Best brokers for trading GBP/JPY

Is City Index a good forex broker?

Yes, for forex traders who want a bit of added value rather than just a click-and-trade account, they also offer free Forex trading signals. City Index also provides some insightful analysis of your previous forex trading with their Performance Analytics.

On the FX trading platform, currency pairs are listed by major pairs and also separated by base currency so you can easily see EUR, USD and GBP FX crosses. You can trade forex options as a CFD or spread bet.

As well as trading FX, you can also invest in the currency markets through a range of ProShares and Invesco ETFs.

One really nice feature of the platform is that when you trade forex you can set your price tolerance, so if you want to place a limit order rather than market or fill or kill, you will still get filled within a few pips (depending on how many you set) of your limit rather than missing out entirely.

Trading Central is also integrated into the platform, which will show you which currency pairs have the most “market buzz” and see a constantly updated stream of technical analysis highlighting potential forex trades with pivot points, an indication of whether to go long or short, alternative scenarios and key support and resistance levels.

What does the City Index Forex trading platform look like?

Is FOREX.com good for forex trading?

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

“For FX sake”, I thought to myself when I decided to write a review about a forex broker that offers access to the forex market for forex traders because on the surface, that’s what forex trading platforms do, so I didn’t really think I’d have much to say. I’m not normally a fan of forex trading becuase, a. I’ve never had much success at it and b. I find the nuances of intra-day technical analysis too complicated.

I’m a sort of old-fashioned trader, I like to look at the market and think it’s either overvalued or undervalued and in my mind anyway, that is easier to do 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. And I know that the currency markets are not only hard to understand, they come with all sorts of complexities. For instance, I used to do some prime brokerage for institutions that would hedge their currency exposure when buying aeroplanes. So we would do deals like buying 50m EURSEK, then roll it forward for delivery in 2 months’ time. A massive headache when trying to market it up. Or dealing in GBPEUR, or was it EURGBP? I remember once, marking up (or down) a forward the wrong way. It would have been a €20k error, but fortunately, the dealer didn’t know what they were doing, so we styled it out. At one point, forex trading for me was a big income generator, but also the type of business I hated most. It was so bad at one point that the broker next to me refused to pick up the phone if he knew it was a big FX trade coming through. He’d get all red and sweaty and pretend to be busy filling another customer.

I was, in fact, 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 £250k 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 alas, I am a better marketer than a salesman, so I now just let other currency brokers compete for clients by trying to offer the best exchange rates.

But you don’t really care about that. You want to know what I think of Forex.com.

24 Hour Test: 

I thought I’d try something a little different with this review and have a bit of fun with it. So 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 £10k on account at 11:30. 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; it was a stand-alone forex trading app. When I reviewed it back in 2018, I said back that it was 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 my contacts at Forex.com for lunch, I put a few traders on. First, I looked at the trades 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). Used the classic stop/limit risk/reward ratio to of 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:

Then after lunch, on the way to my next meeting, I took a few moments on London Bridge, in the glorious sunshine with Tower Bridge in the background, to take a 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 provides 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 their 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 five 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 like:

Swipe to trade: a bit like Tinder (so I hear – I’ve been married for 12 years).

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 have 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 them, I already had a real account. So after I got my demo account login details, I clicked through to the “webtrader” portal (and this is quite 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 they had sent me through my credentials (as Interactive Brokers didn’t for some reason when I tested their demo account), I may not have noticed that I was logging into a live account. It could have been disastrous if I’d started ttrading away thinking it was paper money. Even more so as you get £10k in demo funds and I’d deposited £10k in my live account when I took forex.com on a 24-hour trading signal test drive around The City.

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 they voided his €10m profits. But, that’s unlikely, to happen to me because even on demo accounts I don’t get thank lucky.  And almost certainly won’t happen to you because why would you open a demo account after already having a live one unless you were reviewing it?

