Best Forex Brokers In Australia

We named Pepperstone the global best forex broker, winning 3 of the 8 categories we compared. It has the fastest execution speeds of any ASIC regulated provider based on our testing. The broker also has the best forex trading platform range (including MT4, MT5 and TradingView) and award-winning customer service (based in Melbourne).

Pepperstone’s has some of the lowest spreads which we compare each moth. Australian forex traders should select the Razor account option with a $3.50 commission rate per side (AUD) to minimise trading fees.

Lastly, the broker allows trading across an extensive range of instruments from currency, commodities, precious metals, crypto to share CFDs.

We named Pepperstone the best forex broker based on their Razor account. Our analyst, Ross Collins opened accounts with each Australian broker and ran EAs for two periods of 30 hours. He found that Pepperstone was a true 0 spread forex broker across the most traded currency pairs 100% of the time.

Not only was the spread low but the other trading costs were also low including no funding or withdrawal costs, inactivity charges and competitive overnight fees. Their commission rate was also competitive at $3.50 per side ($7 AUD round-turn) which is lower than other brokers like IC Markets which in 2024 now charge $4.50.

The broker also offers a no-commission account (Standard) but we don’t recommend choosing this option. Not only are the trading fees higher compared to their Razor account but their spreads are less competitive. Generally, this account type of more structured towards beginner traders who prefer a simplified pricing structure.

There are now 5 trading platform options for Pepperstone which are:

1. Pepperstone Trading App
2. MetaTrader 4
3. MetaTrader 5
4. cTrader
5. TradingView

I personally think their own trading app is ideal for those new to trading while TradingView is the ‘gold standard’ for experienced traders. If you are planning on trading algorithmically then MT4 is ideal for forex markets while MT5 is superior for CFD markets. You can choose to trade with a demo account across all five platforms for a risk-free trading environment.

Pepperstone ReviewVisit Pepperstone

We found IC Markets has the lowest average spread standard account (no commission account). In the broker details section, you can see our standard account fee comparison that led to this recommendation. This doesn’t apply to their raw account which in 2024 saw their commission rate increase from $3.50 to $4.50 per lot. Pepperstone above is recommended if you are looking for a raw spread account.

Outside of spreads, IC Markets has similar features to Pepperstone including the choice of the most popular trading platforms (MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView, a $0 minimum deposit and a wide range of markets. This led to their score of 85/100.

IC Markets was founded in Sydney and is now one of the largest global CFD brokers. They have leveraged its $22.68 billion in daily trading volume to source 25 liquidity providers globally. This is why the broker can offer such low spreads which keeps its trading costs low.

We tested over 40 brokers to find which offers the lowest spreads and found IC Markets’ Standard account one of the lowest. Our Analyst, Ross Collins, found that the broker’s average EUR/USD spread was 0.73 pips, placing it in the first place and 35% lower than the industry average of 1.11 pips. Low spreads mean your trading costs will be lower, increasing profit margins, which is always a positive.

If you want tighter spreads you need to select the RAW account but with the AUD commission rate in 2024 increased to $4.50 ($9.00AUD round0term) the trading costs are too high. Better alternatives for this account type are Pepperstone or Eightcap which charge $3.50 per lot (100,000 units traded).

Of the four platforms available with IC Markets, MetaTrader 5 is the best suited for the broker with 38+ trading indicators and 44+ drawing tools to facilitate your technical analysis. It’s better suited for those who want to trade a range of CFDs compared to MetaTrader 4 which is more suited purely for forex trading.

A key highlight of the platform we like is the Depth of Market tool, which allows you access to the current order flow of the liquidity providers’ books. This is valuable knowledge if you want to scalp, as it can highlight where other traders are placing their trades, giving you intel on where they think the market is going.

IG Markets is the most popular retail broker for CFD trading in Australia, based on our extensive analysis.

This global online brokerage juggernaut has had over 30 years to refine every aspect of its offering, from trading tools to asset classes to educational tools to infrastructure.

Lastly, we like that IG is extremely trustworthy and offers a huge range of trading products.

IG Marketshas the largest choice of 17,000 CFD markets available compared to the rest of the industry, which typically offers 2,000~ markets. These markets include:

• 80+ forex,
• 130 indices,
• 12,000+ shares,
• 14 commodities,
• 14 fixed income, and
• 6,000+ ETF products.

