Pepperstone Forex broker review
Pepperstone is one of the global leaders of the trading industry. It’s a relatively young Australian company hailing from Melbourne. It was started in 2010, which implies it grew relatively fast, considering that it was initially a strictly Australian project. Now, however, Pepperstone is available in mane corners of the world (Canada and US not supported).
The broker doesn’t have any special offers that can only be found here, but the local selection of instruments and markets still looks very promising and well-put together. Not to mention that company bosses actually put a lot of effort into making Pepperstone into an effective analytics hub for the more advanced traders.
But only the user reviews can tell you whether they implemented all these features with success or no. Before that, however, let’s talk a bit more about Pepperstone itself.
What is Pepperstone?
The first thing you see after visiting the front page of pepperstone.com is a demo account offer that lasts for 30 days. Considering that the first mention of a live account is at the very bottom of the same page, it says a lot about the service.
As for market selection, Pepperstone has quite a few resources (over 180, actually). They are divided into several groups:
- Forex – currency exchange
- Indices – indicator trading
- Commodity CFDs – commodity speculation
- Share CFDs – shares speculation
- Cryptocurrencies – crypto exchange
- Currency indices – a combination of the first two
To learn more you can come to the official Pepperstone website and click on each of these markets under ‘instruments’ menu in header. It applies to everything, really. PS has a large library of trading theory to learn, including market news, analysis, guides, webinars and more.
Pepperstone is very in touch with the recent events, and it shows. They often offer their analysis on the upcoming events that will affect a lot of markets. Now, the analytical cornerstone is US presidential elections, for instance.
But back to the topic of features – Pepperstone only has 3 trading platform to connect to markets:
- MetaTrader 4
- MetaTrader 5
- cTrader
You may think that it’s not much, but in actuality most brokers only allow you to trade on MT4, which may sometimes be fairly uncomfortable.
There’s a lot more to PS that this, but the reviews will indicate a few more good sides, as you’ll see.
The rating
Pepperstone has a surprising number of positive reviews on many popular Forex review aggregators. As a result, on Trustpilot broker has the rating of 4.3/5 from 705 reviews, and on FPA they have 3.5/5 from 333 reviews.
The results are very good – especially on Trustpilot – but FPA shows that PS still has some flaws that ‘redirected’ and ‘invited’ reviews on Trustpilot can’t cover fully.
The disadvantages
Before going through all the benefits of working with PS, let’s see what flaws they have, because these are more crucial in understanding whether the company suits you or not.
- Security breaches are common
It’s astounding how often the security breaches happen on this platform. Some say it’s the company’s own doing, but it’s unlikely. They have nothing to gain by stealing your data, they already have it. It’s much more probable that PS simply has a terrible and unsecure connection in place somewhere.
It doesn’t happen to everyone, but it’s still advisable to put in place all security measures you can and also contact them as soon as breach happens.
- Bad spreads
Pepperstone generally has low commissions, but their spreads may be especially high. The spreads may rise to stunning numbers during rollovers – sometimes to 40 or even 500 pips (according to client reviews). It’s definitely a big disadvantage for any spread-better, but if you don’t think you will partake in such types of trading, you’ll probably be fine.
- Service not available for Canadians
Unfortunately, the support is not extended to Canadians and several other groups for some reason. Without support, you’ll be on your own during each crisis, and no one wants that. If you can live without it – feel free, the broker has a lot to offer that compensates for the lack of Canadian support.
However, if you are both a beginner and a Canadian, then it’s really unreasonable for you to start trading here. Not with constant breaches at any rate.
The advantages
These flaws are uncomfortable, but the benefits more than compensate for them.
- Fast withdraw
A lot of brokers have an identical gaping flaw – withdrawing speed. It can take weeks or months on some platforms, but PS does very well. They can withdraw your funds in a matter of days, sometimes hours. It may be due to looser security measure (*cough* breaches), but we’ll never know.
- Near-instant execution
The front page of PS itself states that execution takes less than ~30 milliseconds. It implies near-instant execution of orders, and if you aren’t doing great, then it’s possibly an issue on your end. If you happen to not be a Canadian resident, you could try calling them to figure out what’s slowing you down.
- Great support (for non-Canadians)
This pro should be at the top of the list, but since there are usually problems with providing Canadian residents with quality support, you’ll be in a precarious position each time you have an issue. If you aren’t a Canadian, then you may enjoy quality service from helpful staff.
Conclusion
Technically speaking, Canadians can’t receive support from Pepperstone. It means that you probably will be able to trade here, but you won’t be able to address their support for anything. It also means that if they’ll ask you to submit your documentation for security purposes, the Canadian docs won’t work.
Barring this fact, Pepperstone is overall a very comfortable experience with several minor flaws. If you know how to protect yourself from breaches, the experience will prove even better.