BlackBull Markets vs ThinkMarkets — which broker is better?

Pros

• No minimum deposit at all — every account tier including Prime opens from USD 0
• Prime pricing of USD 3.00 per lot per side with EUR/USD averaging 0.16 pips — about USD 7.60 all-in on a standard-lot round turn
• Platform range beats brokers many times its size: MT4, MT5, cTrader, native TradingView, in-house CopyTrader, ZuluTrade and Myfxbook
• LMAX ECN liquidity into Equinix-hosted servers with sub-100ms average execution — genuine institutional plumbing rather than marketing language
• 24/7 support across phone, email, live chat and dedicated English and Spanish WhatsApp lines, consistently praised in recent public feedback
• No inactivity fee, no custody fee, no account fee, and nine base currencies including NZD, SGD and ZAR
• Milford Asset Management, a NZ$34bn manager, holds a minority stake — an outside investor with reputational skin in the game
• BlackBull Invest adds real ownership of 26,000+ shares, options, ETFs and bonds alongside the leveraged accounts

Cons

• No investor compensation scheme under either entity — New Zealand has none and the Seychelles has none, so segregation is the only protection if the firm fails
• USD 5 charged on every withdrawal, in the account base currency, which almost no direct competitor does; small or frequent withdrawals get expensive fast
• The commission-free ECN Standard tier is not the cheap option it looks like — EUR/USD averaged 1.16 pips over the twelve months to October 2025, about USD 11.60 per standard-lot round turn against USD 7.60 on Prime
• Not available to EU, UK or Indian residents by BlackBull's own disclosure, which rules it out for German and Austrian readers entirely
• BlackBull does not publish which countries are onboarded to which legal entity, so you may not know which regulator covers you until you read the agreement
• Research is thin — a hub of daily snapshots and a podcast, with no screener depth or serious analytical tooling
• Privately held with no banking licence and no exchange listing — audited accounts surface once a year on the New Zealand register and not in between; the credit ratings quoted on its compliance page are those of custodian banks, not of BlackBull

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