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Eightcap vs IC Markets

Same instrument, same window, both on our own accounts. Green is the better number on that axis — it lands on whichever side earned it.

EUR/USD · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · profile 10 lots a month

Axis	Eightcap	IC Markets
Annual cost	$889 spread + commission · Raw · MT5	$910 spread + commission · Raw Spread · MT5
Avg spread, 07:00–20:00 UTC	0.04 pips 25 185 samples · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC	0.06 pips 28 851 samples · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC
Spread 21:00–24:00 UTC	1.12 pips rollover hours · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC	0.84 pips rollover hours · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC
Commission per lot	$7.00 fee schedule · 2026-10-13	$7.00 fee schedule · 2026-10-13

Both brokers on this page are measured and named in full, and neither is linked: we have no commercial relationship with either, and sending you to one of them would be the quickest way to make these numbers worth less than the time it took to take them.

The trade-off, in money

A row of green on one side is not a verdict. These axes measure different things with different price tags, and the only way to compare them is to put them in money.

On annual cost of ownership, Eightcap is $20 a year cheaper at 10 lots a month — $889 at Eightcap against $910 at IC Markets. Inside those totals, Eightcap pays $49 in spread and $840 in commission, while IC Markets pays $70 and $840 — the same two components in different proportions, which is why the ranking between them is a question about volume rather than about brokers.

The two accounts behave differently once the session ends. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC Eightcap averaged 1.12 pips and IC Markets 0.84 — against 0.041 and 0.058 in the liquid session. Eightcap is the wider of the two in that band by 0.28 pips, roughly $3 on a standard lot, charged on every lot opened or closed inside it.

This is the figure that disappears from every advertised spread. A spread quoted “from 0.0 pips” is a statement about the London afternoon. What a position held through midnight pays is the band above, and the only way to know it is to record every second of it on an account you hold yourself. A reader flat by the evening never pays it; a swing trader pays it twice per position.

There is no winner on this page, and that is not diplomacy. The weighting that decides it — volume against holding period against news exposure — is a property of your trading, not of the brokers. Neither column is given more room than the other, because choosing between them is not our job.

The axes, one at a time

The same axes as the table, unrolled into sentences, with the winner named on each. There is no overall score: inventing one would let us bury a loss inside an average.

Who the two of them are

An account is measured; a company is regulated. Those are different objects, and the difference is the most consequential thing on a page like this: two clients of the same brand, onboarded through different entities, can have identical platforms, identical spreads and materially different protection if the firm fails.

Where an entity is confirmed, the broker's own page carries what that licence obliges the firm to do — the compensation ceiling, the leverage cap, the margin close-out and negative balance protection — quoted from the regulator's rule rather than summarised. An unconfirmed entity is printed as unconfirmed, and the measurements stand on their own either way.

The measurement behind this pairing

The comparison is only worth reading because both sides went through the same pipeline at the same time. Figures taken weeks apart, or on different pairs, can disagree by more than the brokers do.

Here it is EUR/USD on both sides, 2026-10-12T19:08:17Z to 2026-10-13T17:13:27Z continuous, on the Raw · MT5 account at Eightcap against the Raw Spread · MT5 account at IC Markets — both opened through the ordinary retail sign-up, both running on the broker's own MetaTrader 5 build on hardware that does not sleep.

Only one side of this pairing has a publishable execution sample, so the execution axes are not compared. The side that is missing says why on the axis itself, and the cost axes — which come from the quote stream rather than from order probes — are compared in full.

It is one instrument: EUR/USD is the most liquid pair in the market, and a broker that looks tight here can be much wider on a cross or a metal, where its own margin is less exposed. And it is one window: a month of measurement is a month, not a permanent property of either firm. Which is the reason every figure on this site carries its own dates.

