Beware! 9Markets is an offshore broker! Your investment may be at risk.
RECOMMENDED FOREX BROKERS
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Open trading accounts with at least two brokers.
With the catchphrase “Stop dreaming, start trading!”, there is a hint of a promise made by 9Markets that if you trade with them, your dreams may come true. Whether this is so, or not, we are going to find out.
9Markets Regulation and safety of funds
9Markets is a forex broker without any address or registration. This in its own is enough to put you off from trading with this broker. Non-registered and non-licensed brokers tend to be scammers and we strongly advise you against trading with them.
If you want any guarantee for the safety of your funds and that you won’t be scammed, we advise you to research some of the licensed brokers in the well-established jurisdictions of the EU, the UK, Australia and the US. In these jurisdictions, there are measures put in place to ward off scammers. For example, in the EU and UK forex brokers must have an initial capital of no less than 730,000 EUR and in the US, a much higher capital of $20 million. Australia also set high standards by asking for 1 million AUD. As you can imagine, scammers will never invest so much money just to look legit. In the EU and the UK, there are additional measures to protect the clients’ funds. Forex brokers in these jurisdictions must contribute to a local compensation scheme from which traders are compensated in case the broker becomes insolvent. If the broker is regulated by the CySec, then traders can be compensated by up to 20,000 EUR per person and if the broker is regulated by FCA, then traders can be compensated by up to 85,000 GBP per person. As you can see, these are excellent conditions offered in these jurisdictions and we recommend that you use the links we provide to research and select a reliable broker.
9Markets Trading software
The trading platform offered by 9Markets is a web trader (screenshot below). On the left, you see the menu with the forex currency pairs together with their bid/ask price. In the middle, you see the chart of a selected currency pair that shows the fluctuation in price in a given time frame. In this case, we are looking at the EUR/USD currency pair and from the bid/ask price we can calculate the spread to be 0.6 pips which is within normal limits. However, we found out that the leverage for this currency pair is very high – 1:500. High leverage may seem attractive as it looks like it amplifies trader’s chances to make a big win. Unfortunately, it is not exactly so, because it also increases the trader’s chances of losing big time. Please do not be tempted to make transactions using such high leverage because the chances are that you will lose if we pay attention to the statistics that around 70% of traders lose in transactions. Do not become statistics!
Also, you should keep in mind that licensed brokers in the EU have a cap on leverage and cannot exceed 1:30. In the US the leverage cap is 1:50. Australia will soon follow in the steps of the EU and will impose a leverage cap of 1:30 for major forex currencies in March 2021. Imposing a leverage cap is a measure to protect investors’ funds and when you see a broker offering high leverage, such as with this broker, think ‘scammer’.
Although the web trader offered by 9Markets is easy enough to use, it does not offer many trading tools and instruments that will give traders a chance to analyse and predict the fluctuation in the exchange rates and make a profit. We want to recommend 2 trading platforms that in our opinion are far more superior to the one offered here – the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 platforms. They are considered to be choice number one for around 80% of the forex brokers around the world due to the excellent package of trading tools and instrument they offer. Among many such, we can mention the auto trading option, the code base with customers scripts, the trading signals that come with a subscription fee but are totally worth it, the app market, the financial calendar, etc. Worth mentioning is also the excellent array of charting options that contain technical analysis indicators, such as the Bollinger Bands, Fibonacci retracement, moving averages, etc, that help traders predict the future direction of exchange rates and make a profit.
We strongly recommend you to look up licensed brokers that offer either of these platforms in the links we provided.
9Markets Deposit/Withdrawal methods and fees
As you can see from the screenshot below, 9Markets offers 5 different trading accounts – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Premium. The minimum initial deposit is 250 EUR. The other accounts start at 5,000 EUR, 10,000 EUR, 50,000 EUR AND 100,000 EUR.
If you look at the company’s website, you will see a horizontal band with different payment methods (screenshot below) among which you have VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Skrill, BPay, Sofort, Giropay, Bitcoin, etc. However, when you open a trading account and decide to make a deposit, you see that the only payment options available are credit card, bank transfer or CashU.
In the Terms and Conditions document, we found out that the minimum withdrawal amount is 100 EUR/USD/GBP and that the withdrawal methods are via BTC wallet or credit card and it can take up to 7 days to process the withdrawal request. It may take up to 60 business days for the withdrawal amount to reach the client’s credit card or bank account.
A fee of 4.5% will be taken from the withdrawal amount if the has has not traded at least 1% of the deposited amount prior to the withdrawal request. For example, on a $10,000 deposit minimum of 100 standard lots ($10 000 000) must be traded.
It does not seem at all that these payment and withdrawal methods are up to the client’s advantage. Also, the information published on this company’s website about the variety of payment methods is misleading.
We are always mistrustful of forex brokers that offer bonuses as it is often a sign of a scam. Bonuses come with difficult to fulfil conditions. In the case of this broker, if a trader accepts a bonus or as it is called here ‘company’s credit’, he/she will have to trade a volume that is equal to the amount of deposit plus the amount of bonus multiplied 60 times. Imagine the amount of trading volume that you need to trade in the case where you invest $100,000! Please be extremely cautious if you are offered a bonus and also bear in mind that licensed brokers never offer bonuses or other free gifts.
How does scam work?
If scammers make a movie, it will probably be called “Dream on”. They make everything sound credible and build their scam on your dreams of getting an easy and quick profit. People get duped if they decide to deposit money into one of the scammers’ schemes. What you probably do not know is that your hard-earned money goes as commission to the scammers. Next, you get inundated by daily calls. First, the scammers congratulate you for joining their business, next they try to persuade you to invest even more money. After all, the more money you send, the bigger money fall you can expect. This of course is not how things work. By the time you realise that no money is coming your way, it might be too late. All you want now is to get your money back and get out of there but the scammers have other plans for you and they won’t late get away so easily. Now they try to delay you so that you miss the deadline for a chargeback.
What to do if scammed?
If you get scammed, our advice is to act immediately and if you have paid your deposit via credit/debit card you may still have a chance. Visa and MasterCard allow you 540 days time limit to file for chargeback which gives you a fighting chance to recover your money.
However, if you have used bitcoin or bank wire for your payment, the chances of you recovering your money are really slim.
Cancelling your credit/debit card in case you have given the scammers your CVV code may be another good idea. Also, make sure to remove from your PC any software that my give scammers access to your private data stored on your computer.
Whatever you do to recover your funds, beware of the so-called recovery agents. Please make sure that you are dealing with a genuine one by checking their credentials and company’s information transparency. Otherwise, you may fall victim to another form of scam.
Joan Spriggs
I was stupid enough to invest £250 with 9 markets, but Tesco bank mastercard
refused, any sort of chargeback, refund or help on the basis that any crypto currency
purchase is not covered under refund rules.
This was at October 2020.
I have just been contacted by Solutionsreport.com, they tell me Ninemarkets was a scam
but, they also tell me I have $4425 lock up in my ‘Bitcoin wallet’ and they can get the money back for me, I have to open a account with ‘moonpay.com’.Solutions report is ringing me again tomorrow
I think this is another scam, what do you think. Any advice is useful.
Thank you