JFD Brokers is a brand of JFD Group, a company founded in 2011. JFD stands for “Just Fair & Direct”, which is supposed to evoke their model of transparent and fair treatment of all the stakeholders in their company. JFD Brokers is regulated by CySEC and it is also registered with several european regulators. We have listed them in the last section of the review. One of the strengths of JFD Brokers is the fact that they are no-dealer-desk broker, or how they call it “full agency model”, which eliminates conflict of interest. Another nice feature is a wide selection of platforms. Minimum $500 deposit is a bit high, however, considering it is an STP broker out of the box, its not out of the ordinary, considering such accounts sometimes start from $2000 deposit with other brokers. Interesting addition is support for Guidants platform, which is not something you se everywhere.
Account Features
JFD Brokers do not offer a set of various account types. Actually they pride themselves for treating all the customers the same. As we noticed, the whole experience is bound to the DMA – direct market access mantra, where JFD Brokers enables forex and CFDs traders to directly access a huge pool of liquidity and place trades directly on the market, without them being the dealer -> meaning they do not take the other side of the trade and then do not profit from traders’ losses. In any case, that means that all traders, no matter how much they deposit will get same trading conditions.
The account can be opened in USD, GBP, EUR and CHF, with minimum 500 currency units. It includes the negative balance protection.
- Leverage: up to 1:400
- Margin call at 125%
- Stop-out at 100%
- Stop Out Level
- Positive slippage used
- Hedging allowed
- Expert Advisors allowed
- Scalping allowed
Overall its a standard STP account, however, 1:400 leverage is higher than in most other places.
Forex commissions at JFD Brokers are 3USD, 2.75 EUR, 2.5 GBP and 3 CHF per lot per side. High volume traders can ask for better conditions.
Trading Software & Assets
JFD Brokers are really proud of their execution, which is as mentioned a direct market access with multiple liquidity providers for CFDs and Forex trading. This allows for the best prices, low spreads and the commission is the only thing to worry about when it comes to market conditions.
The platforms available with JFD brokers are
- MetaTrader4
- MetaTrader5
- Guidants
While many brokers do not allow MT4 and MT5 to have the same set of assets sometimes, JFD supports all their assets on all their platforms. Since MT4 and MT5 are relatively new platforms, we decided to take a peek at Guidants, where we did not have much experience before.
JFD Brokers Guidants access is also available in the demo mode, so when you are opening the account, first select the demo account and the platform. With demo account you dont have access to the my-JFD client portal. The login info that will arrive to your email inbox after verification of the email address. We did not realize this at first so we tried changing our my-JFD password, but the system was not giving us any indication that we do not even have access, instead generating a message that verification code will be sent to reset the password. We figured out the login credentials in the email are just for the trading platform, after a chat with the live support.
In short, Guidants requires first a registration with their system – the easiest way is to simply use the Facebook login. After that, the broker login is next. For that, the info JFD Brokers provided in the email is used. This will credit the amount selected for deposit in JFD Brokers system. We have selected 5 million which is maximum and the biggest demo account we have seen so far.
Guidants is for us a new system to trade Forex and CFDs, so it took some time getting used to it. First thing one notices is that the work surface is blank – the level of individual customisation is almost endless. One can create sets and widgets and save almost any kind of preset in almost every section, from asset watch list, news to selected strategies and indicators. This may be a bit overwhelming to beginners so we definitely recommend using the guide that is available on JFD Broker’s website. In the end when one settles on the look and feel that suits her, Guidants is a really powerful trading tool with integrated copy trading, webinars and other helpful tools.
There was one issue we did not manage to resolve, maybe we should have started with this immediately – we could not switch Guidants to English language. It was in German. So if you do not how to speak Deutsch, maybe best you keep to MT4 or MT5.
Underlying assets available are
- 64 forex pairs
- 4 precious metals
- 15 indices based CFDs
- more than 400 stock CFDs
- 7 commoditiy CFDs
- 2 bonds CFDs
- 21 ETFs based CFDs
- 2 bitcoin CFDs
Support Information
The support is available per phone in several countries (Austria, Cyprus, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Russia and Czech Republic). JFD Brokers have offices in several countries too – Cyprus, Bulgaria and Germany. If for any reason you cannot reach them in these countries, you can always use the live chat, which we used when we could not figure out how to login into the my-JFD client portal (which was impossible for demo account holders). In any case in a matter of minutes our issue was resolved.
We like it when chat support focuses on helping instead of selling, and JFD Brokers support was outright helpful.
The website is available in English, French, German, Czech, Italian, Bulgarian and Chinese.
Banking & Company Information
The minimum deposit for the account is $500 as we already mentioned in the intro to the review. This may be a bit high, but it will ensure full trading experience due to higher capital. If the margins are higher, make sure to understand that this means also higher losses/wins, even with the negative balance protection this can easily affect the total capital.
The payment methods with JFD Brokers are plenty
JFD Brokers Ltd. is registered in following EU jurisdictions:
- Germany – BaFin Reg: 126399
- UK – FCA Reg: 580193
- Frence – ACPR Reg: 74013