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 (a pinch of salt). As TradingView has grown, they have also become an execution venue too, 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 Forex.com app and web-based platform are provided by TradingView (who incidentally are one of the largest financial-based websites in the world now).

You can also trade on MT4, 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 GBPUSD trade that covered most of the losses from some of the other trades. When I used their trading ignals five years ago, I also made money. Day two 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? Well, yes, if you are going to trade Forex and don’t know where to start, 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, they tick the lot. Or should I say pip the lots…

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.

Is Plus500 a good broker?

Yes, Plus500’s trading platform has evolved nicely over the years from a simple interface to an intuitive execution venue for CFDs on the major markets and stocks.

1. Submit some documents to the company (identification, residence verification, etc.)
2. Read through several documents and complete a questionnaire
3. To be able to trade, you will need to fund your account (in the UK, the minimum initial deposit is £100).

Pricing: It’s dynamic so moves with the market for minimum spreads.

Plus500 does not charge any trading commissions when you place a CFD trade. However, there are some fees you need to be aware of including:

• Overnight funding fees – This is either added to or subtracted from your account when holding a position after a certain time
• Currency conversion fee – There is a fee (0.7%) for all trades on instruments denominated in a currency different to the currency of your account
• Guaranteed stop-loss order fees – If you request a guaranteed stop loss on a trade, there will be a small fee
• Inactivity fees – If you do not log in to your trading account for three months, a fee of up to USD $10 per month will be applied to your account.

Withdrawals are free of charge no matter how many you make per month.

Deposits are also free of charge.

Market Access: Very good, Plus500 are always first to try new asset classes

With Plus500, you can trade CFDs on a range of assets and instruments including:

• Shares (e.g. Lloyds Bank, Tesla, Apple)
• Currencies/forex (e.g. GBP/USD)
• Commodities (e.g. gold, oil)
• Options (exchange-traded options)
• Exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
• Indices (e.g. FTSE 100, S&P 500, ESG indices)

Overall, there are over 2,800 assets you can trade with CFDs.

The maximum amount of leverage you can use with Plus500 varies depending on the asset class as shown in the table below. If you are trading forex, you can potentially borrow up to 30 times your own money. For shares, you can only borrow up to five times your own capital.

Plus500 margin rates:

• Shares – 1:5
• Forex – 1:30
• Commodities – 1:20
• Indices – 1:20
• Options – 1:5
• ETFs – 1:5

Platform & Apps: Basic execution, but it does the job well

Plus500 trading apps and platform also offers several tools to help traders manage risk including:

• Stop-loss orders – Traders can use these orders to automatically close out a losing position at a specific level
• Guaranteed stop-loss orders – A guaranteed stop-loss puts an absolute limit on your potential loss from a losing trade
• Trailing stop-loss orders – This type of stop loss moves upwards as the price of the security being traded rises
• Take profit orders – Traders can use these orders to automatically close out a winning position at a specific level.

Customer Service: Plus500 doesn’t have a phone option, but its live chat is sufficient

Plus500’s customer service options are limited to online chat, email and WhatsApp. So, you can’t contact the company by telephone. However, don’t let that put you off. We contacted the company via online chat and were very impressed with the service and support offered. 

It’s worth noting that support is available 24/7. This is a big plus – some other CFD providers only provide support during the week.

If you are a larger or professional trader you can get access to Plus500’s Premium Service Package which includes:

• A dedicated premium service client manager.
• Periodic emails containing expert analysis of upcoming trading events.
• External trading webinars.
• A premium service customer support team.

The premium service is invitation only. To become a premium customer, you must have a real-money trading account.

However, if you want better margin rates but are not interested in the premium package you can upgrade to a professional account. The Plus500 professional account is an account designed for professional traders. With this account, you have access to higher levels of leverage (e.g. 1:20 for shares).

To be eligible for a professional account, you must meet two of the following three criteria:

• You’ve performed an average of at least 10 transactions per quarter, of significant size, over the previous four quarters on the relevant market (with Plus500 and/or other providers)
• You have a portfolio worth more than €500,000 (including cash savings and financial instruments)
• You have worked in the financial sector for at least a year in a professional position that requires knowledge of the related transactions or services.

