated client money, capital requirements, external audit and AFCA dispute resolution — but no compensation fund covers this business: the Compensation Scheme of Last Resort, in force since 2 April 2024, pays up to AUD 150,000 only on unpaid AFCA determinations in sectors that do not include CFD and FX trading.
• First Prudential Markets Ltd — CySEC licence 371/18 (Cyprus). Books EEA clients including Germany and Austria. The Cypriot ICF covers eligible clients up to EUR 20,000 — the only FP Markets entity with statutory compensation attached.
• FP Markets (Pty) Ltd — FSCA FSP 50926 (South Africa).
• First Prudential Markets Limited — Seychelles FSA SD 130. No compensation scheme.
• Capital Markets Authority of Kenya licence 193.
• FP Markets Ltd — registered in Saint Lucia, number 2025-00853. This is where the honest reader should slow down: a Saint Lucia IBC registration is a company registration, not a financial services licence. It carries no prudential supervision, no capital requirement and no compensation scheme. FP Markets' international website states that it is operated by this entity, which makes it the default counterparty for clients outside the licensed jurisdictions.

Structurally, retail client funds are segregated from company money at what FP Markets describes as leading banks, negative balance protection applies across all entities, and the group's financial accounts are externally audited. FP Markets' own risk warning discloses that 72.5% of its retail investor accounts lose money trading CFDs.

The gaps are the familiar ones for a private CFD broker: no stock exchange listing, no banking parent and no published financial statements, so the capital standing behind your account cannot be checked from the outside. The practical takeaway is the same as for any multi-entity broker: read the entity name on your client agreement, and if you are in the EEA, make sure it says First Prudential Markets Ltd.

This is where FP Markets is genuinely differentiated. Most CFD brokers give you MetaTrader and stop. FP Markets gives you five distinct trading environments on one relationship.

MetaTrader 4 and 5 cover the FX and CFD business. Expert Advisors, hedging and scalping are all permitted, VPS hosting is available for latency-sensitive systems, and the Traders Toolbox add-on pack layers correlation, sentiment and order-management tools onto MT4. Independent testing scores the MT4 desktop client 3.4/5 with the usual complaints: dated design, weak search and no two-step login.

cTrader is the better-designed alternative for anyone who wants to see an order book. Level II pricing, cBots for automation and a separate published fee schedule.

TradingView integration is the standout. You can trade an FP Markets account natively from TradingView's charts, which means the best retail charting package in existence sits directly on top of your positions. This is the single feature that makes FP Markets more pleasant to use day to day than most MetaTrader-only shops.

Iress is the professional tier and the reason serious equity CFD traders come here. Iress Trader and the newer ViewPoint front end deliver direct market access with full depth of book, live streaming news from multiple vendors, market heat maps, pre- and post-market auction access, sophisticated charting and a deep order-type set with automation. Iress Investor is the simplified free version, and Iress Mobile covers iOS and Android. The difference between DMA and a dealer's synthetic price is not academic: your order goes to the underlying market, so you see and interact with real liquidity.

On mobile, FP Markets ships its own app alongside the MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView and Iress mobile clients. It supports a static PIN and fingerprint authentication, which puts it ahead of several MetaTrader-only competitors that still ship single-factor password login. The same independent testing scored the mobile experience 3.8/5, with the main gap being that price alerts can only be configured from desktop.

Money managers get MAM and PAMM allocation tools, and copy trading runs through FP Markets' own social trading service plus Signal Start and Myfxbook.

FP Markets advertises 10,000+ financial instruments, and unlike many such claims it is mostly about equities rather than padding. Instrument counts measured in July 2026:

Around ten thousand share CFDs is a genuinely strong number — roughly five times what IC Markets lists and seven times Pepperstone — and the ETF CFD range at 46 is competitive. Futures CFDs cover the main index contracts on CME, Eurex, CBOT and the SFE. Through the Australian entity you can also buy real ASX shares rather than CFDs, on the Iress platform, at 0.11% with an AUD 14.95 minimum.

The order-routing model differs by product and this matters. Forex runs through an ECN; CFDs on the Iress platform use direct market access, so orders reach the underlying exchange without a dealing desk in between. Lower spreads and faster fills are the practical benefit.