This choice of markets makes it a solid choice if you trade multiple markets or day trade, as you can capitalise on the movements from different products with one trading account.

While trading with IG, we found that you could only access the broker’s markets through its IG Trading Platform. The platform surprised us as it had more indicators (40+) available than MetaTrader 4 and included advanced tools like Signal Centre and Market Sentiment indicator. These tools are built into the platform and can help you find new trading ideas or validate current ones based on other IG clients.

When we tried the platform, we found the Signal Centre to be a highlight as it gives you both the technical analysis and the market commentary, giving you the full picture behind the trading idea. We liked that you could instantly copy the trading signal via the Copy button, helping you enter the trade faster and more accurately.

We recommend OANDA as the most trusted broker in the Forex market. With commission-free trading, a guaranteed stop loss on OANDA trade and a huge education suite, IG is also great for beginners.

Given OANDA a perfect trust score of 100/100 by the CompareForexBrokers team, the broker has an excellent reputation with multiple tier-1 regulations.

We also like OANDA’s proprietary platform, OANDA Trade as well as the broker’s extremely competitive commission-free spreads, which keeps its costs low.

In our recent review, we rated OANDA as the most trusted after scoring 100/100 in our Trust tests. We gave the broker full marks as it is regulated by multiple tier-1 regulators such as ASIC, FCA, CFTC, and CySEC, while also being around since 1996 in the industry.

We also felt that the OANDA Trade platform was perfect for beginners, offering beginner-friendly features such as low trade sizes, default trade settings, guaranteed stop-loss orders, and trading signals. The platform uses TradingView’s charts, so you get 110+ indicators and drawing tools, with a clean user interface that isn’t cluttered by market news that may be distracting.

The default trade settings are an excellent addition. While exploring the platform, we could input our trade sizes, stop loss, and take profit levels, which would be used to auto-populate our order tickets. We liked this feature as it can protect you from mistakes such as “fat fingering,” which is a position size that could cost you money if the market moves against you. Plus, it ensures your stop loss is always attached to your new trades.

OANDA’s trading fees are also simple, offering a standard account only, which is commission-free and has variable spreads. We found the broker’s spreads tight, averaging 0.60 pips on EUR/USD, one of the lowest we recorded.

CMC Markets has the biggest range of currency pairs that we’ve seen, with 330 available to trade. The broker can offer this many by quoting both ways, expanding its list of tradeable forex pairs.

A highly trusted broker with multiple tier-1 regulators, we also like CMC Markets’ excellent proprietary platform, Next Generation, as well as its low, commission-free spreads.

We found CMC Markets had the most extensive choice of forex pairs compared to the rest of the industry, offering an impressive 330+ pairs. The range of forex pairs includes majors, minors, and exotics, giving you the full spectrum of currency pairs to trade and capitalise on market volatility with niche currencies.

Along with the vast amount of fx pairs, the broker has a large selection of financial products, including 9,000+ stocks, 82 indices, and 15 commodities, allowing you to trade multiple markets with one account easily.

While opening our account to test CMC Markets, we found they offered an FX Active account that focuses on providing the tightest spreads on ten popular forex pairs, including EUR/USD and USD/JPY. With the tight spreads, you are charged a fixed commission, which is $2.50 per lot traded, lower than the industry average of $3.48, so this could be a much cheaper option compared to the Standard account with spreads that average 1.13 pips on EUR/USD.

The NGEN platform is CMC Market’s flagship platform, which you can access after opening an account. It has 80+ indicators and advanced tools, like chart recognition indicators, to automate finding new trades.

We recommend Eightcap as it’s the best crypto broker with a top range of cryptocurrencies to trade. You can trade 95 crypto products, which are all available to trade on the broker’s MetaTrader 5 platform.

Eightcap also scores highly in our categories including trading platforms, education and customer service.

Lastly, Eightcap has a competitive fee structure and intuitive platforms, making it an appealing option for traders seeking a range of trading tools.

Our testing found that Eightcap had the largest selection of cryptocurrencies available out of all the other forex brokers, with 95 markets. We like that Eightcap offers highly liquid coins like Bitcoin and Ripple and more volatile coins like SHIB, offering various products to trade. This is excellent as you can leverage the security and regulations of a forex broker to trade crypto markets, ensuring your capital is secured.

