“Commission Free” or “no commission” or “spread only” trading accounts

Some Global Prime trading accounts do not have commission charges separate to the spread. Where this is the case, the spread visible in the trading platform is an ‘all in’ price that includes our transaction fees and commissions. There are other fees such as swaps and interest for positions held overnight which you should be mindful of.

Spreads on these accounts may be higher than those advertised on the Global Prime website, however, the overall trading costs are lower since there are no commissions charges separate to the spread.

The commission free trading account cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.

Australia’s Lowest Cost Forex and CFD provider

The claim Australia’s lowest cost Forex and CFD provider is based on a sample of data collected from Australia’s largest and most competitive Forex and CFD providers in February 2021.

The term ‘lowest cost’ is a reference to the total round turn spread and commission trading costs in Australian dollars. Competitor spreads and commissions are based on advertised spreads and commissions from their websites.

Spreads from 0.0 pips

The claim ‘Spreads from 0.0 pips’ is a reference to the minimum spread seen across many of Global Primes Forex and Metals products, i.e. those products which have an ‘aggregated’ or ‘retail broker ECN’ price.

The average spreads on the website https://www.globalprime.com/trading-conditions/spreads/ are based on recent observations and should not be solely relied upon when deciding to trade with us. The trading platforms have live pricing for each market. We recommend using a demo account to assess our pricing before deciding to trade with us.

Commission free accounts can have a 0.0 pip spread, however, this is unlikely due to the small fees that we build into the spread. You should not use the commission free account if you want 0.0 pip spreads.

ECN

Global Prime explains its use of the term ECN in detail here https://www.globalprime.com/ecn-advantage/

The main takeaways that you should know about our use of the term ECN are:

• Global Prime provides you with liquidity consisting of the world’s leading tier-1 dealer banks, non-bank market makers, ECNs and dark pools. We aggregate this liquidity into a best bid best offer (BBBO) that is streamed for you to execute on.
• Global Prime does not make money from your trading losses. The term ECN is synonymous with A-book, agency style execution and not B-book.
• Global Prime executes all trades with its liquidity providers. Small trades are batch hedged. See more information on this below.

‘Multi-bank liquidity aggregated into a best bid best offer’ is only available for our Forex and Metals products. CFDs over Indices, Stocks, Bonds and Commodities are not ‘ECN’. See below for more details or our Best Execution page for the different pricing and execution across each class of products.

Small FX and Metals trades are not ECN or STP

Small forex and metals trades (usually less than 50,000 and XAU 30oz respectively) are executed internally and ‘batch hedged’ once the position size is large enough to hedge via our prime broker, or an opposing trade comes in from another client. Batch hedging small trades allows us to avoid prime broker minimum ticket fees and therefore give you the lowest trading costs possible.

SMALL TRADES THAT DO NOT GO DIRECTLY TO OUR LIQUIDITY PROVIDERS ARE NOT ECN OR STP.

Global Prime hedges all market risk with our liquidity providers. We do not seek to run a net position and the market risk arising from small trades is both small and temporary. It is automatically and systematically hedged out every time. Lastly, we limit our market risk per currency pair to around 100,000 so we can hand on our heart say ‘small trades’, ‘cost savings’ and ‘not a B-book’. A typical B-book has positions per currency pair in the tens or hundreds of millions.

Automated Trade Receipts

You can verify exactly how and with whom all of your trades have been executed by viewing your automated trade receipts in your client area. You can see all details for your trade including: executed price, spread, slippage, execution time and market depth showing the order book and liquidity providers.

With this information, you have all the means necessary to make a decision as to whether you want to continue trading with us, and if our statements and claims are true and meeting your expectations.

If you’re not satisfied with our performance, stop trading immediately and contact us as soon as practically possible so we can address your concerns.

CFDs

Indices, Commodities, Bonds, Cryptocurrency and Stock CFD products are ‘synthetic index or market tracking derivatives’. They follow the underlying cash and or futures markets of their respective product.

THESE CFD PRODUCTS ARE NOT ECN.

We do not provide an ‘aggregated’ or ‘ECN’ feed for these products since most liquidity providers will have somewhat different prices and there is no central counterparty or ‘prime broker’ through which these trades can be given up and cleared. Because of this, all trades generally go to a single liquidity provider on a per product basis.

When these products follow an underlying futures market, there may be times when their prices differ from the futures. For example, in periods of extreme volatility when the spread between the front and second nearby month of the futures is highly volatile, it may become difficult to track movements in these markets and therefore prices may vary wildly. Factors such as illiquidity and contract expiries in the underlying futures markets can exacerbate these price differences.

End of day / start of day / rollover / end of week wide spreads and spread caps

Global Prime has measures in place to mitigate the impact of wide spreads, spread spikes, illiquidity and generally poor market conditions around the end of day period. GlobalPrime defines the Rollover Period as between 4.30pm and 5.30pm New York each day.

TRADING OVER THE END OF DAY PERIOD IS EXTREMELY HIGH RISK AND SHOULD BE AVOIDED AT ALL COSTS.

The Rollover Period may have the follow negative effects to client trading:

• Significantly reduced liquidity with wider spreads, spread spikes, episodic volatility, and generally poor market conditions.
• Wider spreads may trigger client stop-loss orders, which can result in client orders being filled at prices beyond their stop loss.
• Larger orders are less likely to be filled close to the top-of-book price due to fewer quotes from Liquidity Providers and Large orders filling against multiple quotes.

Steps that Global Prime may take to improve client experience during the Rollover Period:

• Stop pricing – pricing may be stopped if spreads are extremely wide – this is to protect Stop Loss orders from being adversely triggered via spread, as opposed to authentic market movement.
• Spread Caps – the distance between the bid and offer may be artificially limited to a maximum value. i.e. Liquidity Providers may be pricing wider than the Bid and Ask quotes shown to you. This will reduce the chance of Stop-Outs from wide spreads. As usual, GlobalPrime is still the counter-party to your trade, but instead of this being backed by an external Liquidity Provider’s price, Global Prime is providing a better price directly. Global Prime will only ever improve upon LPs prices (by adding additional liquidity). Any trade against a Spread Cap quote will be clearly distinguishable in trade receipts, and Traders will be able to confirm that there was no Liquidity Provider who had a better price at the time (All LP’s quotes are viewable on the trade receipts).
• Delayed hedging - Instead of hedging client trades immediately against wide Liquidity Provider prices, Global Prime may delay the time at which it hedges. This is the only way that Spread Caps can be offered at a better price than the market, otherwise Global Prime will lose on every trade, as it would be hedging against a worse price. This is called an A-Book Net model – that is, client positions are hedged in aggregate, rather than hedging 1:1. This is a similar hedging model to that which is used for small trades, however may be offered on trades larger that the small trades limits to protect more of our clients - during the Rollover Period only.
• Reject trades to avoid high slippage in the underlying market or because the marker risk from those trades may be too high

TRADES EXECUTED OVER THE END OF DAY PERIOD THAT DO NOT GO DIRECTLY TO OUR LIQUIDITY PROVIDERS ARE NOT ECN OR STP.

There are steps you can take to mitigate your risk of loss over the end of day period, including:

• ensuring you have enough margin in your trading account to withstand high spreads
• establish a clear trading plan that avoids trading over the end of day period
• not trading, especially news trades on New Zealand dollar crosses
• proactively managing your pending orders including stop losses to prevent wide spreads from triggering them.