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Frequently Asked Questions
Find out everything you need to know about opening an account or view commonly asked questions about managing your existing trading account.
Accounts and funding
Leverage is the ability to control a large amount of money in the forex markets.
For example, we offer leverage of up to 50:1 for forex. That means, for every $1 that you have in your trading account, you can trade $50 in the forex market.
Leverage gives the trader the ability to make meaningful profits on the normally miniscule daily currency movements, and, at the same time, risk only minimal capital on a given position.
Leverage can exponentially increase your profits as well as your losses so it's crucial that traders take care when using leverage. The larger your position size, the larger your pip value will be and therefore, the greater the impact on your profit/loss (P/L).
As part of our Pepperstone Partners program, we offer MAM (Multi Account Manager) and PAMM (Percentage Allocation Management Modules) to qualified and experienced fund managers with relevant licences or industry experience. Our MAM software allows you to easily manage hundreds of sub-accounts from one centralised place with virtually no delay in allocation. To find out more about our partners program benefits or enquire about MAM/PAMM software, visit pepperstonepartners.com.
Leverage is predetermined and can not be changed.
If you are a Professional Client, you may be able to access higher leverage, for more information please contact us.
If you’re a Retail Client, your current maximum available leverage is:
- 50:1 (2%) for major currency pairs, major indices and gold
- 10:1 (20%) for crypto currencies
- 10:1 (10%) for shares
- 20:1 (5%) for products with any other underlying asset, including minor currency pairs and oil
Please note that the above rates are the maximum leverage that we can offer you. We may decrease the amount of leverage that’s available to you in situations where existing leverage levels are unsuitable for certain market conditions.
Demo accounts expire automatically after 30 days unless you have a live funded account and request us to set it to non-expiry for you.
Demo accounts will disappear from the SCA once 30 days lapse, even if it is set to non-expiry.
The initial deposit to trade with Pepperstone is $200.00 USD or equivalent. However, this is not actively enforced and clients are welcome to deposit less than this.
Withdrawals are processed during business hours Australian time and take 1 business day to be processed and sent by Pepperstone. Once sent, withdrawal ETAs depend on the method chosen. For example withdrawals by Bank Wire Transfer usually take 1-5 business days to reach your account once sent. Paypal, Neteller, Skrill - 2 Business days
Pepperstone cannot teach you how to trade nor make any trading decisions for you. We do have a dedicated team of trading specialists that can support you with all the tools to help you design your trading strategy, but ultimately, all final decisions are made by the client.
You can have up to 100 live accounts with us, as long as you have over 10 units of currency in 10 of your live accounts.
Opening an account
To open a live account, please head to our homepage and select Live Account > Open a Live Trading Account.
The process will take around 5-10 minutes to complete online. You'll be prompted to complete an onboarding appropriateness test and provide your account opening ID documents, which can be uploaded online during your application.
Your application will then be reviewed by our back office team. Once we've verified your documents, we'll send you your trading account login information.
As part of our regulatory obligations, we are required to verify your identity and residency before opening your trading account. Please note, that in some cases you may be requested to provide additional documentation. Should we need anything further, our account opening team will contact you.
We must be able to understand the language on any identity documents submitted. Our team can currently translate most European languages plus Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Malay, Russian and Thai.
To help us verify your ID, please provide at least one the following:
- Passport
- Government issued photo ID
- Driver’s License
Please note the document must show your full name, date of birth and must be valid.
We do not accept utility bill, bank or credit card statement, birth or citizen certificate or similar as ID document for identity verification purposes.
To help us verify your residency, please provide at least one of the following documents:
- Utility Bill (must be in your name and issued within the last 6 months) or;
- Tenancy/Ownership contract or agreement (must be in your name and in case of tenancy contract, should be current year)
- Bank statement (must be in your name, showing your current residential address and issued within the last 3 months)
We’re often asked this question. Part of the difficulty in answering it is the fact that 'ECN' and 'STP' are marketing terms taken from a listed market regime and different providers in the industry give them different meanings.
A 'true ECN' or STP broker is an introducing broker or a broker who operates using someone else’s system under a white label arrangement.
