Pepperstone Review
When starting as a trader, you want to be profitable with every trade and turn into a millionaire in no time. While these stories look great in the news, every trader needs to take some careful and sensible steps to have a profitable trading career. The first big decision you have to make is to choose the right broker to meet all your trading needs. From education to devising expert strategies, the right broker will help you with all of that. Pepperstone has emerged as quite a favorite broker of many traders around the world. The broker must be doing something right to have such a loyal audience.
Take a look at this Pepperstone review to know more about the company and decide whether or not it will be a good decision to sign up with this broker.
What Pepperstone Is All About
Pepperstone is one of the many online brokers that provide you a professional platform to conduct your trades in several financial markets. Using their platform, you are able to trade CFDs, currency pairs, cryptocurrencies, and many other assets and contracts. Pepperstone Group Limited has been around for eight years now. However, Pepperstone Limited came into being six years later in 2016. Despite being so new, the company has already become a favorite of many traders in more than 60 countries of the world. According to the official website of the company, the people running it are those who have remained a part of the industry for decades.
The vision of the company is to provide traders with a platform that is not just easy to use but also provides real-time execution of trades without any hiccups. The company also makes great customer service a part of its vision. You can tell from a lot of things that the founders of this company know what the industry is all about. They have taken the professional route right from the beginning because they understand trading online is a sensitive matter. People do not and cannot trust just anyone claiming to be a broker with their money and banking information.
Pepperstone has received proper registration to provide its services to the traders. It is a fully regulated and authorized entity by FCA (Financial Conduct Authority). The parent company also has proper regulation and authorization from ASIC. By putting the regulation information on the website, Pepperstone wants it traders to trust the platform and the company with their money and have the peace of mind. In a nutshell, the company wants traders to pick it for top notch customer support, favorable trading conditions, and transparency of matters.
What Is Available for Trading?
When a broker is new, you cannot expect it to have too many assets. And yes, when you look at the list of assets that you can trade with Pepperstone, it is still small compared to many other brokers on the market today. However, you have to agree that it has the most liquid and famous assets on the list. These are the assets that get traded most often on the trading platforms. There is a variety of asset classes to choose from. You can trade soft commodities, energies, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, indices, and foreign exchange currency pairs. Just in the currency pairs section, you can trade all them major and some minor currency pairs.
You also have indices from different markets and countries of the world. With 14 different indices available at your disposable, you can pick the one for trading that you think you understand the best. Some of the major indices that you can trade on Pepperstone include Australia 200, Japan 225, France 40, UK100, and many more. In the precious metals category, you can trade palladium, platinum, gold, and silver. You can see that the options available to you for trading are the most famous around the world and thus they offer a lot of liquidity. You can also trade energies such as such as oil and gas.
Soft commodities that are available for trading on Pepperstone trading platforms include cotton, orange juice, cocoa, sugar, and coffee. It is amazing that Pepperstone has allowed its traders to trade cryptocurrencies despite being such a new broker. As of now, you have only the major cryptocurrencies available for trading, which include: Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dash. The broker has not been around for a long time but those who are running it have definitely spent some time in the industry. For that reason, you have all the major assets from the most popular asset classes available for you to trade with Pepperstone.
How Do You Trade?
You need a platform for trading, and that platform has to be provided to you by your broker. Some brokers are happy with only one platform whether their traders like it or not. Getting stuck with one platform can be a big issue. Today’s traders are not like the old traders. The modern traders like to move around on platforms and devices. They don’t want to be tied to their desktop computers to do anything. Since Pepperstone is focused on giving its traders the best of the trading world, it has brought to them the best platforms. With Pepperstone, you can access cTrader, MetaTrader 4, and MetaTrader 5.
For a long time, MetaTrader has remained the king of all trading platforms. To this day, most of the online brokers use it for their traders. However, there should be no doubt about the fact that cTrader has emerged as another one of the best platforms for traders in the recent years. The ease of use, customization, and automation of trading are only some of the options that have made people love the cTrader platform. Even the cTrader is available to you in the downloadable format as well as the web-based form. You can also use it on your mobile devices as an smartphone application.
