Eightcap ranks 2nd of 3 on cost — and the session is not the whole day

The bill, taken apart: $889 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 $889, or 94%. That is the thing a spread table cannot tell you. Eightcap quotes a raw spread of 0.04 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.

One thing the bill above deliberately leaves out is the rollover. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC the spread on this account averaged 1.12 pips against 0.04 in the session — 27 times wider — and folding those three hours into a daily average would have told you about a market nobody trades in rather than about the price you pay. It is measured and printed as its own column. Whoever holds through the rollover pays that number rather than the headline one.

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 both lines shrink to a tenth, and since one broker is cheaper on spread and another on commission, the ordering between them can invert.

The measurement itself, 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC

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.

This account has no publishable execution sample. The reason is printed on the axis itself rather than hidden: an execution figure from a handful of orders is noise with a decimal point on it, and we would rather show nothing than that.

The window is 2026-10-12T19:08:17Z to 2026-10-13T17:13:27Z, 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.

Spread by hour on the Raw · MT5 account

Every hour of the day, as measured on this account: the mean of one-second samples falling in that hour across the whole window. The widest hour is 21:00 UTC at 3.196 pips, the tightest is 17:00 UTC at 0.027. 16 hours of the day were recorded on both this account and the others it is compared with; the rest are not shown, because an hour measured on one account only is not comparable with anything.

The rollover window, 21:00-24:00 UTC, averages 1.123 pips against 0.041 through the London and New York hours — about 28 times wider. That ratio, not the daily average, is what decides whether an overnight strategy is viable on this account, and it is the number a marketing page never carries.

Hourly mean of 1 s bid/ask samples · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · our own Raw · MT5 account · how the hours compare across brokers

How a price series earns its place here

A demo server can quote a price that looks entirely plausible and never moves. Averages, hourly breakdowns and rankings built on such a feed measure the simulator rather than the broker, and every figure derived from it inherits the fiction while looking exactly like a measurement. So before a single number from an account is published, its series is tested for one property: continuity.

A floating spread moves in steps of one unit, so it is seen at the values either side of its usual one. If a series usually reads one unit wide it must sometimes read zero and sometimes two; if it never visits its neighbours it is being set rather than formed. The test is run on the liquid session only, because an off-session widening schedule can hand a fixed daytime price exactly the neighbours it lacks — that is how one feed passed a day-wide version of this audit and failed the session-only one.

Here is where a cruder test would have thrown away the truth. Eightcap quoted bid equal to ask in 56% of the samples we took in the liquid session: on a commission account the spread genuinely sits on the floor of the price grid, and the broker earns from the per-lot charge instead. An audit that refused series for being “too constant” would have condemned that as a units error — it is the first version of ours that did, and the test had to be rewritten around continuity rather than variety.

The test has teeth, and the refusals are published. 8 series across 2 accounts failed it for this window and are not represented anywhere on this site — not as a row, not as a footnote figure, not as a “from” number. One of them belongs to the broker that pays for the site.

The order leg - what a broker does with a real market order - runs on the same accounts next, and when it produces figures they will appear as their own axes rather than as adjectives.

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 $889 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 0 of the 4 axes it has figures for. 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 · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · 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 numberour measurement, third party, or 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: [email protected]. 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.