ActivTrades vs OANDA — which broker is better?

Pros

• FCA licence 434413 held since 2005, plus a CMVM-regulated EU entity, an SCB entity and a Brazilian brokerage - one of the longest continuous track records in retail CFDs
• Excess-of-loss cover at Lloyd's of London pays up to USD 1,000,000 per claimant on an insolvency - and it covers the offshore entities, which is where clients have no compensation scheme at all; UK clients have FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 instead
• No minimum deposit at all on the standard account, and no deposit or withdrawal fee on any published method
• Four platforms on one account - ActivTrader, MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and TradingView - with the SmartOrder, SmartLines and SmartPattern add-ons bundled into MetaTrader
• Four base currencies including CHF, which is rare and removes a conversion round trip for Swiss clients
• Support runs 24/5 in roughly fourteen languages with a published average email response time of about 27 minutes
• UK clients can trade the same book as spread bets, which changes the tax treatment of gains in the UK

Cons

• 82 percent of ActivTrades retail accounts lose money on CFDs - the highest disclosed rate among the fourteen FCA-regulated CFD brokers surveyed by The Investors Centre in 2026, against a 69.9 percent mean
• Spread-only pricing is not cheap for active traders: ForexBrokers.com measured a 1.08 pip EUR/USD monthly average on the standard account, versus roughly 0.8 pips all-in at raw-spread competitors
• A 0.5 percent currency conversion fee applies whenever an instrument settles outside your base currency, which quietly taxes every US share CFD held in a EUR or GBP account
• Education is limited and poorly structured - archived webinars and roughly seventy articles folded into the research section rather than a course path
• Everything is a CFD. No listed options, no exchange-traded futures, no mutual funds, no fractional shares and no share ownership of any kind
• The Luxembourg entity was fined EUR 14,000 by the CSSF in December 2024 for AML and counter-terrorist-financing failings, including training written for UK rules and applied unchanged in Luxembourg

Pros

• Regulated by six tier-1 authorities - CFTC/NFA, FCA (542574), CIRO, ASIC (AFSL 412981), MAS and the JFSA - a licence footprint almost nobody in retail FX matches
• Trading since 1996, with client money segregated and FSCS cover up to GBP 85,000 for UK clients and CIPF cover up to CAD 1,000,000 in Canada
• No minimum deposit at all - you can open and fund a live account with any amount you choose
• The mobile app is the strongest in this comparison set: full order management, alerts and charting rather than a cut-down position viewer
• Research rated 5 out of 5 by ForexBrokers.com - MarketPulse commentary, Autochartist integration, news feeds and podcasts, all in-house rather than bought in
• Share CFD commission of 0.06 percent of notional per side with no minimum, which is cheap on small tickets where per-order minimums usually bite
• Open REST and streaming API through Algo Labs, with no punitive volume threshold attached
• Available to US, Canadian and Japanese residents, who cannot open accounts at most global CFD brokers

Cons

• The default spread-only account is expensive: EUR/USD has been measured at 1.4 to 1.7 pips against roughly 0.8 pips all-in at raw-spread competitors
• Core pricing closes most of that gap but is reported to require a USD 10,000 balance, so the cheap tariff is not available to the clients who need it most
• A 1.0 percent currency conversion mark-up applies whenever the instrument currency differs from your account currency - the largest hidden cost in this review
• Inactivity fee of up to USD 20 a month - GBP 20 at the UK entity - after twelve months without an open or active position, though up to three months are refundable once you trade again
• No options, no futures and no mutual funds; outside the EU no share ownership either (the EU entity, OANDA TMS Brokers S.A., offers real shares and ETFs, held by a custodian in an omnibus account in OANDA TMS's name) - and the product list varies so much by entity that US clients get forex and spot crypto only
• Support is 24/5 rather than 24/7, with narrower language coverage than the Australian competitors