Reviews

Plus500 Review 2023 - The Good and the Bad

By Stefano Treviso, Updated on: Apr 07 2023.

Plus500 in a Nutshell

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Plus500 in 60 seconds

• Over 2,000 CFDs along with options included
• No commissions
• Proprietary web and mobile trading platforms

Plus500 is an international broker specialised in CFD trading with a big range of assets including CFDs based on American options.

Plus500 Full Review

Here’s what we’ll talk about during our review:

• Is Plus500 safe?
• Plus500 Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal
• Plus500 Trading Fees
• Plus500 Available Assets
• Plus500 Web Trading Platform
• Plus500 Mobile Trading Platform
• Plus500 Research and Analysis Tools
• Plus500 Educational Tools
• Verdict

Is Plus500 safe?

Plus500 is regulated by several financial regulators, let's go over a few of their top licenses with a direct link to the license provider:

• CySec: the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission. Plus500CY Ltd has the License # 250/14
• FCA: the Financial Conduct Authority (UK). Plus500UK Ltd has the registration number FRN 509909
• ASIC: the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Plus500AU Pty Ltd has the license AFSL #417727 (To view the Australian license you must search directly on the license link and write the company name)
• MAS: the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Plus500SG Pte Ltd has the license CMS100648-1

Aside from the licenses, we tested them and found that they don't engage in any bad practises such as misleading clients or sharing any type of financial advice.

They only provide support via chat and they never attempt to establish contact in order to encourage you to open trades or become engaged, this is a great point in favour, the less your broker calls you, the better.

Thanks to the reasons mentioned above, we conclude that Plus500 is a safe choice.

Plus500 Minimum Deposit and Withdrawal

Plus500 has the following options for depositing or withdrawing funds:

• Credit or Debit Card
• Paypal
• Skrill
• Bank Transfers

The minimum amount to deposit via Credit or Debit Card, Paypal and Skrill is: 100 Euros, Dollars or Pounds. The minimum deposit using Bank Transfer is 500 Euros, Dollars or Pounds.

There are no fees for depositing funds into the platform and for all cases except bank transfers, deposits are processed immediately. In the case of bank transfers it can take from 48 to 72 hours. 

Plus500 Withdrawal Options

Withdrawals in Plus500 have different thresholds according to each withdrawal method (they will also be adjusted in your account currency):

• Credit Card withdrawals: €90
• Paypal withdrawals: €45
• Bank Transfers withdrawals: €100

Base currencies

Plus500 accepts the following base currencies:

• United States Dollar
• Great British Pound
• Euro
• Swiss Franc
• Australian Dollar
• Japanese Yen
• Polish Zloty
• Hungarian Forint
• Czech Koruna
• Canadian Dollar
• Turklish Lira
• Swedish Krona
• Norweggian Krona
• Singapore Dollar

Plus500 Trading Fees

Plus500 charges spread, overnight funding, guaranteed stop-loss premium and inactivity fees. Thankfully they do not charge in and out commisions on each trade, data fees or any of the other common fees you see in other brokers. Let's go over each fee:

Spreads

Here's how Plus500 spreads compare to similar brokers:

Commissions

Here's how Plus500 commissions compare to similar competitors:

Plus500 Available Assets

Here's how Plus500 asset offering compares to similar brokers:

Plus500 Web Trading Platform

Plus500's web platform has undergone a massive transformation in 2020, they went from having a very old-fashioned look to a modern dark-themed futuristic look. Also a lot of the user interface elements were changed and clearly some major upgrades in the area of responsiveness took place.

Before we discuss each feature, the most important recommendation we can give you is, do not switch the platform's theme using the little moon icon on the bottom left corner, it will go back to the awful looking blue design they had for several years. 

Home Screen

The starting window of Plus500's trading platform gives you access to the following:

• Search assets by name or using the ticker symbol (for example: AAPL equals Apple Inc).
• Filter assets by certain predetermined criteria such as their class, price behaviour, country.
• Monitor your account's available balance, equity, maintenance margin and current profits and losses.
• Accessing the notifications centre by clicking the top right corner red button.
• Viewing a customisable chart in the bottom of the platform for any selected asset you choose.
• Accessing other areas of the platform through the left panel by clicking on each icon such as open positions, portfolio, funds management, etc.

We can't think of a good reason for this design with a chart layed out on the bottom, it produces some sort of visual distortion that it's really uncomfortable to look at. It's not recommendable to use the bottom chart for any prolonged analysis but rather click on the full screen icon to ensure you can fully look at each chart. 

Notifications

The notifications centre is accessible by clicking on the top right corner of the platform, it will glow on a bright color when there is a pending notification. Usually the notifications involve any major market movements that occured recently. 

