Pepperstone Forex broker: User reviews
Pepperstone is well-known amongst traders. This provider is working all over the world and offers instruments and assets suited for all styles and approaches. The problem with Pepperstone is that you don’t really get the idea of how it feels to work with them until you are actively involved in it.
User reviews on websites like Trustpilot don’t really help – not unless you know how to filter the nonsensical statements and read between lines. Trustpilot is filled to the brim with positive reviews by Pepperstone users. Unfortunately, they are mostly left ‘by invitation’, and you can’t really get the general idea from them.
Thankfully, you don’t need to search thoroughly through Trustpilot and other aggregators, because this article already has the results of exactly such a search.
What is Pepperstone?
Pepperstone makes great emphasis on satisfying the customers through their superior customer support. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all the other features are hollow and inferior, but you should get distracted by the client service.
The variety of instruments and assets on Pepperstone is pretty standard. It’s not too rich, but they seem to focus on something they know how to implement best. It includes:
- Indices and Forex indices
- Currencies and cryptocurrencies
- CFDs on shares and commodities
They are especially keen on promoting their gold trading, but you can trade a lot of other commodities, currencies and shares (mostly just American shares). Many of these assets can be traded via CFDs. It means you can arrange a contract to buy or sell them later – quite lucrative if you know how to use them.
But CFDs are a main focus here, so you might want to learn how to use them if you want to use Pepperstone to its fullest extent.
User rating
Looking at Trustpilot (as many do before signing up to one broker or another) is pointless, it’s mostly littered with ‘invited’ reviews – meaning they asked people to do so. On Trustpilot, the rating is 4-5/5. The more objective FPA (and other smaller aggregators) mostly award 3-4/5. Food for thought.
Advantages
You still shouldn’t disregard the ‘invited’ feedback, because they aren’t paid – the broker simply asks people to share their thoughts whenever the support helps them. The only problem is that negative reviews aren’t quite so frequent or encouraged. Still, by reading between lines you can deduce the following advantages.
- Customer service
You can’t deny that their customer support is more-or-less good. There are several key points to commend. Firstly, they evidently support works on most major languages, because they answer the reviews in many different tongues. Even their website is available in several languages: Russian, English and Chinese at the moment.
Of course, they could add more, but they probably assume most European investors can speak English.
Their superb support goes beyond simply breaking language barriers. Reportedly, they have a very quick response team that keeps their clients informed and leads them through trouble step-by-step. There is a 24/5 live chat, dedicated agents and a FAQ section – everything to fix a problem or stop confusion.
- Abundance of learning material
So, you know about Pepperstone’s focus on providing CFD trading as extensively as possible. They are very profitable, but problematic. You should learn a bit before trying to make profit off of them.
Pepperstone allows it. There is a very rich educational section on Pepperstone. You can specifically learn about trading CFDs, because there is a section dedicated to doing it. Moreover, there are webinars, educational videos, guides, articles for beginners.
The more advanced traders can find news and analysis posts to help them draw strategies and make decisions based on the recent developments in the market.
- Technological abundance
They are really adamant about publicizing their superior ‘technological edge’. It mainly means abundance of different trading platforms for all possible occasions, including MT4, MT5 and cTrader, as well as numerous tools to help you cope with sudden price movements and whatnot.
You can really create your strategy from zero with these features. They also don’t forbid experimenting with third-party algorithms (mostly), so you can plug up your automated system and tinker with it freely.
Disadvantages
Regardless, Pepperstone is still very fishy. There are several key targets of criticism, and it’s an effort to find them under the heap of praises and excited reviews.
- Shifty spreads
They seemingly can’t control their spreads at all. Pepperstone has a dedicated spread table to show you all the possible parameters. It’s pointless, however. As evidence shows, the spreads on many commodities and other assets can change almost chaotically, which shouldn’t happen.
Spreads are never fully fixed, but you should at least anticipate them. If they fluctuate by up to 100%, something in the system is obviously rigged or broken.
It doesn’t happen all the time, however – just often. It won’t matter if you don’t miss every single penny. It’s just uncomfortable.
- Flawed withdrawing
Withdrawing is a touchy subject for many brokers. A lot of them either scam you by not letting your transfers through or just can’t spare people to approve it in time, making it hang in limbo between the broker and your bank account for weeks on end.
Pepperstone isn’t a scam – they have too many happy customers to steal withdrawn money. They simply decline the pending withdrawals if there is some kind of problem. Most of the time they tell you what the problem is and maybe even help you fix it. Sometimes they don’t.
You just have to wait then.
In conclusion
Pepperstone is mostly harmless. They do drown you in positive reviews to make sure you sign up, but that’s just ugly marketing. The trading process itself is pretty comfortable, but the full potential of this broker only opens up if you are a professional trader who knows how to analyze and prepare.