CMC Markets Review – Are They Safe or a Scam?

CMC Markets is a market leader in low-cost trading, offering costs to forex traders that are measurably lower than the industry average. The proprietary Next Generation platform has three basic order types with the option of attaching “take profit” and/or “stop-loss” orders to them.

You are also able to set an initial stop loss at the time of execution for market orders and then amend it to a guaranteed stop-loss after execution. For pending orders, you can choose both guaranteed and/or trailing options when filling out the order ticket prior to execution.

In this section of our CMC Markets Review, we will take a look at the different market orders and trades for the benefit of new users:

• Market – This is the simplest order where a trader signals that their trade request should be executed at the prevailing market rate.
• Limit – A pending order where the entry is at a predetermined point below or above the prevailing market rate depending on whether it’s a buy or sell. You’ll also have the option of selecting the expiration time of the order.
• Stop – A pending order where the entry is set at a predetermined point above or below the prevailing market rate depending on whether it’s a buy or sell. You’ll also have the option of selecting the expiration time of the order.

CMC Markets’ best-of-class ‘Next Generation’ platform has a clean and modern design, is highly customisable, and boasts an advanced order panel. At first, it may appear that CMC’s web platform is a little advanced for beginners. However, the platform guide will help you familiarise yourself very quickly.

Our expert team at CMC Markets review took some time to test the platform and were delighted to report being extremely impressed with its design, which is geared toward optimising speed and usability. The layout wizard lets you choose between floating or fixed windows, so you’ll be able to choose between predefined layouts or a custom setup for crypto trades.

One feature that stands out is the Breakout and Emerging Patterns tools, which are categorised and ranked by their signal strength probability. These chart patterns auto-adjust when the chart time-scale is changed, enabling you to scan from a one-minute chart to a monthly chart and see any respective patterns identified.

The Chart Forum offering is a social-media style forum that allows you to post technical analysis and see the posts of others directly on a chart, including posts from dedicated CMC Markets analysts. Once enabled, if you are looking at a EUR/USD chart, for example, and click to view a user’s post in the accompanying Chart Forum section, their full analysis (indicators included) loads on your chart. Naturally, you’ll want to be careful with who you take opinions from, but we think being able to distinguish in-house staff from the public is a nice innovation.

Opening an account with CMC Markets is fundamentally simple and fully digital. Account verification normally takes no more than 1-2 business days.

Being FCA regulated lends credibility, as CMC Markets goes to great lengths to ensure account security. Negative balance protection gives you peace of mind, and the premium for guaranteed stop-loss execution is reasonable, given the account-saving risk management it provides in volatile market conditions. There are no hidden costs, and the free withdrawal (through wire transfer) is a welcome feature indeed.

To verify your identity, a photo of both sides of your driver’s license, national ID card, or passport is accepted. For residency verification, you can upload a bank statement, utility bill, mortgage statement, or credit card statement.

You may be required to upload more than one document for identity or residency verification. This was not immediately clear to us, which eventually led to a longer account opening procedure.

CMC’s flagship platform is a feature-rich, web-based offering aptly named “Next Generation.” This, coupled with the universal MT4 (downloadable) platform and a functional mobile application, brings the entire online offering right to your fingertips.

CMC provides access to an extensive range of offerings, both CFDs (including crypto) and spread betting, across several different asset classes.

Aside from the impressive complement of forex, the product roster includes commodities, indices, and individual shares, a comprehensive government bond listing and 14 cryptocurrency offerings.

The platform is highly customisable; in fact, it’s one of the most customisable platforms we’ve tested to date. It lets you save up to 10 custom platform templates, although one draw-back we found is that it lacks two-step authentication.

The CMC Markets’ Next Generation platform is available in 9 languages, namely Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.  You will be able to access the platform via the web, tablet, or mobile, and we think it will please technically ­oriented clients wanting to upgrade from MetaTrader 4.

In addition to all these great lineaments, it also features advanced charting with 115 indicators/overlays, 12 chart types, and 35 drawing tools, as well as customisable watchlists, client sentiment and a streaming Reuters feed. Charts can also be popped ­out to build and optimise complex desktop layouts.

