Saxo Markets: 71,000 assets makes this a platform for serious traders

Saxo’s remarkable array of tradable instruments, premium features, and sophisticated platforms make it better suited to advanced, professional and institutional traders, than complete beginners. Unlike eToro, Trading 212, or IG, for example, who actively court those novices, Saxo is very much more geared towards the accomplished trader, looking for a sophisticated experience and a platform that won’t limit them in any way.

The choice of general trading account, SIPP and ISA means Saxo can provide solutions for those looking for tax wrappers as well as those looking to make income from day-trading, but if it’s just a tax wrapper you are seeking, there are far less complex platforms to navigate for long-term investors.

This isn’t the platform for you if you want to keep things simple, rarely trade, and just get some money invested in the markets.

With Saxo, you can trade within a:

• General trading account
• SIPP
• Stocks and Shares ISA

Here's how that compares to other providers:

Assets

Saxo offers access to the following assets and instruments:

Stocks: Invest in an impressive 23,500+ stocks from London, New York, Hong Kong, and more than 50 other global markets. As there’s no minimum deposit, you can start buying stocks with as little as £1 making this an accessible way to gain exposure to a large number of global equities.

Forex: 185 FX spot pairs and 140 forwards across majors, minors, exotics and metals.

CFDs: 8,800+ instruments.

Commodities: A wide range of commodities as CFDs, futures, options, spot pairs, and more.

Futures: Saxo is one of the few UK trading platforms to offer retail traders access to futures and options, providing access to 250 futures covering equity indices, energy, metals, agriculture, rates and FX.

Forex options: 45+ FX vanilla options with maturities from one day to 12 months.

Listed options: 3,200+ listed options across equities, energy, metals and more, from 20 exchanges worldwide.

ETFs: More than 7,000+ exchange-traded funds from 30+ exchanges.

Bonds: Online and offline government and corporate bonds from 26 countries in 21 currencies.

Funds: Thousands of top-rated funds.

It’s a towering list of instruments and assets that few other platforms can match.

For those who have the ability and experience to pass the knowledge test, Saxo offers access to CFD trading with direct market access (DMA). DMA enables traders to deal directly onto the order books of major exchanges. This means that instead of trading at prices set by the broker, you can trade at the price you see on the exchange. This will appeal to high volume and professional traders, as will the ability to trade futures and options which requires a large balance.

SIPPs

Saxo’s personal pension scheme is designed for investors who want flexibility and control over the way their pension is invested, including asset class selection. As an added bonus, you’ll get access to a personal account manager.

It’s free to open and transfer into from other SIPP schemes.

A couple of things to note:

Saxo allows trading of non-leveraged products such as stocks, bonds and certain ETFs within your SIPP. (You can also select a ready-made portfolio.) However, you won’t be able to trade futures, options, CFDs and FX within your Saxo SIPP.

Currency conversion fees for trading non-GBP assets is 1% within the SIPP. That’s high and a bit annoying considering the normal FX rate for general trading is 0.25%.

ISA

If you’re a UK resident over 18, then you’ll have a tax-free ISA allowance of £20,000 for the 2023/2024 tax year. If you invest this in a stocks and shares ISA, your profits will be free from capital gains tax and you’ll pay no tax on income from any dividends either.

With Saxo, you can invest your £20,000 in more than 11,000 global stocks, ETFs and bonds by either opening an ISA or transferring your ISA to Saxo. It’s free to do both. Individual savings accounts only provide access to cash products so you can’t trade derivatives within an ISA account.

Ready-made options

If you’re looking to invest in a ready-made portfolio then Saxo offers a range of options aligned to different risk profiles from “defensive” to “aggressive”. The portfolios are provided by partners which include leading money managers, BlackRock and Morningstar. The portfolios are automatically rebalanced to adapt to evolving market conditions and in line with the risk level chosen, meaning you won’t have to do any management of your portfolio yourself or panic about your investments when the market changes.

Skip to our ‘Portfolio performance’ to get our in-depth analysis on how Saxo’s ready-made portfolios perform against the industry average, and our picks for the funds to go for and avoid.

Fees for holding a ready-made portfolio (in addition to your custody fees) depend on your account tier:

Classic – 0.4%
Platinum – 0.2
VIP – 0.1%

While fees are low with Saxo, eToro is the one to beat here as they charge no custody fees and no additional fees for ready-made funds. That said, Saxo provides excellent value for money in other ways, including its research offering, trade execution tools and customer service, which are all superior to eToro.