Eightcap offers MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and TradingView for trading in its markets. All offer top technical analysis features. However, after using TradingView for our testing, we think It is the best platform for trading crypto.

We found that TradingView offers the largest choice of trading indicators (110+) by default, almost three times the amount of MT4 (30). This makes it easier to set up your indicators without downloading any external indicators. TradingView also has 10+ chart types and custom time frames that go as low as tick charts, which is useful for day traders and scalpers.

Our team awarded AvaTrade the best forex broker for day trading due to the broker not placing limits on scalping or automation.

Additionally, we scored AvaTrade highly for trading platforms, trust and their range of markets.

We particularly like AvaTrade’s unique and diverse range of proprietary platforms, including specialty platforms for AvaOptions for options trading.

Our testing found AvaTrade’s fixed spreads to be as competitive as those of its variable spread broker peers, Eightcap and IG Markets. The broker offered its spreads from 0.9 pips on EUR/USD, cheaper than IG Trading’s 1.13 pips and lower than the industry average of 1.24 pips.

Fixed spreads are a solid alternative to variable spreads as they allow you to keep trading costs the same, no matter how volatile the markets get. Unlike variable spread brokers, which make their spreads more expensive, which will cost you more and potentially cause you to miss trading entries,

The broker also offers fixed spreads across MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and its flagship platform, AvaTradeGO, giving you a solid choice of platforms to trade with. We tested the AvaTradeGO platform and found that it had 90+ indicators and three chart types, but impressively, it offers market sentiment and trading signals—which can help with day trading.

While using the AvaTradeGO platform, we liked that it showed current client trends through its Market Trends tool. We found this highlighted markets where other traders believed to rise/fall. We think this is helpful for day trading as you can find new ideas based on popular demand or use it to validate a current trade idea to see if you are trading in line with other opinions.

FP Markets is our top choice for scalpers as the broker offers unrestricted trading on MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView. Having unrestricted trading allows you to use technical analysis using EAs (expert advisors) to trade over short holding periods.

FP Markets was another broker we scored highly across all of our categories, with an emphasis on funding, education and customer service.

Australian traders will particularly appreciate FP Markets extensive range of physical shares, as well as FP Markets’ fast execution speeds and low trading costs.

During our tests of FP Markets, we tasked our analyst Ross Collins with finding out how fast the broker is compared to other brokers in Australia. Ross found that FP Markets had fast market execution speeds, with an impressive 96ms, one of the quickest recorded, which is important for scalping.

If you have faster execution speeds, you’ll be more likely to get the price you want to enter and less likely to experience slippage, which can save you money.

FP Markets can offer these speeds as it’s an ECN broker, which routes your trades directly to the liquidity provider. This means there is no dealing desk intervention, hence the faster speeds.

Plus, the broker offers tighter spreads, averaging 0.10 pips on EUR/USD compared to spread-only accounts, so you can save money on spreads. To get tighter spreads, you’ll pay a small commission on each trade, which is $3.00 per lot traded, cheaper than the industry average based on our findings.

You can use either MetaTrader 4 or MetaTrader 5 to trade with FP Markets. After trying both, we felt that MetaTrader 5 provided a better platform for scalping. It has improved features like one-click trading, letting you capture scalps quicker, and the Depth of Markets tool, allowing you to time your scalps by viewing the liquidity provider’s order book.

Saxo Markets, the trading arm of Saxo Bank, stands out in the financial services industry with its great range of CFDs and forex pairs.

We also scored Saxo Markets highly in trust, range of markets and education categories.

Saxo Markets is also a highly trusted and well-established broker, with an excellent proprietary platform and advanced trading tools.

Saxo Markets stood out to us with its excellent selection of 8,000+ financial instruments, making it one of the larger selections in Australia. It falls just short of CMC Markets and IG Markets.

We found the broker offered 100+ currency pairs, 8,800+ stock CFDs, 29 indices, 12 commodities, and 675 fixed-income markets, giving you a versatile choice and plenty of opportunities to find market volatility.

The broker offers multiple trading accounts with spread-only pricing on forex and CFD markets. We opted for the Classic account, which had no minimum funding, to test the broker.

