Comprehensive Review dedicated to traders from SA
FXCM Review South Africa
Accepts South African Clients
Who is FXCM?
FXCM is an FSCA regulated broker with a local office in Johannesburg. The company overall charges competitive fees and offers 3 trading platforms along with one social trading platform.
Main advantages of the broker
Regulated by:
FSCA
Financial Sector Conduct Authority, based in South Africa, license no 46534.
FCA
Financial Conduct Authority, based in the United Kingdom, license no 217689.
CySEC
Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, based in Cyprus, license no 392/20.
Risk warning: Remember that forex and CFDs available at FXCM are leveraged products and can result in the loss of your entire capital.
Please ensure you fully understand the risks involved.
Available Deposit & Withdrawal Methods in SA
FXCM supports the following deposits and withdrawal methods in SA
Supported Platforms by FXCM
FXCM supports the following trading platforms
01
Trading platforms of the broker
FXCM South Africa offers 3 different trading platforms: MT4, Trade Station, Ninja Trader and 1 social trading platform called ZuluTrade. All platforms can be accessed via a web-trader or can be downloaded to any PC or smart device.
MT4 can be used for technical as well as for fundamental analysis, for the former traders can use up to 30 built-in indicators and more than 2,000 free custom indicators. FXCM supports on the MT4 both hedging and scalping.
According to the FXCM execution transparency page, the average execution speed is only 0,029 seconds. With that being said, SA traders with an average notional volume of 500K can also request a free Virtual Private Server (VPS) to ensure their trade execution time is even superior to this number.
South African traders can trade FXCM SA with up to 1:400 trading leverage.
FXCM also provides access to Trading Station which is a trading platform with a fresh modern look and a clean and intuitive user interface. Into the FXCM Trading Station platform is integrated the FXCM's News and Economic Calendar, FXCM Cloud, Trading Analytics, Price Alerts and dozens of pre-loaded indicators.
The third FXCM's trading platform, the brand-new NinjaTrader 8 features hundreds of technical indicators, an extensive collection of artful drawing tools, automated trading as well as backtesting system that allows you to apply your strategy to historical data and analyse its past performance.
ZuluTrade, a social trading platform offered by FXCM allows its users to follow the trading activity and strategy of a diverse network of traders. Note that this social platform can be used only with the combination of the Trading Station platform and does not work with MT4 nor NinjaTrader.
The screenshot is taken from the official website of FXCM.com/za
02
Trading assets
In total, there are around 70 trading instruments available at FXM SA to its traders (Most of which are CFDs). These include:
- Forex – In this asset category you can find 34 forex pairs. These cover major, minor as well as exotic pairs. The company also features 2 forex pairs with the South African Rand - USD/ZAR and ZAR/JPY.
- Stocks – Here are as of now 30 stocks, all originating either from the USA, Europe or Asia.
- Indices – If you do not want to trade individual stocks but rather baskets of them, you can have a look at FXCM SA indices. The company features 15 indices.
- Commodities – There are 11 commodities supported by FXCM SA including gold, silver or crude oil.
- Cryptocurrencies – It is possible to speculate on the price movement of 6 cryptocurrencies, which are all traded against the USD. Currently, there are available these coins for trading - BTC, XLM, EOS, BCH, LTC, ETH + one basket of major cryptocurrencies called Cryptomajors that combines BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH into one asset.
Did you know?
FXCM has a local office in SA located at 114 West Street, 6th Floor, Katherine & West BuildingSandton, 2196, Johannesburg.
03
FXCM Trading fees
FXCM is mainly compensated via the difference between the bid and ask price known as spread. FXCM South Africa charges fairly competitive spreads, according to their official site the average spread on the most popular currency pair EUR/USD is 1,3 pips and for ZAR pairs ZAR/JPY and USD/ZAR the average spreads are 4,0 pips and 88,6 pips, respectively.
For highly active traders, the company also features a program that offers spreads discounts based on their traded volume.
When it comes to deposits, FXCM SA does not charge any deposit fees. What you also might appreciate is that according to the FXCM execution transparency page, over 87% of orders have zero or positive slippage. That means, only 13% of slippage orders ended up in negative numbers.
FXCM does not charge anything for using the social platform ZuluTrade, however, you should be aware of the fact that there is a monthly fee of 30 USD you will need to pay directly to ZuluTrade.