In a similar way, you have MetaTrader platforms available on your desktop computers and mobile devices. Whether you use a Windows computer, an Android smartphone or an iPhone from Apple, MT4 and 5 are available for you on all these platforms. Since they have been designed with these devices in mind, the experience is smooth and near real-time when it comes to executing your trades. What’s most interesting about Pepperstone is that it has made the same platforms available on Mac computers as well. You don’t see that being offered very often.
There is something that needs special mentioning here. With the cTrader platform, Pepperstone also offers you algo trading. In this type of trading, you can automate your trades. Of course, you can use this option when you have become an expert trader. Using the algo trading option, you can create your own algorithms that are executed as soon as the market conditions match them and your traders are completed automatically. By using this option, you can make profitable trades even when you are not there in front of any of your devices.
How Good Is Banking and Account Registration
A company that comes into being with the motive that it wants to make trading easy for traders has to be something special when it comes to account types and banking. While there are multiple options available for traders, you can’t say that the accounts offered by Pepperstone are the best thing for traders. First, you have the option of opening a standard account. The spreads can start from 1.0 pips when you open this account. You can tell from this number that in some cases, the spreads can be a bit higher as well. This is just the starting point just so you know. Furthermore, this standard account is not an ECN account. Instead it is an STP account.
The best account that you can open with Pepperstone is called the Razor account. With this account, you can take advantage of 0 pips spreads where applicable. The maximum spread that you will see in this account is only 0.8 pips. There is commission involved in this particular account which is a fixed $3.5 when you have traded at least $100,000. Leverages are available but they can be different based on the type of trader. If you are an institution or a professional, you can take advantage of a huge 1:500 leverage. The leverage is 1:30 for any clients that fall into the retailer client category.
There is a swap-free account for which you need to maintain a minimum deposit of only $200 or equivalent in some other currency. There are no commissions but the pips are a bit looser than those available with the Razor account. Here, your spreads will start from 1.0 pips. To allow you to do safe trading, the broker has given you the option to perform hedging and scalping with the swap free account. You also have a Active Traders program available from the broker. By qualifying for this program, you can enjoy more than 40% discounts on the commissions on your trades.
Banking is quite easy regardless of the account type you pick. You can transfer money into your account using Visa and MasterCard credit cards. You also have the broker to broker transfer option available. For those who rely more on internet based transfer methods, they can take advantage of Neteller and Skrill. Of course, the bank wire transfer option is also available.
Is There Any Trader Training and Education
A broker that has designed its platform and the entire trading experience to be intuitive and user-friendly, it is bound to attract a lot of new traders. For these new traders, the broker needs to have proper educational material available. You will not be disappointed with the type of educational material available with Pepperstone for new and even the old clients. You can start with the basic terminology used in the trading world and then move on to learning about the basics of forex trading. You will also learn how to do basic and technical analyses of the market to execute profitable trades.
Webinars are quite famous in the trading world because they help new and old traders learn a lot from the experts live. Pepperstone has made it easy for traders to participate in its webinars. The list of upcoming webinars is available on the website. You can choose to register by providing your basic information and learn from the experts the art of trading.
What’s the Level of Customer Support
When you go on the Pepperstone’s website, you will find that one of the reasons for the founders to start this company was to provide high level of customer service to the traders. Now, it only makes sense for the company to excel in this department to keep its promise. You will be glad to know that the broker has kept its promises well in this department. First of all, you have all the available methods of getting in touch with the company such as email, live chat, phone call, etc. The best thing about the broker’s customer support is that it is available to help you 24/7.
With most other brokers, their customer support is only available during working days. Pepperstone has gone the extra mile to not only offer phone calls 24/7 but even the live chat and email support. All the office locations and their contact details are properly arranged on the website for the traders to find.
Concluding Remarks
If you say that Pepperstone is the biggest online broker in terms of number of traders, that would be wrong. It will also be wrong to say that this broker has the highest number of financial instruments available for trading. However, when it comes to making things easy for the traders to allow them to start their trading careers smoothly, you have to give it to Pepperstone. The 24/7 customer support is definitely icing on the cake and makes Pepperstone better than many other big brokers out there. In the end, Pepperstone is a recommendable online broker not only for retail traders but institutions as well.