As of August 2024, Instaforex had been rated by WikiBit on a cumulative scale of 7.2/10 out of 10, standing at position 312 out of 829 brokers taken into consideration and below the FCA-regulated industry benchmark of 8.5. Specifically, in terms of the exact dimensions, its “regulatory compliance” rating is as low as 5.8 points. The first is that the firm only has a Saint Vincent FSA license (and a 1.9/10 level of regulation intensity). The CySEC-regulated XM Group is also obligated to keep a net capital of 730,000 euros as well as have its accounts undergo audited reporting on a monthly basis. Australian ASIC Warning 2023 reports that Instaforex has contacted 41 Australian customers without a local license, a total A $1.9 million in disputed funds, whereas ASIC-regulated Pepperstone recorded a mere 0.02 per cent of complaint rate for the same year.
As far as trading conditions are concerned, Instaforex EUR/USD spread was quoted at 1.3 points, but there was a 72% chance that it would go up to 2.8 points upon release of non-farm payroll (industry-grade platforms such as IC Markets hit 1.5 points at the same time). Its commission on its ECN account is $3 per lot. However, when the monthly trading volume falls below 50 standard lots, there is an account maintenance charge of $20 per month that adds $240 to the expense of trading every year. The 2024 liquidity test showed that the maximum order book depth in gold (XAU/USD) was only 150 lots (approximately 150,000 ounces), a whopping 97% decrease from LMAX Digital’s 5,000-lot depth, increasing the likelihood of market order slippage in excess of $1.5 per ounce to 39%. One of the 2023 users of the crude oil futures had a slippage while acquiring the futures whereby the actual price of entry had deviated from $0.8 per barrel to trigger the one-trading-loss amount worth 17% of the capital.
Technical infrastructure was average: Instaforex’s MT5 platform had a median quote lag of 142ms (industry standard < 80ms) and a historical data download failure rate (e.g., gaps in K-lines) of 3.7% (industry average 0.9%) in the 2024 stress test. Its mobile App enjoys a Google Play rating of 3.9 stars (5 stars), simply because the Android version’s real-time chart refresh rate is only 2 times per second (cTrader allows up to 10 times per second), and the rate of failed order executions is 11% (the market average is 4%). In December 2023, a system malfunction caused a 3-hour halt in trading for EUR/GBP and raised the stop-loss order failure rate to 8% (industry average 0.5%), with the maximum loss to impacted users being $23,000.
Customer support performance is uneven: The median response time to initial online chats is 5 minutes 12 seconds (industry best practices such as Saxo Bank are 45 seconds), and the resolution cycle for challenging queries is 4.3 days (industry best practice 1.5 days). In 2024, one Saudi user submitted a scanned version of his passport due to issues with verifying account and took 7 days to get it processed (IG Group’s parallel process takes only 2 hours), thus missing the potential $18,000 by missing the bull market in gold. The average time to process withdrawals is 2.8 days (0.5 days in high-quality industry platforms like Swissquote), and the wire transfer withdrawal fee is 1.2% (with a minimum fee of $25), 140% higher than the industry average of 0.5%.
Market sentiment reflects polarization: Trustpilot: Instaforex gave it 3.7-out of 5 stars, with new clients giving a 35% 5-star rating (out of a bonus program of 30%), while 58% of clients holding more than $50,000 in account balance had a poor rating. The main allegations are the quote freeze (the spread opened up to four times the normal amount during the non-farm payroll period) and the extremely high threshold of the liquidity channel for VIP accounts (requiring a balance of more than 300,000 US dollars in the account). On the other hand, the FCA-regulated CMC Markets customer retention rate has been stable at more than 89% for five years, and large-capital customer satisfaction has reached 93%. The WikiBit risk algorithm indicates that Instaforex is volatile by 1.85 points in features such as security of funds (6.1/10) and technical stability (6.8/10) (industry average 0.92 points), indicating higher volatility. of quality of service than competitors.