Best MT4 Brokers (Australia) Compared

Is FOREX.com a Good Trading Platform?

FOREX.com won Best Forex Broker in the 2025 Good Money Guide Awards.
Plus, as well as being regulated by the top tier FCA in the UK, FOREX.com is regulated by CySEC, NFA, CIRO, MAS, ASIC, CIMA, and FSA with access to over 7,000 markets, exclusively via CFDs.

24-Hour FOREX.com Test

I took FOREX.com out for a 24-hour test drive, to trade with real money and try out some of the key features on the streets of the City of London. Here’s what happened…

“For FX sake”, I thought to myself when faced with writing a review about a forex broker. Firstly because all these brokers do is offer access to the forex market (or so I believed). Secondly, because I’ve never had much success with forex trading.  I find the nuances of intra-day technical analysis too complicated.

I’m an old-fashioned trader – I like to look at the market and think it’s either overvalued or undervalued and, in my mind anyway, that’s easier when looking at a company’s share price, an index or even a commodity. But for some reason, with forex trading, I’ve never really got the hang of it.

Having said that, I have dealt currency for about 20 years now, but more as a broker rather than as a trader. For instance, I used to do some prime brokerage for institutions that would hedge their currency exposure when buying aeroplanes.

But I was so frustrated with how opaque pricing was in currency trading, that I decided to start up my own currency brokerage specialising in high-value currency transfers (£250,000 upwards) and undercutting everyone. It was called Berry FX, you can still see the demo on YouTube. Basically, personal service with the best rates anywhere ever. But now I just let other currency brokers compete for clients by trying to offer the best exchange rates.

But you want to know what I think of FOREX.com.

24 Hour Test

I took FOREX.com out for a 24-hour test drive around the City of London, putting some real trades on whilst going about my business to see if I could make any money.

I started out at the Bank of England with £10,000 on account at 11:30am. Lunch was a few minutes’ walk from the tube station, so I took the opportunity to put some trades on using FOREX.com’s trading signals. I’ve used these for years; back in 2018, they were known as GetGo and it was a standalone forex trading app. When I reviewed it then, I said these were the future of forex trading signals but are they still?

There are a couple of things that make these signals better than the rest.

• They tell you the success rate.
• The signal is linked to an order ticket.

When I was walking down King William Street to L’Antipasto to meet some contacts for lunch, I put a few trades on. First, I looked at the traders that had a historic success rate of over 50% and followed them. Then I looked at trading signals that had a success rate of less than 50% and traded against them. It’s a pretty simple strategy that generally works (not always, though). I used the classic stop/limit risk/reward ratio, aiming for twice the potential loss as a potential win. Again, simple forex trading strategies. The market is not hard to call, but if you get a trade right, it often pays to let it run for longer, but if it’s wrong, close it sooner.

Trading Central

On the way to my next meeting, I took a few moments on London Bridge to look at some of the other signals on FOREX.com: Trading Central. Now, Trading Central has been providing technical analysis to brokers for decades and supplies a constant stream of manually and automatically updated trading ideas throughout the day to give traders an indication of where the markets may go.

It’s not as fluid as the trading signals, as you have to put the trades in manually, but still gives you a bit of stimulus. This is great for someone like me because I generally have an idea of what I want to do from eyeballing a chart (I did, after all, run a technical analysis division for 5 years), but it’s nice to get confirmation of your thoughts one way or another.

Execution

When you are actually trading there are some great other features on the app:

• Swipe to trade: a bit like Tinder (so I hear)
• Chart on tickets: with a quick tap, you can bring up a chart when on the order ticket (to double-check)
• Working orders on charts: when looking at a chart, you can see your working orders and positions
• Position potential: as well as seeing what margin is required when placing a trade, you can also see and set your stops and limits as a potential monetary amount instead of pips

Post-Trade Analytics

Once you’ve done a bit of trading, you can review your trading history and see where you do well and where you can improve. This is a great feature as it can break down how well you trade by time of day, markets or volatility.

You can also set up “Play Maker” if you have a trading strategy and want to stick to it. Obviously, you can’t get that sort of data in a 24-hour test drive, so I’ll have to revisit that another time.

Demo Account

FOREX.com has a pretty good demo account. In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between the demo and live trading platform. You get the same functionality and as trades are OTC, the same prices.

However, when I opened a demo account to test it, I already had a real account. So after I got my demo account login details, I clicked through to the “Webtrader” portal and (funny or alarming, depending on how you look at it) my live account details were auto-filled in by Google Chrome.

Now, had I not been checking my email, to ensure that the platform had sent me through my credentials, I might not have noticed that I was logging into a live account. It could have been disastrous if I’d started trading away thinking it was paper money. Even more so as you get £10,000 in demo funds and I’d deposited £10,000 in my live account when I took FOREX.com on a 24-hour trading signal test drive.

It reminded me of when a trader thought that he was trading on a demo account and put $1bn worth of orders through and then sued his broker because it voided his €10m profits.

TradingView & MetaQuotes

I had a good play about with TradingView, as it’s now the go-to destination for traders. TradingView is a sort of social network for traders where you can view charts (they are excellent) and post trading ideas (take with a pinch of salt). As TradingView has grown, it has also become an execution venue, so you can link your FOREX.com trading account and deal straight from the charts. This shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for most traders as the charts on the app and web-based platform are provided by TradingView (which, incidentally, is one of the largest financial-based websites in the world now).

You can also trade on MT4 or MT5 (but only MT5 in the EU), if you are into that sort of thing…

Am I a Forexpert?

