ActivTrades vs ThinkMarkets — 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

• ThinkZero all-in EUR/USD cost of about 0.8 pips - raw spreads from 0.0 pips plus USD 3.50 per lot per side on forex and metals
• Three top-tier licences - FCA 629628, ASIC AFSL 424700 and JFSA registration 0250 - alongside CySEC 215/13 and FSCA FSP 49835
• Roughly 3,260 instruments on ThinkMarkets' own contract table, including 2,796 share CFDs and 324 ETF CFDs, which is unusually broad for a CFD-only broker
• ThinkTrader mobile is a full trading client with proper charting, drawing tools and server-side alerts, and is consistently rated among the best mobile apps in the category
• No minimum deposit on the Standard account and no broker fee on deposits or withdrawals on the published methods
• Seven base currencies including CHF, AUD, SGD and NZD, which removes a conversion layer for clients outside the euro and dollar
• Copy trading through both the in-house ThinkCopy layer and the ZuluTrade network, plus MT4, MT5 and TradingView on the same account

Cons

• 75 percent of ThinkMarkets UK retail accounts lose money trading CFDs, and disclosures across the group's entities have ranged from roughly 68 percent to 89 percent
• Withdrawals are the recurring complaint in public reviews: repeated document requests on already-verified accounts, multi-week delays, and disputed payments marked as successful. A USD 100 minimum withdrawal adds friction on top
• Dormancy is charged on the UK entity: GBP 10 per month from day 181 without a trade, for as long as the balance is positive. The CySEC, ASIC and offshore entities publish no comparable figure we could verify
• No published currency conversion rate, so the true cost of trading a US share CFD from a EUR or GBP account cannot be modelled before you trade
• The FG Acquisition Corp SPAC merger that would have listed the group in Toronto never completed, so there are no public accounts and no listed-company disclosure
• No listed options, no exchange-traded futures, no bonds, no funds and no share ownership - the entire book is contracts for difference