However, we found the broker offered tighter spreads, saving you 30%+ if you deposit larger funds (from AUD300,000). We think this is very steep for just 30% off spreads, while you can get a free account with tighter spreads with Pepperstone or IC Markets.

While using the Classic account, we recorded Saxo Market’s average spreads of 1.20 pips on EUR/USD—just below the industry average.

We found that Saxo offered an excellent technical analysis commentary service from its in-house analysts. We were impressed that the updates were given throughout the day. This is very useful if you want new trade ideas or digestible analysis to keep you in the loop regarding fast-moving markets.

We recommend eToro as the best overall social trading broker, with a vibrant social community you can discuss trading ideas with. eToro also features a beginner-friendly proprietary platform that has an intuitive interface for both copy trading and normal trading.

Established in 2007, Israeli-based broker eToro is well-regarded as a social and copy trading pioneer, with over 30 million users globally. We found eToro is an excellent choice for beginners in Australia due to its intuitive platform available on both web and mobile. For those not confident in building their own portfolio, you can also use eToro’s ‘CopyTrader’ feature, allowing Australian traders to replicate the trades of successful investors.

Popular Social Trading Platform

The eToro platform’s social aspect is one of its strongest features, enabling you to gain insights from a diverse community of traders through a dedicated news feed. While you’ll need to have some basic knowledge of investment terms, eToro’s educational resources will help you get quickly up to speed.

Using eToro’s ‘CopyTrader’ tool on the proprietary platform, you can easily find and replicate the trades of others via various filters including performance metrics that match your risk profile.

We also found eToro’s platform beginner-friendly, giving you access to a large range of assets including 19 global indices, over 3,000 stocks, 100 cryptocurrencies, 49 currencies, and 264 ETFs.

For those who prefer not to manually select their own portfolio of assets, we recommend eToro’s Smart Portfolios.

With Smart Portfolios, you can invest in pre-selected collections of assets aimed at diversifying your holdings. We appreciated that some portfolios focus on specific themes or sectors, like technology or crypto, while others are designed around particular investment strategies.

Competitive Zero Commission Spreads

eToro keeps its fees low, offering a zero commission, Standard account, with industry-standard spreads of around 1 pip for EUR/USD.

If you are a new trader, we recommend opening a demo account as eToro offers a $100,000 virtual portfolio to practise your trading skills with. Additionally, the eToro Academy offers a wealth of guides and tutorials to enhance trading knowledge before transitioning to a live account.

However, as of August 11, 2024, a $2 USD commission fee now applies for opening and closing stock positions on the ASX for Australian residents.

Additional fees include currency conversion fees when converting AUD to USD, a 1% fee on crypto trades, a $5 withdrawal fee, and inactivity fees so we recommend that you review eToro’s fee schedule to understand all potential costs.

BlackBull Markets offers the highest leverage of any forex broker on this list as it is regulated by the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) in New Zealand, which has different trading conditions to ASIC in Australia.

We also scored BlackBull Markets highly in trading experience, trading platform, customer service and funding categories.

BlackBull Markets also has the fastest execution speeds of any broker we tested, lowering your chance of slippage.

BlackBull Markets offers leverage up to 1:500 in the forex markets, which is significantly higher than that of other ASIC-regulated brokers, which is capped at 1:30. BlackBull can offer higher leverage because it is regulated by the New Zealand Financial Markets Authority (FMA), which has fewer restrictions on leverage than other regulators like ASIC and the FCA.

A high-leverage broker allows you to trade with less margin, making it ideal if you have low trading funds. However, we think it’s better suited if you have a consistently profitable trading strategy and are looking to take on more leverage to scale your trades higher without depositing more funds.

During our tests, we asked our analyst, Ross Collins, to test the broker’s execution speed and compare it with 19 other brokers. To ensure the test was fair, Ross used the MetaTrader 4 platform to execute limit and market orders to reflect the broker’s speed.

Impressively, Ross found that BlackBull Markets placed first in the tests with an average limit order execution speed of 72ms, beating top brokers like CMC Markets, which averaged 138ms.

Execution speed is an important factor when choosing a broker as it reduces the likelihood of you receiving negative slippage, which can cost you more money in volatile markets.