Joint / Corporate accounts

Saxo facilitates:

• Personal accounts
• Joint accounts
• Corporate accounts
• Professional accounts

While past performance is not a guarantee of future performance, it can be helpful to take the historical performance of different funds and providers into account when making a decision. By collating data from more than 160 different funds across 24 different providers, we found the funds offered by Saxo have provided above-average fund returns.

To compare the performance of each brokerage/platform, click on the filter and select your desired broker(s).

They aren’t the highest performing ready-made portfolios (that accolade goes to eToro) and there are, of course, no guarantees with investing. However, they have been a safe choice over the past few years, producing solid returns across all but one of their portfolios.

Saxo is undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive, refined trading platforms available. Traders are offered a choice of two proprietary trading interfaces:

• SaxoTraderGO is web-based and can be accessed through any browser with no download necessary
• SaxoTraderPRO is available as a downloadable desktop application only

SaxoTraderGO

SaxoTraderGO is suitable for traders of all experience levels, and is the platform used by the majority of Saxo clients.

As its flagship platform, SaxoTraderGo provides everything that even an advanced trader is likely to need while navigating the market. There are complex order types and smart features enabling the seamless management of risk. The user interface is complex and the sheer number of available options means it takes time to fully get to grips with it, but Saxo provides plenty of guidance in the form of webinars, guides and videos.

SaxoTraderGO is free to set up with no monthly platform subscription fees and it’s free to test through a demo account. Some features, however – such as level 2 market data – require a subscription.

SaxoTraderPRO

Advanced traders may prefer the downloadable, multi-screen trading platform, SaxoTraderPRO, designed for high-volume, active traders. It’s available for both PC and Mac.

SaxoTraderPRO is a fully customisable trading platform. It comes with additional high performance features and trading tools, including:

• Algo orders
• Depth Trader
• Time and sales data
• Advanced trading ticket with ‘Quick trade’ mode

Note: SaxoTraderPRO is only available in a downloadable format. There is no mobile app version as there is with SaxoTraderGO, and there is no web-based version either.

It’s free to download and there are no monthly charges for choosing the PRO platform. However, some features, such as Level 2 market data, require a subscription.

Mobile platform

The mobile version of SaxoTraderGO is available through the Apple App Store and Google Play. There is no mobile version of SaxoTraderPRO but your account can be accessed through either platform so PRO traders can still use GO to manage their account when not at their desk.

The app is intuitive, looks smart, and makes trade execution as easy and clear as is possible for such an advanced platform on a mobile device screen. But therein lies the only real problem; what works well on Saxo’s desktop and web browser isn’t easy to translate to mobile.

On the Google Play Store, the app has an excellent 4.3 star rating on 2k reviews.

Demo account

With Saxo, you can open a demo account where you’ll be gifted £1,000,000 of virtual cash. Using a demo account is a great way to familiarise yourself with the platform and available tools, and test out your trading strategies before risking real money.

Saxo also offers a preview of its SaxoTraderGO platform which you can access, without needing to create an account, from the website.

APIs and third-party platforms

Through API connectivity, users can further customise their experience with access to multi-asset liquidity, back-office functionality, and high calibre technology and platform suppliers.

Saxo has recently revamped its pricing with the tagline: “premium trading without the premium price tag”. I wouldn’t argue with that sentiment: charges for the VIP and Platinum accounts are highly competitive. Even the fees on a Classic account come in below the industry average.

So, what will you pay? At Saxo, you’ll primarily be charged:

• An annual custody fee
• Fund fees if you invest in a ready-made portfolio
• Commission on trades
• Currency conversion (FX) fees when trading assets with a non-GBP denomination

The fees for these depend on the account tier you fall into.

Tiered pricing

Saxo’s tiered pricing model means that, as a client, you'll receive better rates as your trading volume increases.

There are three tiers: Classic, Platinum and VIP.

Custody charge

A custody fee of 0.12% is charged on Classic accounts and Platinum accounts. For VIP account holders, that drops to 0.08%.

Saxo’s old monthly minimum of £7.95 has now been scrapped as part of its revamped pricing. That’s an improvement for those with smaller portfolios who may previously have been worrying about paying over the odds. If you have £40k invested now, you’ll be paying annual custody fees of £48 (- it used to be £95.40). As a comparison, with interactive investor, you’ll pay £59.88. If you place more than 3 trades per quarter, you’re exempt from custody charges at IG, otherwise it’s £96 p.a.