Sadly this notifications centre is not customisable and only Plus500 decides which notifications go there, so you can't fix the right information for your needs. If you're a trader only interested in commodity markets then you cannot arrange a particular set of notifications dedicated to commodity prices, for that you'd have to manually create price alerts. 

Placing an Order

Placing a trade or an order on Plus500 is a clear winning feature, they've managed to do it much better than some of their competitors. To open the panel below simply click on buy or sell on any asset of your choice (you can do it from the home explore view or from the chart of an asset itself). 

The order placement window provides valuable information and features like:

• Margin requirements for your trade with the small calculation that updates on real time as you change your position size
• A "close at profit" (take-profit) order control that includes all 3 common values at the same time, so there is no need to switch between them, entering a price level will automatically show the take profit order in currency value and percentage. 
• A "close at loss" (stop-loss) order control with the same features as the "close at a profit" order.
• Guaranteed Stop order which allows you to pay an additional cost to ensure that your stop-loss order gets executed regardless of market conditions once your price is met (basically the same as if someone promised to execute a stop-loss limit order regardless of the liquidity and charged you for it)
• Trailing Stop order which allows you to set the distance in Pips from the current price (this one is not that clear as it is on other platforms)
• A "buy when rate is" order (limit order or stop order depending on the case) which creates a pending order. This is also a clear case of oversimplifying things and changing their real professional name for the sake of making everything easier which is something we don't like all the time.
• Asset information window where you'll get extremely important data such as margin requirements, overnight fees, trading hours, etc. 

Leaving aside the oversimplification of their trading orders terminology, Plus500's order placement panel is a well made feature. The MOST important feature no matter how simple this sounds, is that they only have one option on the panel, it's either BUY or SELL. If you clicked on buy, then you need to click outside this panel on the asset to activate sell and a new panel will deploy with the sell button only.

This saves a lot of confusion in comparison to platforms like eToro where the colours of the buttons are almost the same and you could accidentally push the wrong one. 

Multi-chart Tools

One of the most important features on any trading platform is the ability to open multiple charts to study an asset on several timeframes or to study correlated assets. In Plus500's latest update they finally added this feature. To activate it look on top of the chart for the options menu and click on the 4 small squares, this will allow you to open up to 9 charts at the same time. 

Despite having the multi-charting option, we would definitely love a customisable workspace where we could fit in 2 charts and a news feed for example. 

Open Positions

To view your open positions, look on the left panel for an icon with two arrows up and down, we have it selected and shines on a bright blue color in our image below: 

The greates advantage of Plus500's platform is avoiding major layout shifts and simply pulling useful panels out of each side, in this case clicking on our open trade gave us the ability to quickly edit the stop-loss or take-profits we set before and confirm the action through the update button.

Trading History

To access the trading history window, click on the briefcase icon on the left panel and the platform will open all your old trades within a particular time range. You can change the preset timeframe and get a full report of all your executed trades and send automatically a copy via email to yourself. 

Clicking on any of your trades in the trading history will deploy a small window on the right side that contains all the information of your past trade for your own analysis purposes.

A very well appreciated feature is the total values at the bottom of the trading history view so we can calculate if we were profitable or not during a particular period of time. 

Price Alerts

To acces the price alerts option, click on the top left corner of your platform in the hamburguer icon (3 lines) and a big menu will appear where you'll see the option "alerts".

You can configure as many alerts as you want to get notified of all sorts of price movements, changes in percentage and all of this on several timeframes such as daily, hourly, etc.

Plus500 alerts can be delivered to you via push, email or SMS.

Web Research & Education Tools

This is the department where Plus500 lacks the most, their only useful tools are the economic calendar and a couple guides on their main website. 

For some this can be a dealbreaker but for our particular philosophy we don't really care much about educational tools, we don't need a market maker educating us on trading (that's an irony), we need research and analysis tools such as stock screeners for example. 

We're looking forward to Plus500 developing new tools that help traders research the assets they want to trade. 

Out of both platforms, Plus500's web trading platform is the best. We found it responsive, fast, intuitive and has a lot of safety features to avoid confusions for non experienced traders. For professional traders while these failsafe features are not a deal breaker, they're also not a great selling point as professionals like their usual terminology when it comes to trading orders and customisable layouts of their platforms.

Plus500 Mobile Trading Platform

Plus500's mobile trading platform also went through a major overhaul in UI/UX during the year 2020 with major improvements on speed and easeness of use, yet their charting tools leave a lot to be desired when compared to some of their strongest competitors. The mobile platform also comes with the option to change the colour theme to a dark version, we do not recommend this at all, their current dark theme is not a well designed one.