If trading costs matter to you, CMC Markets has you covered. For our 2021 review, CMC Markets finished first in this category, thanks to its low spread offerings for all customer segments and account types.

Our CMC Markets reviews highlight competitive pricing that is better than the industry average and lets you trade on the price of cryptocurrency against the US Dollar, via a CFD account. The broker advises that minimum spreads will vary with after-hours trading.

If the underlying market spread widens throughout the trading day, or you are trading out of market hours, the platform spread may also widen. The spreads shown are for the first price available for the average market trade/bet sizes in the relevant product. The spread will widen for larger trade/bet sizes and can be viewed in live time on the CMC website.

CMC Markets trading and withdrawal fees

CMC Markets is one of the most transparent brokers in the market, which helps to easily calculate your trading costs. For example, we really liked that you can check historical financing costs. With CMC Markets you can trade CFDs on a range of cryptocurrencies using USD, including (but not limited to) Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and dash. You’ll need a Pro account to do this though.

We know it’s hard to compare trading fees for CFD brokers. So how did we approach the problem of making their fees clear and comparable? We compare brokers by calculating all the fees of a typical trade for selected products. These catch-all benchmark fees include spreads, commissions and financing costs for all brokers.

CMC Markets does not charge withdrawal fees for a domestic bank, credit/debit card, or electronic wallet withdrawals. However, if you’d like to receive your funds instantly (via bank transfer) or you use an international bank transfer, however, this comes at a charge.

CMC Markets offers an excellent fit for all types of traders, with a wide product offering, their best-in-class Next Generation platform which boasts accessibility, rich features, a plethora of research amenities, useful educational resources, crypto news, and an emphasis on customer service.

In this day and age, an online broker that does not place a high priority on addressing the needs of its customer in an efficient and satisfactory manner may be doomed to failure.

CMC Markets has included contact options to cover all the bases, with email for clients and prospective clients, 24/5 local phone support, and comprehensive FAQ and support libraries.

The live chat function can be launched from within the Next Generation platform, which is very convenient. Chat waiting times averaged 30 to 40 seconds during several contact attempts. We found that the live chat feature is super responsive, as we got succinct answers to all our questions in under a minute.

Phone support was great, with short waiting times, helpful operators (across multiple languages), who spoke in a clear, understandable manner.

This being said, CMC Markets runs 13 satellite offices on 4 continents to support licensed operations in other geographical locations. We also found that the Twitter and Facebook accounts were filled with up­-to-­date comments and active client interactions.

CMC Markets customer support is only available Monday to Friday, though it is available 24 hours a day, which is a great help for customers across the globe.

CMC Markets is regulated through the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under registration number 173730. The broker also takes steps to ensure that none of its client funds are mingled with corporate funds, in accordance with the U.K. FCA’s client money rules.

This ensures that client assets are protected in the unlikely event that CMC becomes insolvent by holding client funds in segregated accounts at regulated banks. These segregated funds are held in a number of the U.K. and European banks to further disperse risk to you – their most valuable client.

You will also have additional asset protection through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS), although it does not provide any layers of private insurance, which is an omission, given CMC’s large industry footprint.

Negative balance protection is now mandated under ESMA rules that came into effect back in 2018. The broker’s dealing desk acts as the initial counter-party on all CFD trades and spread bets, although pricing is automated through the platforms which ultimately reduces any potential conflict of interest.

CMC Markets offers clients one of the largest product catalogues available in the online trading community. As advertised on the CMC website, clients can trade up to 10,000 instruments, which opens up many new opportunities, especially with longer-­term portfolio managers.

Spreads are competitively low and all financial instruments – with the exception of individual shares, have specified margin percentages. CMC’s margin rates on shares start from 20% on U.K. and U.S. shares. Different margin rates apply for large position sizes on shares, depending on which tier the position size falls under.

The broker’s software security is aligned with the best that the industry has to offer. In addition to two-factor and biometric authentication, there is a timer that will log you out of the mobile application if it is not being used for a certain amount of time.