Interactive Brokers vs Pepperstone — which broker is better?

Pros

• US stocks from USD 0.0035 per share on the Tiered plan, minimum USD 0.35 per order and capped at 1% of trade value
• Currency conversion at 0.20 basis points (minimum USD 2) — an order of magnitude cheaper than most European brokers' 0.25%–1.5%
• Roughly 160 market destinations in 36 countries from a single multi-currency account, with 28 settlement currencies
• No inactivity fee since 2021, plus no custody fee and no platform fee
• Trader Workstation offers over 100 order types plus a mature Python/Java/REST API used widely by retail algo traders
• Nasdaq-listed parent (IBKR) with published quarterly financials and around USD 21 billion of equity capital
• Top-tier licences in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong, with per-entity investor compensation disclosed
• Paper trading account mirrors the live platform, including the full API

Cons

• Customer support is the most common complaint: many requests go through the ticket system, and public reviews (e.g. on Trustpilot) often cite slow replies and template answers
• Trader Workstation has a genuinely steep learning curve; the first session is intimidating even for experienced traders
• The fee schedule is complicated: Fixed versus Tiered, pass-through exchange fees, and per-exchange minimums make cost prediction harder than it should be
• Real-time market data is a paid subscription per exchange, so the headline commissions understate the true monthly cost for active traders
• Account opening is longer and more document-heavy than at app-first brokers, and the website navigation is poor
• Spot crypto is only available to US clients via a separate arrangement; EEA clients get futures and exchange-traded products instead

Pros

• Razor all-in EUR/USD cost of about 0.8 pips - a 0.0 to 0.1 pip raw spread plus USD 3.50 per lot per side
• No inactivity fee, no account-keeping fee and no account closure fee, confirmed on Pepperstone's own costs page
• Five execution venues on one account: MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView and the in-house Pepperstone Platform
• Three top-tier licences - FCA 684312, ASIC AFSL 414530 and BaFin 151148 - so most clients contract with a tier-1 supervised entity
• EUR, CHF and GBP accounts at every European entity (UK, Cyprus, Germany), which removes a layer of conversion cost for European clients
• Account approval typically inside 4-8 hours, with a USD 10 minimum first deposit and no minimum by bank transfer
• Active Trader rebates take the all-in EUR/USD cost down to roughly 0.26 pips at high volume
• UK clients get the same book as spread bets, with EUR/USD from 0.6 points

Cons

• Everything is a CFD. You never own the share or ETF, so there are no voting rights, no transferable holdings and no dividend tax reclaim
• Overnight financing on index and share CFDs is charged at 2.5 percent over the benchmark rate, which quietly punishes anyone holding for more than a few weeks
• No options, futures, bonds or mutual funds - the product shelf is narrow next to a full-service broker
• Education is a webinar and article archive rather than a curriculum; ForexBrokers.com marks it down for having no interactive courses or quizzes
• FIX API access is reported to need around USD 250 million in monthly volume, so systematic traders are confined to MT4, MT5 or cTrader automation
• Pepperstone publishes no headline currency conversion rate, which makes the true cost of a US share CFD from a EUR account hard to model before you trade