Home

The home screen of Plus500's mobile trading platform gives you acces to the following options: 

• Quickly searching for an asset with the search box located on top (you can also use the ticker symbol for convenience)
• Activating the order panel by clicking on buy or sell on each asset
• Looking at a small chart from the currently selected asset (you can make the chart bigger by dragging the right side icon)
• Accessing the platform's main options through the bottom icons such as positions, notifications, funds management and settings.

The bottom chart layout is the same inconvenient design as the one in the web trading platform, also when dragging it shows a little bit of unresponsiveness and delays to load, we're not big fans of this idea.

Asset View 

Here is where Plus500 starts winning the race against their competitors, by clicking on a particular asset on buy or sell you'll deploy the asset window where you'll be able to either scroll down to see more information or to activate the full screen charting mode by clicking on the left icon with the two opposite facing arrows.

Plus500 provides really good information from this view such as the price change divided by 3 different timeframes along with the possibility of creating price alerts by clicking on the small bell icon. 

If you continue scrolling further down, you'll notice how the buy or sell options maintain themselves on top of your mobile device so you're able to look at current prices while you read all the relevant information of the asset such as the overnight fees, margin requirements, etc.

Opening a Trade

We believe that the best mobile view to open a trade definitively belongs to Plus500. This is by far the cleanest interface for placing an order on a mobile platform we've ever looked at. 

Notice how the required margin is shown in 2 different currencies: the one that is being used to trade the asset and the one of our own account. 

For each control there is a clear switch to activate each order and prices will be displayed automatically on 3 different values: percentage, amount and price. Definitively the most convenient mobile order placement window out there.

Open Positions

The open positions window has a very interesting feature, being able to visualize on the chart when did you enter and what is the current price. This is the only useful situation for Plus500's lower chart design. 

Clicking on the small arrow to the right of your position will open a window with all the information of your trade along with the ability to quickly edit values such as the stop-loss, take profit, etc.

One of the best things of this view is the small information icons next to each item, for unexperienced traders it's great to be able to see what each value means with a brief explanation.

Charting Tools

Plus500's mobile charting tools leave a lot to be desired: 

• The colour design is just horrible
• Responsiveness of the charts is not smooth
• Automatic proportioning of the candle's view is non existant
• There's a lot of overlap in certain elements, seems as if it has not been optimised for modern devices

Still against all forecasts, it's possible to do some quick technical analysis and apply indicators through the mobile interface. 

Notifications

Plus500's mobile notification centre is a larger replica of the one located in the web platform.

The notifications are still dependant only on Plus500's criteria and there's no ability to customise the information received to your preferences.

Settings

The reason we included settings of the mobile app in our review was to show you where you can find the economic calendar, it's hidden inside the settings/tools option. 

For the rest, each option provides you basic account management features being the most important:

• Authorizing third party services for your log in such as Google
• Activating 2 Factor Authentication
• Managing your personal details, documents, etc. 

To switch between demo and real mode, simply access the settings view and click on the icon that resembles a small stack of bills that reads the opposite mode of the one that you currently have active. 

Plus500 Research and Analysis Tools

Just like the web trading platform, Plus500 leaves a lot to be desired on this subject.

The only analysis tool available on your mobile platform is the economic calendar which is hidden inside the settings. 

We're looking forward to see improvements by Plus500 on their research and analysis tools.

Plus500 Educational Tools

Plus500 only provides a few written articles and trading guides as their educational tools.

We're defintely looking forward to Plus500 improving their offer in educational content.

Verdict

Plus500 developed a well crafted trading experience for both their web and mobile trading platforms. While trading with them during volatile periods the execution received was within industry standards and all of their user interfaces were responsive and very intuitive. 

Plus500 clearly has a neutral appeal when it comes to their marketing strategy, they're not selling themselves as a beginner friendly solution neither a fully fledged professional trading suite, we can definitely categorize them in the middle grounds for intermediate traders. 

For anyone looking to trade stocks under a low cost and with medium sized volume, Plus500 makes perfect sense as it will also give traders the possibility to hedge themselves using their CFDs on options.

What we're really lacking on Plus500 to consider them a perfect solution would be:

• Customisable trading platform layouts
• Incoporated reuters newsfeeds
• Possibility to deleverage yourself on CFDs or trade real equity
• More responsive mobile trading charts for quick analysis
• A larger quantity of stocks offered
• Research and Analysis tools to discover assets, filter them, create special lists, etc.

Leaving this missing features aside, the strongest selling point of Plus500 is clear: safety and reliability by trading with a large international company that is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, heavily audited and well regulated by the world's leading financial regulators.

Our favourite feature of Plus500 for the web trading platform was the newly incorporated multi-chart view. Our favourite feature for Plus500's mobile platform is the opening a trade view, we believe it's the most organised, friendly and simple of all platforms out there.