HYCM

4
Agile and versatile Forex offering in a regulated environment that doesn’t thwart flexibility with leverage and advanced trading strategies.
Trading Platform:
MT4/5
Max Leverage:
1:500
Instruments:
Forex, Stock CFD, Indices CFD, Crypto
Regulation:
FCA, CySEC, DIFC, CIMA
Min. deposit:
$100
Open an account Read full review

Summary

HYCM specialises in Forex and CFDs on Stocks, Cryptocurrencies, Indices & ETFs are the core of HYCM’s business. 

Regulated by multiple high profile jurisdictions (CySEC, FCA, DIFC, CIMA), HYCM provides regulated access to financial markets. HYCM Limited is also registered in Saint Vincent.

⚠ Risk Warning: Keep in mind, CFDs are complex instruments and are usually traded with leverage, which significantly increases the chances of losing money. At the time of the review 72% of retail investor accounts were losing money when trading CFDs with this provider. It’s your responsibility to understand the inner workings of CFD instruments and understand the underlying risks. 

Overall

Pros
  • Prompt Account Opening & D/W
  • Wide Range of CFD markets (100+ instruments)
  • EA Trading
  • Flexible Leverage
Cons
  • Stock, Index, Crypto, Commodities, ETF trading Limited to CFDs
  • No Proprietary Platform
  • No Money Management or Copy Trading

Fees

Pros
  • Low non-trading fees
  • No withdrawal fee for payment systems and
  • low for wires above €300
  • No inactivity fee availability
Cons
  • None

Trading Instruments

Pros
  • Forex & CFD
Cons
  • No Availability of Futures, Bonds, Options Stock
  • Stocks & Indices limited to CFD

Account Opening

Pros
  • Fast On-boarding (fully digital)
  • Customer-friendly
Cons
  • Fast On-boarding (fully digital)
  • Customer-friendly

Deposit & Withdrawal

Pros
  • Quick D/W
  • Credit/Debit Card Supported
  • Wires
Cons
  • Electronic wallet fees

Platform

Pros
  • Stable platform
  • Rich pool of third party EAs and Indicators
Cons
  • Limited Order Types
  • No proprietary platform
  • MT4/5 only
  • No macOS support after Catalina

Customer Service

Pros
  • Phone Support
  • Live chat
  • Professional & Relevant
Cons
  • No weekend support

Research & Education

Pros
  • Demo Trading
  • Tutorials, Strategies & Handouts
  • Analytical Tools
  • Seminars & Webinars
Cons
  • No Fundamental Data
  • Basic Market Research

Regulation & Safety

Pros
  • FCA
  • CySEC
  • DIFC
  • CIMA
  • Registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Cons
  • No Asic

Full review

Forex & CFDs are the core of  HYCM’s business, with the exception of ETF & Stocks available to EU clients (excluding Hungary & UK). 

As a listed company on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, HYCM should be expected to go the extra mile to ensure the transparency of its operations. Among HYCM’s regulators are the FCA & Polish Regulatory authorities.

Fees

Let’s first go through the fees terminology:

  • Trading Fees occur when you trade (spreads, commissions, financing rates, and conversions)
  • Financing or overnight rates are charged when you hold your leveraged positions for more than 24 hours. Leveraged position means that you borrow money from the broker to trade.
  • Non-trading fees are withdrawal fees, inactivity fees, or hidden fees. 

To put things in a proper context we compare HYCM with the competing services, based on product offering, fee structure, and customer profile.

Assets Fee Level Terms
US Stock Not available Only available via CFD
EURUSD Low ≈ €4.5 per lot + spread
Inactivity FEE Low No inactivity fee

Non-trading fees

HYCM Axi XM
Account fee No No No
Inactivity fee No No No
Withdrawal fee $0* above $300 $0 $0

Except for a slight difference depending on your country, non-trading fees are low to non-existent. You won’t be charged for inactivity, as well as a deposit of over €100.

Trading Fees

Raw account holders would have to pay both commissions and spreads, whereas Fixed & Classic traders are limited to just spreads.

Comparing trading fees among CFD brokers may get convoluted pretty quickly. For the purpose of making things more straightforward, we’ve decided to showcase all fees for trading the most common set of products using a Raw account. The Max leverage HYCM used is:

  • 1:20 for Stocks
  • 1:500 for Forex
  • 1:200 for Indices
  • 1:5 for Cryptocurrencies
  • 1:133 for Commodities
  • 1:20 for ETFs

We define a typical trade as a €2,000 and €200,000 buy position for stock & forex respectively, held and sold after 7 days.  