Research & Analysis: Some sentiment, but limited education and analysis. Plus500 offers a range of additional features designed to help traders make money, including:

• Charting tools – Plus500’s platform offers charts with a wide range of indicators and drawing tools to help traders identify and capitalise on patterns and trends (there 13 charting tools and over 100 indicators)
• Market news – On its website, there is a section dedicated to news and market insights
• Alerts – With Plus500, you can set up real-time email, SMS, and push notifications for trade alerts (e.g. price alerts or % change alerts)
• An economic calendar – The economic calendar is designed to help traders prepare for important economic data (e.g. inflation data, retail sales data, job reports, PMI data)
• +Insights – This is a feature that allows Plus500 users learn more about market trends based on the company’s internal data (e.g. most bought stocks, most sold stocks)
• Watchlists – Users can manage multiple watchlists.
• Trading Academy – Plus500’s Trading Academy offers a range of educational products including eBooks, videos, and FAQs
• Webinars – Plus500 offers regular webinars to its professional clients
• A free unlimited demo account – With the demo account, novice traders can learn to trade CFDs without risking real money.

Summary

Yes, Pepperstone are able to offer some of the tightest forex spreads and commissions for major FX pairs. You can also trade minor and exotic FX crosses as a spread bet or trade CFD. Although no currency futures or options. Liquidity, pricing, and execution time on Pepperstone’s platform are good, given its access to multiple Tier 1 banks.

Pepperstone’s USP, when compared to other forex brokers, is their MT4 offering for traders who want to automate their forex trading strategies. Pepperstone has done partnerships with FX Blue which measures currency strength and also has a free (for clients) package of MT4 indicators which can be used to set up and simulate, then go live with trading algorithms based on technical indicators and price action.

Pepperstone’s Forex Trading Platform

For forex traders, who want manual execution, the cTrader forex trading platform offers good functionality where you can trade directly from the charts, as well as drag and drop stops and limits.

You can also trade forex via TradingView and if you are in the UK, Pepperstone is one of the view firms that lets you trade on TradingView as spread bets.

Is Spreadex good for forex trading?

Yes, we rate Spreadex as particularly good for forex spread betting, which is a form of trading where you do not have to pay capital gains tax on your profits.

Spreadex focuses on tax-efficient forex spread betting but has recently added the ability for traders outside of the UK to use their platform by trading Forex CFDs. The platform has recently had a facelift and provides a very clear overview of the major markets, with clear order tickets, with key fx pairs trading info prominently displayed.

One of the key benefits of Spreadex’s forex trading platform, is customer service. They have experienced dealers, that you can quickly get through on the phone, or via the platform’s chat functionality, plus voice brokerage. The ability to trade forex over the phone is something that few brokers offer nowadays, so it’s good to know that you still can, if you need to.

Forex Trading Platform

The desktop version of the forex trading platform is tabular which saves automatically on exit so you can spread it over multiply screens in one browser, window or detach modules to run separately. Spreadex, have built the trading platform in house, and they have some very good charting functionality where it is quick and easy to overlay technical indicators, that other forex brokers do not offer like VWAP.

Usability

It’s a good platform to get started on as you can trade forex from as little as £0.5 a point. One advantage of spread betting on forex is that your P&L will be in £, so you do not have to worry about FX fees on your resulting profit and loss. Spreadex also offers guaranteed stop losses, for added risk management and trailing stops, which move along with your profitable positions. For forex traders, that look at futures levels, you can also work limits with a time limit, so you don’t need to worry about leaving GTC orders open indefinitely.

Is IG a good forex broker?

Yes, you can trade forex as either a spread bet or CFD in the UK, and on the IG platform forex pairs are grouped by, major, minor, exotic and emerging crosses, which are rankable by the popularity of an FX pair.

