Trading Conditions, Leverage & Execution

We aim to offer low spreads across our products, fast execution and flexible leverage options. We provide some of the most competitive pricing that you can find amongst CFD brokers.

What this means in practice is that for major FX, we are often offering spreads at zero for much of the day on our commission-based accounts, with trade execution under 30ms and up to 1:1000 leverage for qualifying traders.

To view information about our spreads and commissions, you can visit our page here. Information about our swaps can also be found here.

Spreads and commissions vary by instrument, platform, account type and market conditions. The best way to check is on our Account Overview page. The basic guidelines for how we charge are also outlined below:

FX and Metals

Our fees depend on which account type you are using. Standard Accounts and Swap-free Accounts will include any fees within the prices you see. Edge and VIP accounts will charge a per-volume commission on these instruments.

Cryptocurrencies

Typically on digital assets we charge a percentage-based commission, regardless of account type. This is because crypto products are more volatile, which would mean frequently changing the fees we charge as the asset price changes. Instead, we charge a fixed percentage of the contract value - which automatically adjusts the fee based on the instrument value.

Shares

How we charge for shares can vary depending on the underlying exchange, but usually they will have a percentage based commission proportional to notional value, or dollar-based commission per share.

All Other Instruments

On everything else, such as Indices, our trading fee is included in the prices you see in the platform. There won’t be an additional commission charge on top.

There’s no minimum to start trading on our Standard Account - this is our beginner friendly account, and you can start with any amount.

For Edge and VIP accounts, there is a minimum funding level. This is $250 USD for Edge Accounts, and $25,000 USD for VIP access.

Leverage available when you trade will depend on the instrument traded. Some volatile instruments such as cryptocurrencies are not available at the full account leverage rate - instead, they use symbol-specific margin rates. The best place to view symbol-specific margin rates is within the platform itself on the contract specifications.
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For FX and precious metals products the account leverage is used, and with some minor exceptions the full leverage rate is available. For smaller accounts we offer up to 1000:1, though the maximum leverage typically reduces as your account size gets larger.

You can change your account leverage within your Secure Account Portal by navigating to the Trading Accounts section and then clicking the edit button on your chosen trading account.

Margin is the amount of money you must deposit to open and maintain a leveraged position. If your account equity falls towards or below the required margin, you may receive a margin call or have positions reduced/closed automatically to prevent the account falling into deficit.

The margin percentage is the ratio of account equity compared to required margin:

Equity / Margin Requirement * 100 = Margin Percentage

This margin percentage is used to trigger our margin calls and margin stop-outs.

Our default margin levels are as follows:

We try to send out an email, or contact you separately when your account is in a margin call.

Overnight funding (known as a swap fee or swaps) is a charge or credit applied when you hold positions through the end of day rollover period. It reflects factors including:

Swaps are calculated based on position size, direction and instrument. The rates change frequently based on the factors above and more, so you can keep up to date with the latest swap rates by checking an instrument's contract specifications within the platform and read more information on our website.

We don’t offer negative balance protection on any of our accounts. It is your responsibility to use leverage with care, and ensure you always have sufficient margin in your account to meet margin requirements or cover negative balances.

Yes. In fast-moving markets, it is possible for losses to exceed your equity before positions are closed, which can create a negative balance if negative balance protection is not in place or applicable.

This is because filling your orders depends on market liquidity and conditions. If there are scenarios such as a market gap, low liquidity, or the market is moving too fast to fill your order, then it is possible that we won’t be able to exit your trade before the account equity has fallen below zero. In this case, you could have a negative balance which you need to cover.

We have no restrictions on legitimate trading strategies such as scalping and using EAs. You can trade using any strategy you like, but if you are unsure please feel free to check with our support team first.

Where we do have restrictions for exceptional cases, it is for activity that we do not consider legitimate trading - such as attempting to exploit our platform, systems or pricing through latency arbitrage or other methods. We do not consider these activities to be acting in good faith, and they are against the terms of your account with us. We take a zero tolerance approach to these activities as they are at the expense of TabTrade or our clients and may put both at risk.

TabTrade uses an ECN model, which allows matching of orders internally as well as hedging outside of our risk limits with external liquidity providers.This hybrid approach lets us provide the best execution experience for our customers.

As a broker, we earn our revenue based on the following factors:

There are other features of trading that may appear to be a charge we earn money on, but are simply a feature of the underlying market that we need to replicate. This includes corporate actions and dividends, which are usually profit-neutral.

For example, when a share goes ex-dividend and a dividend is paid or charged, the market price for that asset may drop by a relative amount to account for that, given the value of the dividend is no longer in the price of the asset.

We detail all of the costs of trading in our Product Disclosure Statement if you would like to read in more detail.

We source ECN pricing and liquidity from quality partners to customize our price feeds. We take care to analyse the execution quality and reliability of the counterparties we use in order to maintain the quality of our trading conditions. Our liquidity mix may change over time as we optimize our pricing to deliver better conditions for customers

We use a New York close for our trading day. That means that midnight on our MT5 trading server always corresponds to 5pm New York time. This sets the daily chart candle to always finish when trading finishes in US markets.
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The actual time-zone will switch between UTC+2 and UTC+3 depending on whether it is currently Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US. Our trading server time-zone will be UTC+3 when the US is in Daylight Savings Time and UTC+2 when the US is out of Daylight Savings Time.