Saxo now has to compete with platforms offering no custody charges at all. Trading 212 , for example, and eToro don’t charge custody fees and neither does IBKR, which is possibly Saxo’s biggest and closest competitor when comparing propositions.

If you invest in a fund, you’ll incur an additional charge. Fees for holding ready-made portfolios vary depending on your account tier, and are in addition to your account fee:

Classic – 0.4%
Platinum – 0.2%
VIP – 0.1%

While these fees are reasonable, eToro, again, is hard to beat here as it charges no custody fees and no additional fees for ready-made funds. It’s also important to consider that when paying on a percentage basis, large portfolio holders could be better off with a flat-fee provider.

Using our calculator is the best way to get the most accurate results on which platform wins out on costs for your specific requirements. *LINK

Commission

Saxo also charges commission on trades. Commission is reduced (see table above) when you move into the Platinum and VIP tiers, but it’s competitive even in the Classic tier.

Commission is determined by the instrument or asset you wish to trade, but as you can see from the sample collected for the comparison tables below, Saxo is among the cheapest UK providers where commission is concerned.

Saxo’s new pricing

FX conversion fees

When you trade an instrument in a currency that differs from your base denomination, you’ll need to pay a currency conversion (FX) fee. Saxo charges 0.25% for this service – that is very much at the lower end of the scale for FX fees in the UK market and again, means this provider is very competitively priced.

Note, however, that when investing through a SIPP, the currency conversion fee increases to a steep 1.00%.

Inactivity fees

Another benefit of the new pricing announcement – there are no more inactivity fees at Saxo. That’s unusual and a bonus if you want to execute a ‘buy and hold’ strategy.

Withdrawal fees

It is free to withdraw funds from your Saxo account.

Deposit fees

No charge.

Minimum deposit

£0.

Interest paid on cash

Saxo is currently paying 3.91% on GBP uninvested balances. That’s pretty good, but not the highest – IBKR, Moneybox and Trading 212 all pay higher rates.

Saxo excels here. It offers research capabilities and tools to meet the needs of all types of traders. It’s a seemingly endless source of trading inspiration and insight, cleanly presented for ease of use. You’ll find:

• Company fundamentals
• Latest research articles
• Analyst sentiment
• Over 50 technical indicators to analyse price trends
• Asset specific news and analysis
• Live market analysis and actionable insights from Saxo’s in-house strategists (the ‘SaxoStrats’)
• Price data
• Live charts
• Annotation tools
• Drawing tools
• Calendar
• News flow
• The daily ‘Market Call' Podcast
• Features to check how other traders are positioned
• Data on the day’s market movers

You can also find out about upcoming events and webinars. When I looked, there were free sessions on ‘How to build a portfolio’, ‘How to use SaxoTraderGO like a PRO’, ‘How to research and analyse companies’, and ‘Using CFDs to potentially boost returns’ amongst many others.

Trade Signals

The Trade Signals tab in the research section of your trading dashboard holds data from Autochartist and provides a list of technical analysis signals which translates into possible trades on a variety of instruments. You are able to filter on specific asset classes, probabilities, chart patterns, key levels patterns, Fibonacci patterns, and intervals on the left side (here you also find small information boxes explaining the different filters). By pressing the ‘View Analysis’ button on the right side, you can see the specific trade signal for each instrument and a trade ticket.

The news flow displays a wide variety of financial news from different news providers such as Dow Jones Global News Select. It provides you with the latest articles about the financial market developments. You also have the option to filter by specific news providers.

The financial calendar displays the different types of economic data rolling in on each specific day. It also displays the previous data, the estimation of the incoming data, and then the actual data when it has rolled in – from all over the globe.

When selecting a provider for your investments, it is very important to first ensure they meet certain minimum safety standards. We judge Saxo to meet the threshold for a ‘safe’ provider because:

• Saxo Bank is a registered Trading Name of Saxo Capital Markets UK Ltd which is regulated by the top-tier UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
• It is licensed in 15 jurisdictions across the globe.
• Investors are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) which protects investments up to a value of £85,000 in the event the company liquidates.
• Saxo is a financially stable company with a robust balance sheet. They serve clients in 170 countries, hold $95+ bn in AUM and process 1m transactions daily.

Account security

Saxo uses Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) solution as its 2FA authentication option, and software compatible with TOTP – such as Google and Microsoft Authenticators.

Again, Saxo does an excellent job here. Through the ‘Become a better trader’ section of its website, novice and improving traders can access a wide variety of materials and tools to allow for growth.

