ActivTrades vs Pepperstone — which broker is better?

Pros

• FCA licence 434413 held since 2005, plus a CMVM-regulated EU entity, an SCB entity and a Brazilian brokerage - one of the longest continuous track records in retail CFDs
• Excess-of-loss cover at Lloyd's of London pays up to USD 1,000,000 per claimant on an insolvency - and it covers the offshore entities, which is where clients have no compensation scheme at all; UK clients have FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 instead
• No minimum deposit at all on the standard account, and no deposit or withdrawal fee on any published method
• Four platforms on one account - ActivTrader, MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and TradingView - with the SmartOrder, SmartLines and SmartPattern add-ons bundled into MetaTrader
• Four base currencies including CHF, which is rare and removes a conversion round trip for Swiss clients
• Support runs 24/5 in roughly fourteen languages with a published average email response time of about 27 minutes
• UK clients can trade the same book as spread bets, which changes the tax treatment of gains in the UK

Cons

• 82 percent of ActivTrades retail accounts lose money on CFDs - the highest disclosed rate among the fourteen FCA-regulated CFD brokers surveyed by The Investors Centre in 2026, against a 69.9 percent mean
• Spread-only pricing is not cheap for active traders: ForexBrokers.com measured a 1.08 pip EUR/USD monthly average on the standard account, versus roughly 0.8 pips all-in at raw-spread competitors
• A 0.5 percent currency conversion fee applies whenever an instrument settles outside your base currency, which quietly taxes every US share CFD held in a EUR or GBP account
• Education is limited and poorly structured - archived webinars and roughly seventy articles folded into the research section rather than a course path
• Everything is a CFD. No listed options, no exchange-traded futures, no mutual funds, no fractional shares and no share ownership of any kind
• The Luxembourg entity was fined EUR 14,000 by the CSSF in December 2024 for AML and counter-terrorist-financing failings, including training written for UK rules and applied unchanged in Luxembourg

Pros

• Razor all-in EUR/USD cost of about 0.8 pips - a 0.0 to 0.1 pip raw spread plus USD 3.50 per lot per side
• No inactivity fee, no account-keeping fee and no account closure fee, confirmed on Pepperstone's own costs page
• Five execution venues on one account: MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView and the in-house Pepperstone Platform
• Three top-tier licences - FCA 684312, ASIC AFSL 414530 and BaFin 151148 - so most clients contract with a tier-1 supervised entity
• EUR, CHF and GBP accounts at every European entity (UK, Cyprus, Germany), which removes a layer of conversion cost for European clients
• Account approval typically inside 4-8 hours, with a USD 10 minimum first deposit and no minimum by bank transfer
• Active Trader rebates take the all-in EUR/USD cost down to roughly 0.26 pips at high volume
• UK clients get the same book as spread bets, with EUR/USD from 0.6 points

Cons

• Everything is a CFD. You never own the share or ETF, so there are no voting rights, no transferable holdings and no dividend tax reclaim
• Overnight financing on index and share CFDs is charged at 2.5 percent over the benchmark rate, which quietly punishes anyone holding for more than a few weeks
• No options, futures, bonds or mutual funds - the product shelf is narrow next to a full-service broker
• Education is a webinar and article archive rather than a curriculum; ForexBrokers.com marks it down for having no interactive courses or quizzes
• FIX API access is reported to need around USD 250 million in monthly volume, so systematic traders are confined to MT4, MT5 or cTrader automation
• Pepperstone publishes no headline currency conversion rate, which makes the true cost of a US share CFD from a EUR account hard to model before you trade