ThinkMarkets vs Pepperstone — which broker is better?

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

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