ThinkMarkets

ThinkMarkets ranks 4th of 10 on cost — and cost is not the whole bill

Measured on a ThinkZero · MT5 account against FxPro, same instrument and same window. Nothing here is taken from a marketing page.

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

Where the $1 302 comes from

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 ThinkZero · 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 $1 302, or 65%. That is the thing a spread table cannot tell you. ThinkMarkets quotes a raw spread of 0.33 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, $66 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.

These are not quoted prices. They are what one real account would have paid over a stated window at a stated volume - and volume moves the total more than any difference between brokers. The per-lot components scale with volume and the swap does not, so the ordering between accounts is a function of how much you trade.

The measurement itself, 27.08–25.09

Our ThinkMarkets account is a plain ThinkZero · MT5 account, opened through the public sign-up with no negotiated terms and no introducing-broker arrangement. 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. A tick that is not seconds old after the offset is subtracted is not stored at all, which is the guard that closed the hole through which a frozen Friday quote once arrived stamped as Saturday.

Execution is measured the only way it can be — by putting orders through the account: 4 801 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 211 were timed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases. Positions were closed at once and the account reconciled afterwards so that what is measured is the fill and not an accidental trade.

2026-08-27 to 2026-09-25, continuously, with coverage counted against calendar market hours rather than against the hours we happen to have seen.

Spread by hour on this account

There is no hourly series for ThinkMarkets yet. The hourly table needs a continuous series from our own account for the whole window, and one that survived the feed audit. This account either post-dates the window or failed that audit. 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 interesting hours are the ones missing from every marketing page. 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.

What ThinkMarkets did with our orders

Spread is what a broker quotes. Execution is what you get and the two part company precisely when it matters. Out of 4 801 orders on this account 1.4% did not execute and the 211 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 1.7 pips on average — about $17 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. Folding the two together is the kind of error that is very comfortable to make when it favours the broker that pays for the site.

Slippage measures where the fill landed relative to the request, with the sign pointing the way a trader experiences it — positive is money lost. It is measured only on release-timed orders because that is where the number has meaning. A grid of probes spread evenly through a quiet afternoon reports that every broker on earth is identical. Those minutes are where execution quality actually exists - liquidity thins and every order in the market arrives together.

Each probe is the smallest volume the account allows and is closed immediately, which keeps the measurement from accumulating market exposure and keeps the cost of running it survivable. Fills and quotes do not always arrive in the same units on the same connection; a probe that disagrees with its own quote stream is flagged suspect instead of becoming a slippage figure.

What ThinkMarkets's licence gives a client

Not established. We have not confirmed which of this broker's licensed entities would hold an account like ours, and without that there is no honest way to say what protection applies: a group can hold a European licence, an offshore one and several in between, and the client protections attached to them are not comparable. A licence number attached to the wrong entity is worse than no licence number at all, so this section stays empty until the broker tells us which entity our account sits under.

This matters more than it sounds. The compensation ceiling, the maximum leverage you may be offered, whether your losses can exceed your deposit and who hears a complaint are all properties of the entity, not of the brand on the website. Two clients of the same broker, onboarded through different entities, can have materially different protection with identical platforms and identical spreads.

Where we have established the entity, this section carries the regulator's own rule with the sentence it came from — see any of the brokers whose entity is confirmed. For this one, the measurements above stand on their own: they describe the account we opened, whoever turns out to hold it.

Where ThinkMarkets sits on each axis

ThinkMarkets is in the better half of the table on 4 of the 8 axes it has figures for — best of 9 on withdrawal fee. Every placing below compares like with like - same class, same instrument, same window - and stops there, without a total. 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 about ThinkMarkets

Each answer is derived from the figures on this page. None of them is a general statement about brokers.

How to check what is on this page

A measurement published by a site that earns a commission from one of the brokers it measures deserves scepticism, so here is where to point it.

• 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
• Check the window, then the sort orderevery figure carries the window it was taken in; the cost table is sorted by cost, and our sponsor sits wherever that puts it
• Check that the losses are printedif the sponsor's losses ever stop appearing on this site, stop believing the rest of it

If you find something wrong, tell us: desk@costcheckfxen.com. We publish the correction and keep the wrong rows, flagged and excluded, because a record of our own faults is worth more than a clean-looking database. A broker that disagrees with a number here is sent the query and the rows behind it; the editorial policy says how that works.