We’re the issuer of the products that we provide and we have control over the systems that we use, because our preference is for our clients to have a direct relationship with us.
That said, we could be considered to be an 'ECN' broker in that we don't run any proprietary trading book. By contrast, we source our pricing from external Liquidity Providers (pricing isn’t provided by us or from any one related to us) via an electronic communication network, and this pricing is passed on to you and our other clients without a dealing desk intervening.
Hedging each individual transaction creates more chance of something happening to the second limb of the trade, which impacts the first. For this reason, we don’t hedge each and every position with our external Liquidity Providers, because we want to provide you with a better product by giving you price certainty and speed in terms of how we deal with you. Please be assured that we take our risk management practices very seriously and closely monitor our exposure to ensure we are not exposed to excessive risk.
We consider a 'market-making broker' to be someone who operates a dealing desk and creates their own prices, which can be based on their own proprietary trading positions or risk exposure. We don’t currently operate in this manner, so although we have market-making authorisations on our AFS Licence (like every other licensed product issuer in Australia), we don’t consider ourselves to be a market maker.
For more information about this, please contact us at support.ae@pepperstone.com.
Platforms and tools
ASIC’s new product intervention measures restricts retail leverage, increases the minimum stop out level to 50% and requires that you place margin for hedged positions. To satisfy these requirements, we’ve introduced retail only symbols with the addition of an .a suffix (for example EURUSD.a or XAUUSD.a) for MT4 and MT5 only. These new symbols for retail clients will be live from 28 March. This also means that you’ll no longer be able trade on the current plain symbols.
You can find detailed information about these conditions and changes here.
Understanding trading conditions
We aim to provide low trading costs and fast execution across a wide range of instruments.
You can learn about our trading conditions under Trading with us, where we cover our available instruments, spreads and commissions, trading accounts and more.
You can also view important information in our Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) and Terms and Conditions documents.
Our demo account aims to mimic a live account and allows you to test our platforms and trading conditions, but due to execution differences, the exact same trade outcomes may not occur at all times. The difference is that you can have up to 200 live account trades open or pending at any one point in time, whereas demo accounts are limited to 50 trades at any one time.
Yes, we proactively monitor our exposure to clients, hedging internally when we can but also using multiple external providers to hedge with when the market risk goes beyond certain limits.
This model allows our clients to enjoy seamless execution speeds, as orders being matched internally will result in extremely fast execution with low levels of slippage regardless of the trading session or time of day.
More information about our hedging policies can be found in our Product Disclosure Statement (PDS).
We primarily make money via the spread (the difference between the bid and ask price on your contract) and commission (which will be reflected when you place a trade and varies depending on which platform you use) on each of the instruments we offer. More information can be found in section 7 of our Financial Services Guide (FSG).
Have a trade that you're not happy with? Feel free to create a trade investigation and our Support team can investigate your enquiry. To create a trade investigation, please fill out this form and send this directly to support.ae@pepeerstone.com.
For Pepperstone DFSA clients, the automated stop-out will occur when your account equity falls below 50% of the margin requirement of your trades. Professional clients may request a close out margin of 20%, however this is subject to our discretion and prior approval. DFSA clients are not protected by full negative balance protection however we consider waiving negative balances on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the circumstances.
Pepperstone rollover occurs 23:59 – 00:01, MT4 server time, which is currently on GMT+3. Our rollover time coincides with New York market's close, which takes place 5 pm, New York time.
Pepperstone offers FX, indices, equities, cryptos, energy and commodities to trade. You can read about the product specifications for each product on our available instruments page.
Yes. MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 are extremely popular platforms for automated trading strategies via expert advisors.
Maximum lot size for one trade is 100 lots and clients can have 200 trades open at any one point in time for live accounts. Demo accounts are capped at 50 trades at any one time.
Understanding fees and charges
A Razor account has raw spreads with commission (i.e. the spreads are passed directly onto our clients from our liquidity providers).
For cTrader, the commission rate is determined by the currency you are trading rather than the deposit currency of your account, as is the case with MT4/MT5. The commission rate on cTrader Razor accounts is seven units of the first quoted currency in the currency you are trading. For example, a one lot trade of NZDCAD will cost $7NZD in commissions.