I did make money on day one, mainly thanks to putting on a GBP-USD trade that covered most of the losses from some of the other trades. When I used the trading signals 5 years ago, I also made money. Day 2 wasn’t so good. On my way to an investor show, I gave back a few pennies but still ended up on top. But I have to admit my traders were calculated guesses rather than heavily researched positions.

I don’t like holding positions overnight, as day trading reduces not only your margin requirements but also increases the amount of sleep you get because you don’t wake up with cold sweats in the middle of the night worrying about Asian interest rates.

Overall would I recommend forex.com? Yes, if you are going to trade forex and don’t know where to start, as it’s a massive brand with global reach and owned by a listed brokerage with an institutional pedigree. As far as box-ticking is concerned, it ticks the lot. Or should I say pips the lot…

Does Pepperstone use MT4?

Yes, MT4 is one of Pepperstone’s primary trading platforms. However, they are building their own trading in-house and also offer cTrader and MT5.

Pepperstone won “Best MT4 Broker” in the 2025 Good Money Guide Awards.

Is Capital.com any good for trading?

Capital.com has a user friendly and intuitive trading platform and app, that gives access to the most popular financial markets with competitive spreads with the ability to reduce risk by decreasing your leverage. Trading via the app has always been capital.com’s forte, and in 202, it won our award for “best trading app” not in part due to the fact that the company CTO has extensive experience in building engaging apps like Candy Crush.

What makes Capital.com different? Thumbs up, literally

Do you know what one of the most impressive thing about Capital.com is? They put the buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the app.

I don’t mean that in a facetious way, it’s genuinely a brilliant feature.

This may not sound like much but it’s a good example of how Capital.com has integrated decades of analytics, experience, feedback and customer data into creating a very easy-to-use intuitive trading app from scratch.

When Capital.com first became authorised by the FCA back in 2018, I visited their offices in London to have a chat about what they offer. The two main things we discussed were button placement and AI.

Trading App

But anyway, if you’ve updated your iPhone to the latest iOS you’ll notice that Apple has started moving things to the bottom of the screen, the search bar for instance. This is because, phones are getting bigger, and your thumb can’t reach the top of the screen if you are holding it with one hand. This is something that Capital.com figured out would make trading easier 5 years ago. I’ve just been through a bunch of other trading apps on my phone and still, amazingly enough, none of the other brokers have done this yet.

Capital.com was also the first to integrate artificial intelligence to help you improve your trading, they say, based on the Martingale theory. When I spoke to Chris Demetriou, the head of sales in the UK, he said that the system should give you prompts based on your previous trades. So for example, if you are about to do a trade that is similar to ones you have constantly lost on before, you should get a “are you sure you want to do this” notification.

Leverage Control

Everybody knows, that one of the main reasons people lose money when trading is overleverage. This could be either from not having enough free cash on account to give your position breathing space, or simply putting on trades that are too risky. One really good feature is that you can change your leverage based on asset class. The default leverage is the max that retail traders in the UK are permitted, but you can change this to 1:1 so you need to fully pay up for positions. A sensible thing to do if you are just getting started, which can help reduce excessive losses. As your experience grows you can increase your leverage accordingly.

Hedging

You can also set the platform to put on hedging positions, so you can be long and short the same thing at the same time. Why you ask? Well, it can help you run longer-term positions and short-term hedges. This in fact is the very point of CFDs. They were originally hedging tools, and still a good way to protect your long-term investment portfolio against short-term market corrections without having to close off your positions.

Customer Support

Customer support is pretty good too, you can get in touch via the chat widget on the platform, whatsapp or telegram. When I tested it I got a response within a minute and the issue I had was dealt with quickly (uploading ID to verify my account if you must know).

TradingView

You can’t trade from the charts, but when you have open positions they are overlayed along with your stops and limits, which you can move by dragging and dropping. But, if charting is your thing, you can join the other 78,000 Capital.com customers using and trading from TradingView.

Proprietory Tech

One thing I quite like though is that instead of relying on third-party software, the Capital.com trading platform is built in-house, and if you want something you can ask for it. For example, previously on the app you could see where an asset is as a percentage relative to the daily range. But, a customer asked, if you could see it in points too. So, that was quickly integrated so that you can now toggle between percentages and points. A small thing, but indicative of a broker that can do things and does do things, rather than just logging a helpdesk ticket.

Refinitiv

There are no trading signals on the platform or app, but you do get access to Refinitiv reports on US stocks, which give you a good overview of historic and potential future financial health. A good feature for those looking at slightly longer-term positions.

Overnight funding

Talking of long positions, or longer long positions, Capital.com also display quite clearly what your overnight financing rates are going to be on a daily basis. I’m sure this is a regulatory obligation anyway, but it’s done in a way that you can actually see what the price is, rather than an opaque formula. It gives a bit more transparency about how much a position is going to cost you.

Investmate

If you are new to trading, they have a stand-alone app called Investmate, which puts you through a series of bitesize courses that explain the financial markets. Capital.com also own currency.com if you fancy a punt on crypto, and shares.com so we can expect to see more comprehensive physical investing options soon.

Does IG work with MT4?

Yes, you can use MT4 with IG, but you are limited to only a few markets. If you are going to use MT4 as your main trading platform specialist MT4 brokers like Pepperstone give you access to more markets. However, one of the key advantages to trading on MT4 with IG is their experienced development team for helping implement strategies and how well-capitalised IG are as a business.

Does CMC Markets have MT4?

Yes, and it’s actually quite a good offering, compared to other mainstream brokers like IG who also have their own in-house platform.

You get competitive spreads on 175+ FX pairs, plus indices and commodities with no restrictions on scalping and no restrictions on minimum stop-loss or take-profit distances, or stop-loss and take-profit limits. Additional premium MT4 indicators and EAs, included at no cost on a London-located server.