The commissions are calculated for the RAW account.  

The benchmark fee takes into account commissions, spreads and financing costs. Below is the result for HYCM.

Forex fees

Forex Fees are low in comparison to XM & AxiTrader. 

  HYCM XM AxiTrader
EUR/USD benchmark fee 0.2 + $4 per round  17.1  13.8
GBP/USD  benchmark fee 0.8 + $4 per round  13.8  –
AUD/USD benchmark fee 0.6 + $4 per round 13.9 9.5
EUR/GBP benchmark fee 1.2 + $4 per round 12.2 11.0

Stock & Index CFD fees

Stock & Index CFD are similar to XM & AxiTrader. 

HYCM XM AxiTrader
Apple CFD benchmark fee 21  3.4 x
Vodafone CFD benchmark fee x  5.6 x
S&P 500 CFD Benchmark 0.2 2.4 1.7
Europe 50 CFD Benchmark 1.5 2.4 1.2

Finance Rates

These fees occur when you decide to hold your position. The longer you stay in CFD or FOREX trade, the more fees will accumulate, making the final amount rather hefty.

Trading Instruments

Focused on CFDs & Forex HYCM will only let you trade CFDs on Stocks, Commodities, and Indices. 

Stocks & ETFs 

At the time of the review HYCM hasn’t offered any stock and ETFs directly. They did offer CFDs on stocks & ETFs – see below.

Markets & Products General

HYCM Axi XM
Stock - - -
ETF - - -
Forex 48 34 48
Fund - - -
Bond - - -
Options - - -
Futures - - -
Cfd 122 51 122
Crypto 5 3 5

CFDs, Forex & Crypto

⚠ Keep in mind, CFDs are complex instruments and are usually traded with leverage, which significantly increases the chances of losing money. At the time of the review 76% of retail investor accounts were losing money when trading CFDs with this provider. It’s your responsibility to understand the inner workings of CFD instruments and understand the underlying risks.

HYCM offers a ok amount of CFDs, most of the traders will find the most popular instruments around here.

Account Opening

Despite sales people trying too hard sometimes, the account should be ready within the same day – without complicated procedures involved.

Account Eligibility

You are fine as long as you don’t currently reside in the following countries: 

  • Afghanistan
  • Bahamas
  • Belgium
  • Botswana
  • Cambodia
  • Canada (British Columbia, Quebec, Saskatchewan), 
  • Cyprus
  • France 
  • Ghana
  • Hong Kong 
  • Iceland 
  • Iraq
  • Japan 
  • Lao PDR 
  • Mongolia 
  • North Korea 
  • Panama
  • Sudan
  • Syria 
  • Turkey 
  • Trinidad and Tobago
  • Uganda
  • USA
  • Vanuatu 
  • Yemen and Zimbabwe

HYCM Min Depo

Depending on your country, a minimum deposit may or may not exceed $100. Contact your local sales team for more info. 

Account Types 

There are two account types “pro” & “standard” that differ in commissions. 

Ostensibly, there is no difference between the two. I suspect that the difference may be rooted in the market vs non-market maker execution. 

  •   Standard
  •   Pro 

How to open an account at HYCM

Despite at times a pushy sales process (prepare yourself to accept frequent emails and call attempts), the account opening is very straightforward and mild when it comes to identity verification and money operations. 

You’d need to: 

  •   Fill in your personal data
  •   Answer questions about your trading experience
  •  Verify identity (depending on your country of residence it may not apply

Deposit & Withdrawal

Available via several options, the deposit & withdrawal (d/w) process is quick and inexpensive (except for digital wallets).

Deposit Fees & Options

With an exception of electronic wallets (≈ 2% of the amount) the fees are free. Among the popular transfer options are: 

  • Bank transfer
  • Credit/Debit card
  • Skrill
  • Neteller
  • Webmoney

Deposit options

HYCM Axi XM
Bank transfer Yes Yes Yes
Credit/Debit card Yes Yes Yes
Electronic wallets Yes Yes Yes

You can only w/d from entities on your name. The debit/credit card and digital wallet deposits arrive instantly, whereas wire transfers might take up to 3 business days. 

There are no withdrawal fees after $300, while the funds can only be requested via a wire transfer.

