Eightcap

Eightcap ranks 3rd of 10 on cost — and cost is not the whole bill

Raw · MT5 account, EUR/USD, 27.08–25.09. Both columns are printed for every broker on this site, ours included — the losses are what make the wins worth reading.

EUR/USD · 27.08–25.09 · our own account, 1 s bid/ask sampling

The bill, taken apart: $1 273 a year

The headline figure is one number, and one number is not checkable. Here it is in its parts, for 10 lots a month of EUR/USD on the Raw · MT5 account we opened:

One pip on one standard lot of EUR/USD is about $10; that conversion is the only constant in the sum, and it is the market's, not ours.

On this account the commission is the larger half of the bill: $840 of $1 273, or 66%. That is the thing a spread table cannot tell you. Eightcap quotes a raw spread of 0.31 pips, which looks almost free, and then charges per lot for the privilege. Whether that is cheaper than a wider spread with no commission depends entirely on how much you trade, which is why the profile is stated rather than assumed.

The swap line, $61 a year, is the one component that does not scale with how often you trade — it scales with how long positions stay open. A A day trader who is flat overnight will pay almost none of it; somebody holding a position for weeks will pay more than our profile shows.

The table is an invoice reconstructed from measurements, not a price list. Change the volume and every per-lot line moves with it. At a tenth of this activity the commission line shrinks to a tenth while the swap line barely moves, and the ranking between brokers can invert.

The measurement itself, 27.08–25.09

An account was opened at Eightcap in the ordinary way, on the Raw · MT5 account type — the one a retail client is offered, not a negotiated institutional tier. The broker's own platform runs on a machine that does not sleep, does not hibernate and does not throttle on battery; all three defaults had to be turned off explicitly, because each would have cut exactly the overnight hours this site exists to measure.

Ticks land in the store unmodified, and the one transformation applied to them — the shift from broker-server time to UTC — is measured per session rather than assumed. The guard that holds whatever the offset says is freshness: a tick has to be seconds old once converted, or it does not enter the store. Without it a stale weekend quote reads as a live one.

Execution is measured by sending orders not by reading a chart: 4 776 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 206 were timed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases. Every probe was closed within seconds: an open position would collect swap and market risk and contaminate the next reading and the account is reconciled against the broker after each run.

The window is 2026-08-27 to 2026-09-25, continuous. Coverage is reported as the share of calendar market hours in that window which actually hold samples, not as the count of distinct hours of the day we have ever seen — the second number can only go up, and it hid a three-day outage from us for exactly as long as we trusted it.

Why there is no hourly table for Eightcap

Not published for this account. The hourly table needs a continuous series from our own account for the whole window, and one that survived the feed audit. One of those two conditions is missing here. An hourly table assembled from a partial series looks exactly like a complete one, which is precisely why it is not here.

The window-level figures are published; only the hour-by-hour cut is withheld. When a full series exists, this section fills itself from the same store as every other figure on the site — there is no second pipeline for presentation, which is the only reason a reader can trust that an hourly figure and an average come from the same ticks.

The hours that matter most are the ones nobody advertises. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC the New York session closes, liquidity thins and spreads on every account we hold widen — several of them by a multiple rather than a margin. A broker quoting a single daytime average is quoting its best hour and leaving the arithmetic to you; the spread page carries the day-against-rollover ratio for every account in the table, including this one.

Execution measured by sending orders, not by reading claims

Spread is what a broker quotes. Execution is what you get and the two part company precisely when it matters. Out of 4 776 orders on this account 1.1% did not execute and the 206 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 1.6 pips on average — about $16 per standard lot every time one of those orders is placed.

A reject here is an order the broker declined, with its own status code attached. It is not the same thing as an order that got no execution event inside our window: those are recorded under our own status, no answer, and excluded from this rate. That separation is not pedantry: it is the difference between measuring a broker and measuring our own network.

Slippage is the difference between the price asked for and the price filled, signed from the trader's side: positive means worse for you. Only orders aimed at scheduled releases count towards it. Execution quality is invisible in calm markets — that is the whole reason brokers can advertise it freely. The whole of execution quality lives in the few minutes a day when liquidity thins and everybody has orders arriving at once.

Every probe opens and closes within seconds at minimum volume, so what is measured is the fill and not a position. The execution price returned by an order and the quotes streaming alongside it are not always in the same units, so a probe whose fill disagrees with the quote stream by more than a couple of per cent is recorded as suspect rather than published.

What Eightcap's licence gives a client

The protections attached to Eightcap in this table are the ones that come with 246/14, held by Eightcap EU Ltd. They are properties of that entity, and they are worth reading before any spread figure on this page.

Read together, those four lines describe a fairly specific deal. Your losses on a CFD account cannot exceed the money in it, because negative balance protection caps aggregate liability at the account balance. Positions are closed out when equity falls to half the required initial margin, which is a floor under how far a bad position can run before somebody intervenes. Leverage on major currency pairs is capped at 30:1 — the same broker group may legally offer several hundred to one through a different entity, and that is one of the clearest practical differences between the licences a single brand can hold. And if the firm itself fails owing you money, the compensation scheme pays up to €20,000, which is a ceiling worth knowing against the size of a deposit rather than after it.

None of that is a judgement about Eightcap. It is the floor the licence puts under any firm holding it, and the reason this site records the entity rather than the brand: the measurements above would be identical under a different entity, and the protections would not.

📄 stated by the regulator · read on 2026-10-11 · we quote the rule, not a summary of it, because a summary is where this kind of fact usually goes wrong

One caution about reading protection as cost. The regulated European entity is often not the cheapest venue a group operates: the same brand's offshore entity may quote tighter and lever higher. Our figure of $1 273 a year is for the entity above, on the account type above, and it is not transferable to a differently licensed arm of the same company.

Eightcap against the rest of the table, axis by axis

Eightcap is in the better half of the table on 5 of the 8 axes it has figures for — best of 9 on withdrawal fee. Each placing is against the other accounts in the same source class, on the same instrument and window - not against a broker's claim, and not rolled into a composite score. A composite score is exactly where a site paid by one of these brokers would hide its thumb, so there is none.

Lower is better on every axis · 27.08–25.09 · ranking happens inside one source class only

Read the column of placings rather than any one row. Consistency across axes tells you what kind of account this is; a strong placing on one axis tells you almost nothing about the bill or the fills.

Questions this page should answer

The questions below are answered from this broker's own figures; where the honest answer is that we do not know, that is the answer given.

How to check what is on this page

The incentive on this site runs one way, and the only honest response to that is to make the figures easy to attack. Start here.

• Check that the losses are printedif the sponsor's losses ever stop appearing on this site, stop believing the rest of it
• Check the source class on each number🔬 measured, 📊 third party, 📄 stated by the broker — and no ranking crosses those classes
• Recompute the billthe components and the profile are printed above; the arithmetic is deliberately simple enough to redo on paper
• Ask for the rowsthe data page says what we hand over, including the flagged readings we excluded
• Compare us with anybody else measuring the same thinga figure that only exists on one site is a figure nobody has checked, ours included

If you find something wrong, tell us: desk@costcheckfxen.com. A correction is published with a note of what changed, and the faulty rows are quarantined rather than deleted. A broker that disagrees with a number here is sent the query and the rows behind it; the editorial policy says how that works.