GAIN Capital Review

If you are interested in a live account we suggest you do it through our form on the right of this page. We can provide you with rebates if you open your account through us. This means that you will receive a rebate of up to 0.5 pip (or $5) on every trade you make!

GAIN Capital is one of the largest brokers in the Forex industry. GAIN Capital was founded in 1999 and has realized strong growth over the years. Nowadays, GAIN is among the most respected brokers and has clients in more than 140 countries. GAIN's client base is very diverse. It includes individual traders as well as professional traders that trade on behalf of an institution. This review of GAIN Capital focuses mainly on the individual trader although much of the information also applies to institutional traders.

GAIN Capital and Forex.com

Sometimes, there seems to be confusion among (new) traders with regard to the relationship between GAIN and Forex.com. Actually, Forex.com is a fully owned subsidiary of GAIN, this is also clearly stated on the Forex.com website. Forex.com is the website through which GAIN offers its services to individual traders. GAIN has tailored Forex.com to these individual traders by offering trading tools that are easy to use, providing a lot of educational material on the website (allowing also people that are completely new to Forex to get started), and offering trading accounts with rather low minimum initial deposits.

The minimum initial deposit required for opening a new live institutional trading account at GAIN Capital is $ 100,000 while this is only $ 2,500 for new accounts opened at Forex.com and only $ 500 for new mini accounts opened at Forex.com. This difference clearly illustrates the discrepancy in focus between the two websites.

GAIN Capital's spreads

Institutional clients as well as individual traders benefit from variable spreads. Variable spreads vary with the volatility of the market. The more volatile the market, the wider the spreads but at times of low volatility the spreads are very tight. Any broker that offers variable spreads needs to widen them when the market becomes more volatile because more volatility means more uncertainty. However, variable spreads are in the end always better for the client because on average transaction costs are lower with variable spreads. Therefore, GAIN only offers variable spreads.

Fractional spreads

Both, individual and institutional clients, can benefit from the fact that GAIN offers fractional spreads so that spreads like 1.9 pip (instead of 2 pip) become possible. Fractional spreads come with two advantages:

• The extra digit allows traders to benefit from relatively small price differences. While a difference of 0.1 pip may not appear is a big advantage it adds up quite significantly if you trade each lot with a 0.1 pip price advantage for a longer period of time. 0.1 is 5% of 2.0, and any trader will confirm that a 5% reduction in transaction costs is a huge advantage.
• Unlike many other brokers, GAIN does allow to place orders inside the spread and this becomes easier thanks to the fractional pricing. By placing orders inside the spread you can lower your transaction costs because you don't have to pay the full spread if your order inside the spread is taken up by the market.

Commission free trading

Individual traders that trade through Forex.com pay no commission at all. The only transaction costs you pay as an individual trader is the spread between the bid and the ask price. Commission free trading is very common these days, most major market makers offer commission free trading to individual traders.

For institutional clients there is commission involved in trading. They pay $25 for every Million they trade, regardless of the currency pair. The reason for this is that spreads are lower for institutional traders (as low as 0.5 pip). Spreads are lower for institutional traders because they trade huge volumes.

Review of GAIN's trading platform

When it comes to the trading software, GAIN offers many options. All options are available for individual as well as institutional traders. GAIN's standard platform, the FOREXTrader platform, comes in different forms. The Windows based platform consists of a high quality software package that is easily installed within a few minutes. It offers all the functions and information you need: lots of different order types, trading directly from charts, the latest trading news headlines, market research, links to all kinds of resources etc.

Then there is also the web based platform. This platform offers the same functionality but it is fully operated through a web browser. This means that you can access and trade your account from anywhere you have internet access. This allows for great flexibility since you can trade your account when traveling. The wireless platform takes this flexibility even further by allowing you to trade your account from your cell phone or PDA.

 

Trade your GAIN Capital account with Meta Trader 4

GAIN also allows you to trade your account using the Meta Trader 4 platform. This platform comes out on top in almost every review on Forex trading platforms and it is nowadays the most popular platform in the market. Meta Trader 4 offers a huge number of analytical tools and all order types you can think of. Furthermore, the platform enables you to do automated trading, allowing you to do something else while an optimized automated trading program trades your account. You can even build your own trading strategies and indicators and add them to an automated trading system. We advice every trader to use the Meta Trader 4 platform since it is currently the most advanced and easy to use platform available (a GAIN Meta Trader 4 demo account is available at the upper right of this page).

Novice traders

Through its Forex.com website GAIN Capital provides novice traders with all the information and training required to get started. Novice traders can benefit from webinars, workshops and training courses in order to get more experienced and position themselves for success in the Forex market. Although many Forex brokers offer some kind of training, not many of them can meet the high quality that GAIN offers.

GAIN Capital review conclusion

In our opinion, GAIN is one of the best brokers in the market for individual as well as institutional traders. The main strength of GAIN is that it combines very competitive spreads with high quality service and a state of the art and easy to use trading platform. The size of the company and its liquidity position are also important because it assures you that your money is safe. Finally, the excellent training section makes GAIN also a good choice for novice traders.

If you are interested in a live account we suggest you do it through our form on the right of this page. We can provide you with rebates if you open your account through us. This means that you will receive a rebate of up to 0.5 pip (or $5) on every trade you make!