ActivTrades

ActivTrades was established in Switzerland in 2001, but it was not until 2008 that they began offering FX and CFD products. ActivTrades holds licences in several jurisdictions, including Mauritius, the Bahamas, Italy, and the UK. They also provide a multilingual customer service team.

The broker has physical offices in locations such as London, the Bahamas, Italy, Bulgaria, Portugal, Brazil, and Mauritius.
ActivTrades operates as a variable spread broker, which, as reflected in their documentation, can result in significant fluctuations in the Bid-Ask spread.

ActivTrades is a CFD/FX broker that prioritises having a physical presence in multiple locations. This is evident from their offices in Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, and Portugal.

We also appreciate their proprietary ActivTrade platform. It is rare for a broker to invest in developing their own trading platform, but ActivTrades has done so, and the platform is impressive.

They offer a broad selection of tradable products. While this is fairly standard for brokers, it is still worth highlighting.

ActivTrades is expensive. At TraderGuide, we prioritise what matters most: the cost of trading. While we do not rank brokers based on customer service – as we expect high-quality service across the board – we focus on what can be measured objectively. The most tangible measure is the cost of the Bid-Ask spread, and ActivTrades does not perform well in this area.

With a score of 39.91 across 16 commonly traded FX and CFD products, ActivTrades ranks poorly on the TraderGuide’s ranking list. They perform reasonably well on stock indices, particularly in the FTSE, but we also recorded spreads as wide as 2.21 on the DAX index. This is the drawback of using a broker with variable spreads.

One of the benchmarks we use is the cost of trading the EUR/USD pair, the most commonly traded FX pair. ActivTrades' spread is 1.80, which is five times more expensive than the cheapest broker we evaluated.

If you do not trade frequently, ActivTrades could work well for you. They offer an excellent platform and a multilingual customer service team that can cater to your specific language needs.

However, if you trade frequently, the higher trading costs associated with ActivTrades may unnecessarily impact your account. This is an important factor to consider when selecting a broker.