Educational tools include:

• Platform video games: tour the platforms and get step-by-step guidance on placing orders, managing positions and performing analysis.
• Introduction to trading course: Short, online courses covering the basics of financial instruments.
• Risk management materials
• A podcast
• Live webinars (and recordings of previous webinars): Upcoming and recent topics include ‘How to get started with investing’, ‘SaxoTraderGO platform walk through’, ‘How to research and analyse companies’, and ‘Using FX to potentially boost returns’ amongst many others.

Within SaxoTraderGO, you’ll also find educational materials contained in the ‘research’ section of the platform. It’s an impressive and comprehensive offering utlising different methods and media to help traders grow their skills.

Saxo has an “average” 3.7 star rating on Trustpilot at the time of writing. That’s around average when you look at many of Saxo’s competitors, with the exception of Trading 212 scores an excellent 4.6.

But it does have a worrying number of negative reviews, many of which complain about delays in account opening and getting issues resolved, that tally with my own experiences. That's a shame as Saxo does so much else well and when you use a premium platform, you expect premium service that understands the questions and needs of clients.

Help can be accessed via:

• Phoneline open during business hours: +44 (0)207 151 2100
• Email: digitalsalesuk@saxomarkets.com
• Existing customers can raise a ticket or visit the help centre

Account opening

As with other sophisticated platforms offering access to complex instruments, the form you'll have to complete to open an account for Saxo takes more time and effort than, for example, opening an investment account somewhere like AJ Bell or Moneybox. Expect to answer questions about your income, employment and existing trading knowledge so that Saxo can determine which products and services are appropriate for you. Don't be tempted to cheat and look answers for the appropriateness test – it's being done to protect you from the very real risks of trading products that you aren't suited to.

Unfortunately, it then took one full week for Saxo to confirm my account and grant me full access to the platforms, and having a read through customer reviews on sites like Trustpilot leads me to the conclusion that I'm not the only one to experience a similarly protracted account opening process. I had access to the demo account while I waited, but it's highly unusual to experience such a long delay between applying and having an account verified, and Saxo could do with speeding this up.

It is free to deposit funds into your Saxo Markets account. Initial funding can only be made by bank/wire transfer. Subsequent funding can then be made using a debit card.

There is a maximum limit of USD 100,000 per transaction and a maximum 30-day running sum limit of USD 160,000.

Account closing

If you decide to close your Saxo account, you can do so from within the platform – there's no hassle of having to contact customer services.

However, you'll first have to cancel any open order, close your trading positions and withdraw any cash. Don't forget to download any tax certificates, or account details you might later need.

You can only withdraw funds from your trading account to a bank account held under your name. Saxo Markets does not charge any fees for withdrawals submitted via the Online Cash Withdrawal Module. For a telegraphic transfer, there is a £15 charge.

Withdrawal requests will be processed the next business day if requested before 14:00 CET, and two trading days later if made after that time.

Saxo is home to a suite of powerful trading tools. That means the platform can be used by traders of all abilities, including professionals. That said, inexperienced retail investors may find the sheer number of options disconcerting.

I really like SaxoTraderGO’s trade ticket interface: it clearly displays all the relevant information within the ticket itself, and has been designed to facilitate speedy trades. If you want to execute trades quickly using only a single click, then you can activate 1-click trading.

If you use SaxoTradePRO you’ll get even more choice. High performance tools for managing and executing orders, including algorithmic orders, are integrated into the trade tickets. Once they’re active, you can modify orders without having to cancel and replace them. And ‘quick trade’ mode allows for more efficient trading.

Risk management tools

On both SaxoTraderPRO and SaxoTraderGO, you can also utilise an excellent choice of risk management tools including:

• Stop-limit orders
• Trailing stops
• Cancel all orders
• Margin breakdown
• Margin alerts

Saxo also offers its clients an innovative ‘Account shield’ tool. This tool effectively acts as a stop loss on your entire account value. If triggered, it liquidates all your open positions. Similarly, if you want to quickly close all your FX and CFD positions, or just those within an asset class, a quick close tool allows you to close all in just two clicks.

In addition, Saxo offers an array of educational materials within the ‘Research’ section of SaxoTraderGO centred around the theme of risk management so there is plenty of help provided to ensure your trades are strategies are built on a solid understanding of risk management philosophy.

Have a question about Saxo that we haven't covered? Ask it here and we will get back to you as soon as possible!