Withdrawal fees and options

HYCM Axi XM
Bank Transfer Yes Yes Yes
Credit/Debit card Yes Yes Yes
Electronic wallets Yes Yes Yes
Withdrawal fee $0* above $300 $0 $0

Platform & Trading Experience

HYCMs  offers a basic version of MetaTrader (4/5) and comes with a native macOS support (not after macOS Catalina)

MetaTrader is the most popular forex and CFD platform, available in multiple languages and supported by the largest FX community. Unfortunately, the platform is also quite dated and unlike with competitors, lacks any added features. 

User Experience & Functionality

The website and back-office offer a comfortable browsing experience at the first glance. Most of the information is easy to find and comprehend. 

Despite a somewhat outdated MetaTrader 4 experience, the platform will be familiar to non-novice traders. Traders looking for a simplified interface may find the web version of the platform more to the point. 

Unfortunately, unlike other trusted brokers on the website, HYCMs MetaTrader experience doesn’t pack any added value features, nor the support of macOS. 

Therefore, you will be limited to the following order types:

  • Market Buy/Sell
  • Pending Buy/Sell

Alerts and Notifications

MetaTrader allows you to configure the following notification:

  • Margin Call
  • Deposits & Withdrawals
  • Orders

Customer Service

Although HYCM is less impressive than email, you will always find help via phone or live chat. Make sure to time your queries during the traditional 24/5 hours.

Available in many languages, the HYCMs support is available to you 24/5, over the phone, live chat, and by email.

The random cheek of HYCMs CySEC support chat via phone and live chat, left us satisfied in terms of response time, quality of answers and general tone of communication.

A minor red flag on the quality of support showed up when the account manager hasn’t clarified the difference between CFDs on stocks and actual stocks. Keep in mind, that the quality of customer service may vary depending on a local branch.

Research & Education

Research and education are well structured, easy to comprehend, and useful for any novice and intermediate traders.

HYCM’s trading education offers a clear-cut path to important trading principals, and can be sorted by experience levels – ranging from beginners courses and generic MT4 videos to trading strategies and trading tools overviews.

Via HYCM’s market research workshops you can prepare for the week ahead, as well as to learn about the larger trends. 

People looking for live education, will find plenty of information by experienced coaches via workshops. Furthermore, HYCM organises free offline events and meetups in some regions.

Charting

Charting tools are quite robust, packing over 20 indicators. Surprisingly, you won’t be able to save the chart settings for later.

Fundamental Reports

You won’t find much besides an economic calendar – which, to HYCM’s credit, provides easy access to a comprehensive amount of reviews.

Other Research Tools


HYCM’s research tools are limited to the following types 

  • Trading calculator
  • Web based news feed
  • Economic calendar 

All perform basic functions and will come handy as a point of reference. For more comprehensive analysis you might want to look at other brokers or service providers. 

News Feed

Traders looking to stay on top of the latest news will find a basic feed, with a list of top news according to HYCM staff of editors.

Regulation & Safety

You should be safe with HYCM, as it’s regulated by 5 authorities around the world, including FCA and CySEC.

HYCM legal entities & background

Established in Hong Kong in 1977, currently HYCM operates under five legal entities, Honeycomb Capital Markets Limited (FCA), HYCM ltd (CySEC, Cayman Islands Monetary Authority), HYCM Limited (Saint Vincent & Grenadines) and Henyep Capital Markets (DIFC) Limited (Dubai)

To make sure your branch offers a required level of protection contact the local client service.

HYCM legal entities
Client country Investor protection amount Regulator Legal entity
United Kingdom £85,000 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

Honeycomb Capital Markets Limited

European Union Clients €20,100 Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) HYCM (Europe) Ltd
Clients outside of Europe Not provided International Financial Services Commission of Belize (IFSC) HYCM Ltd (Cayman Islands)
Dubai Not provided Dubai Financial Services Authority  Henyep Capital Markets (DIFC) Limited

In a nutshell

Despite its limitation in product offering and sometimes-pushy sales team, HYCM manages to offer competitive services. Although the main instruments are limited mainly to Forex & CFDs, you will be able to trade ETFs, Crypto via CFD contracts. 

It’s commission structure, flexible leverage, well-executed web/mobile platforms & low deposit/withdrawal fees puts it in the group of the top EU brokers.

HYCM Brief Overview

? Country of regulation UK, Cyprus, Dubai, Cayman Islands, Saint Vincent & Grenadines
? Trading fees class Average
? Inactivity fee charged No
? Withdrawal fee amount $0* after $300
? Minimum deposit $100
⏰ Time to open an account 1 day
? Deposit with credit card Available
? Depositing with electronic wallet Available
? Number of base currencies supported 4
? Demo account provided Yes
? Products offered Forex, CFDs on Crypto, Stock and ETF and Commodities

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