The window both accounts share, and how much of it each one holds

A comparison between two accounts is a comparison of windows before it is anything else. The figures above are taken over 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC — the period both of these accounts were recording — and averaged over the 16 hours of the day they both measured, of which 6 fall inside the liquid session and 3 at the rollover. Hours only one of them recorded are left out entirely: an hour measured on one side is not a comparison, and including it would make the collection schedule part of the result.

Account	Samples with both sides	Window recorded	Bid equals ask
Eightcap Raw · MT5	25,185	70%	56%
IC Markets Raw Spread · MT5	28,851	70%	45%

EUR/USD · samples are one-second bid/ask observations inside the shared window · “window recorded” is the share of the window's market hours that hold samples on that account

Read the third column as the confidence behind the first two. Eightcap holds the smaller share of the window here, and whatever it did not record cannot be in its average. The gap is not an estimate filled in later: a missing hour stays missing, the hour is dropped for both accounts, and the figures move when the window grows rather than when we decide they should.

The last column looks like a fault and is not one. A high share of samples where bid equals ask means the spread is sitting on the floor of the price grid, which is exactly what a commission account is for: the broker is paid per lot instead of through the price. It makes the spread column small and the commission column decisive, and it is the reason this site compares the total rather than the spread.

At what volume does the answer change?

The bill on either account is the cost of a lot times the number of lots, with no standing charge to spread over them. Our headline profile — 10 lots a month — is one point on it, and a reader who trades a tenth or ten times that is reading the wrong point. Here is the same arithmetic at six volumes, with our profile marked.

Spread × $10 per pip per lot, plus commission per lot · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · every component scales with volume, which is what makes the lines cross at all

Both bills are now pure functions of volume: every dollar in them is charged per lot, so the ranking does not flip anywhere. Eightcap costs $7.41 a lot against IC Markets's $7.58, and that ratio holds at one lot a month and at a hundred. What volume changes is the size of the gap in dollars, not its direction. A reader who holds through the rollover is on a different line altogether, which is why that band is measured separately.

Two limits. The sum assumes our measured spread applies at your size — fine for retail volume, wrong by the time anyone is trading institutional size. And it is an average over all hours: a strategy that lives in the thin hours either side of midnight UTC pays a materially larger bill than this.

Trading through the roll: what it adds to the bill

The annual figures above use each account average across all hours. Nobody trades all hours, and the thin ones are much more expensive than the rest. Eightcap goes from 0.04 to 1.12 pips in that window; IC Markets from 0.06 to 0.84. Below is the same annual sum with a share of the volume moved into those hours.

Spread blended between the window mean and the rollover mean in the stated proportion · commission unchanged · 10 lots a month

At a fifth of the volume in the thin hours, the penalty is $260 a year on Eightcap and $189 on IC Markets — Eightcap carries the heavier one. No broker publishes this number, and it can be larger than the whole difference between the two accounts on cost.

Treat it as a floor rather than a forecast. Monthly means hide the individual nights, and the individual nights are where the damage is done.

Where this pair sits in the population

Comparing two accounts with each other says nothing about whether either is any good. Both can be mid-table. So here are the same two accounts placed against every account we measure, axis by axis. IC Markets leads the whole table on spread 21:00–24:00 utc.

Placings inside one source class · 12.10 19:08–13.10 17:13 UTC · the full ranking is on the brokers page

Reading the table in full is the better route for anybody choosing from scratch; a pairing is for a reader already weighing these two.

What this page is not

It is not a recommendation, and it is not a verdict on either firm. It is a record of what two accounts did on one instrument during one stated window, published by a desk that earns a commission if a reader opens an account at IC Markets and nothing at all if they open one at Eightcap. Knowing that is part of reading it: the method is written out at length because the incentive runs one way and the only defence is making the figures checkable.

Plenty that matters is missing: how fast money comes out, what support does at three in the morning, how the platform behaves in a real panic, and how either firm handles a disputed fill. Some of that is outside anything a retail account can show at all; the rest is work this rig has not done yet. “Which broker is better” is a much larger claim than anything on this page, and it is not one a measurement can settle.

Questions about this pairing