Forex Signals

You can also hunt out upcoming trading signals, which are directly linked to a trading ticket (with corresponding stops and limits) for quick execution. These stops can be guaranteed stops (which will always be filled at your price no matter is the market gaps below) or trailing stops that move based on how profitable your position is).

Forex Options

You can trade forex options on a daily, weekly or quarterly basis for major pairs from £1 per point, if you want to take limited-risk forex positions. One of the lesser used but most helpful features through is the ability to trade forex when others can’t over the weekend. IG provides a weekend market for EURUSD, GBPUSD and USDJPY on Saturday and Sunday. Pricing is obviously wider, it does help provide some more control over your positions.

IG Forex Trading Platform

To trade an individual forex pair, the platform “workspace” gives a good overview with quick access to news, analysis, and integrated trading signals (from Autochartists and PIA). The market data page also gives some good indicators of IG client sentiment, how much a forex pair has been traded within the last hour and month, what excepted price ranges are and what volatility has been like.

Is CMC Markets a good CFD broker?

Yes, based on our broker matrix CMC Markets offers the most currency pairs of all the forex brokers we compare. 338 at last count. This is made up of both cash markets, but also CFDs and spread bets based on future prices (not DMA futures, but OTC derivatives based on the cost of carry). The Fx platform lets you rank all 388 fx pairs based on change and market so you can see what is most volatile and what are the cheapest and most expensive crosses to trade. They are also split into developed markets, which will traditionally have more liquidity and emerging markets, where prices may be more volatile.

Prime Forex Services

However, as well as being a client-facing forex broker, CMC Markets also provide liquidity to a wide range of smaller brokers. This means that there should always be good FX liquidity capable of filling large and high-frequency orders from even the most active traders.

And of course, you can see what other traders on the CMC platform think of specific forex markets with the “market pulse” tools. The client sentiment indicator shows how many clients are long or short an FX market, and the Chart forum gives analyst views from a technical perspective.

Forex Trading Platform:

There are a few things that are unique to CMC’s forex trading platform, which are quite handy, for example, the web version is modular so you can set it to update all windows (news, pricing, sentiment, charts etc.) when you click on a new pair, or you can keep them separate. Which can give you either a good market overview, or let you focus on an individual asset.

They also have 12 “Forex Indices” which are baskets of currency pairs that track the same base currency. So instead of speculating on the USD versus a specific currency, you can speculate on how the USD will perform against a broad range of economies, like a sector position in stock trading.

There are a couple of FX ETFs to trade that track GBP, EUR and USD, but there are no OTC options markets, nor can you trade on exchange futures with DMA.

Is XTB a good trading platform?

Yes, XTB’s trading platform offers access to the usual markets and pricing is fairly standard, but what sets it apart from other brokers is some of the trading platform’s unique functionality.

Most brokers offer it now but XTB was actually one of the first brokers to offer post-trade analysis, where the trading platform will show you where you are profitable and where you lose money.

One nice feature is the ability to close all of your positions in one go. A time saver if you are a day trader and want to be flat at the end of the day, or if you want out of the market in a hurry.

XTB produce their own market news, which is constantly updated throughout the day, which you can filter by asset class. If you combine this with the heatmap feature, stock scanner, sentiment indicators and automatically updated “hot” watchlist that shows where the order flow is going you can hunt out trading ideas

Overall, XTB is a very good trading platform that offers a lot more than just vanilla trading, suitable for new traders or more experienced investors wanting to create and hedge their own markets.

Is Interactive Brokers good for forex trading?

Yes, IBKR has two different forex trading platforms, IBKR Trader Workstation for advanced traders, which comes with some very complete order routing tools for larger orders. The Interactive Brokers web portal platform is much more suited to more casual forex traders and lets you go long or short currency pairs based on position size rather than lots by placing limit, and market entry orders and you can set your stop and limited exit orders based on P&L rather than price.

It’s also worth noting that if you want to trade margin products with Interactive Brokers you need at least $2,000 in your account.