Now the gaps, which are real. Options are not offered at all — not exchange-traded, not OTC, not as CFDs. Anyone whose strategy involves hedging with puts, selling covered calls or trading volatility has to open a second account somewhere else. Bond CFDs number two, which is a rounding error rather than a fixed-income offering. Commodity CFDs number twelve, well behind Pepperstone's forty and IC Markets' twenty-eight. And there is no access to physical international shares, ETFs or mutual funds — the real-stock capability is ASX-only through the Australian entity.

Leverage is capped by entity: 1:500 on the offshore books, 1:30 on major FX under both ESMA and ASIC product intervention rules. You can change the default leverage on MetaTrader, which is a useful risk control, but not on the Iress platforms.

The application is fully digital and takes 10 to 15 minutes: name and residence, then personal details and occupation, then account type, platform and base currency, and finally a short questionnaire demonstrating understanding of leveraged products. Most applications are approved the same day. Minimum deposit is AUD 100 or equivalent on a MetaTrader account and AUD 1,000 on Iress. Individual, joint, corporate and trust/SMSF ownership structures are all supported, and a swap-free Islamic variant is available on the forex accounts with an administration fee replacing swaps.

A quietly useful feature is sub-accounts: you can run separate USD, EUR and GBP ledgers under one login, which avoids paying a conversion every time you fund or trade in a different currency. Twelve base currencies are available — AUD, USD, EUR, GBP, SGD, CAD, CHF, HKD, JPY, ZAR, MXN and BRL — one of the widest selections in the sector and genuinely helpful for Swiss clients holding francs.

Funding on MetaTrader is free by domestic bank transfer, card, PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, BPay and POLi. International bank transfers cost AUD 12.50. On Iress the picture is much worse: card deposits cost 1.6% in AUD or 3.18% in any other currency, Neteller and Skrill cost 4.0%, and PayPal costs 2.0%. On a EUR 10,000 Iress funding by card that is over EUR 300 gone before a single trade — use a bank transfer. Withdrawals by bank transfer and card are free; e-wallets and international wires carry charges. FP Markets covers acquiring-bank and processor fees on MetaTrader accounts where those fees are visible to it.

The DACH tax question. FP Markets is not a German or Austrian paying agent. It does not withhold Abgeltungsteuer, Solidaritätszuschlag, Kirchensteuer or KESt, there is no Freistellungsauftrag, and no Jahressteuerbescheinigung is issued. Every gain has to be declared through the Anlage KAP from statements you export yourself, and German loss-offset limits on Termingeschäfte apply to CFD and futures results. Combined with the fact that EEA clients are booked in Cyprus with EUR 20,000 of ICF cover rather than a German depot's statutory framework, this is a trading account for people who already file their own investment income — not a replacement for a domestic Depot.

FP Markets buys good third-party research and wraps it in its own layer, which lands somewhere between Tickmill's bare-bones licensing and a genuine in-house desk.

The tools are the recognised names: Autochartist for automated pattern recognition and volatility analysis, Trading Central for technical analysis and actionable levels, Myfxbook for performance analytics, and Traders Toolbox — a package of fourteen-plus MetaTrader add-ons covering correlation, sentiment, alarms and order management. On top of that sits the Traders Hub with a blog, technical and fundamental analysis, an economic calendar and a set of forex calculators, plus TradeMedic, a diagnostic tool for connection and execution problems that is a small but thoughtful piece of engineering.

Education is a proper programme rather than an afterthought: structured trading courses, regular webinars, podcasts, platform tutorials and a trading glossary, all organised under an Academy heading. The content is instructional rather than promotional and covers both the FX and the DMA equity side.

Support is FP Markets' strongest single dimension. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week — not the 24/5 that most brokers offer — across live chat, email and phone, in a long list of languages including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Greek, Dutch, Chinese, Indonesian, Turkish, Thai and Arabic. Higher-tier and Iress accounts get named account managers. Aggregated user feedback from May to August 2026 backs this up: support is described as quick, helpful and patient, and it is one of the few brokers in this category where service is a recurring positive rather than a recurring complaint.

The recurring negative, in fairness, is the same one that dogs the whole sector: some users report withdrawal friction and disputes over profits, occasional slippage and spread spikes at busy times, and opacity when account terms or trading rules change. FP Markets' 40-plus industry awards and long ASIC record are meaningful context, but they do not make those reports disappear, and a first large withdrawal should be planned rather than assumed.