BlackBull Review

About BlackBull

BlackBull was founded with the vision of becoming the world’s leading financial technology and foreign exchange broker and as a New Zealand regulated broker, provides a slightly different proposition to pure Australia based firms. The company stands out as one of the first true ECN, no dealing desk brokerages. Whilst the platform originally emphasised forex, the broker has expanded to offer a huge range of shares, ETFs, commodities, CFDs and indices, serving a range of clients all over the world.

The company was initially founded in Auckland, New Zealand in 2014, with the broker recently passing it’s 10 year anniversary. Prior to this, the company had a background in institutional forex trading and boasted over 10 years of experience in the field.

The original vision was to provide support for retail clients who needed more in the way of institutional-level resources. To achieve this, the team developed multiple fintech solutions, which it would go on to include in BlackBull’s patented proprietary in-house, trade-order aggregation software.

After establishing its advanced technological and pricing offers, the company focused on providing a professional service to its clients, such as personal account management, daily market condition updates and specialised analysis tailored to its clients’ needs.

This is what has allowed BlackBull to provide an overall superior product when compared to its competitors, which by itself is no mean feat. Since its inception, the company’s popularity has grown substantially worldwide, allowing it to pursue rapid growth in a relatively short space of time.

Products and Trade Offers

BlackBull offers a wide range of investing tools and features. From a technology standpoint, it stands above many of it’s competitors. BlackBull’s execution speeds are award winning, and the range of instruments offered, with more than 26,000 shares is truly impressive as a multi asset platform. You can sample the demo account really smoothly, allowing you to experiment with trades before committing real money. Of course, this doesn’t ever guarantee success, but it does help new traders learn the ropes and provides a platform to be more experimental without the risks usually associated with trading.

The company offers a range of accounts to its clients, allowing them to choose one that best meets their needs. The account types are all very self-explanatory, so clients will know what category they fall into upon viewing the selection.

The range is all ECN, and the minimum deposit level starts from $0 for the Standard Account.

Commissions and Fee Charges

You can choose between various accounts at BlackBull, with the minimum spread on trades being 0.00 pips on the ECN Institutional account.

If you have a Standard ECN account, the minimum spread can be as low as 0.8 pips, but without the commissions. This account comes with no fixed minimum deposit level, so you can choose to get started at whichever level you feel comfortable.

When looking for low spreads, the ECN Prime offers you very competitive spreads from 0.1 pips, with a $6 per lot commission level. This account comes with a $2,000 minimum deposit level which could well prove to be worth the initial outlay to reduce fees.

Against the usual practice of other brokers, BlackBull does not charge inactivity fees.

What Others Say

• When all is said and done, BlackBull stands as perhaps the most reputable broker we have reviewed thus far. The trading community just likes these guys and that is quite priceless. In fact, reputation could well be considered the main selling point of this operator.

Forexfraud.com offers very high praise indeed in its BlackBull broker review, drawing particular focus to the company’s reputation.

Customer Service

For forex or equities brokers, establishing a reputation online can be a challenging thing to cultivate. Clients all have different requirements, and what works for one may not be suitable for another. Forex trading has never pretended to be simple, but a client or would-be client needs to know they are in safe hands.

BlackBull has a 4.7 rating on TrustPilot, which stands them out as one of the best trading platforms and fintech firms out there according to it’s users. There are also a substantial number of reviews from various parts of the world that help give a picture of trust, and efficiency.

Customer service is emphasised here, and from reading client feedback on trading message boards, this is clearly an area the company takes great pride in.

Those with more time to scour the internet will find further reviews that also generally portray BlackBull in a very positive light. Trading forums and the message board users that are on them seem to suggest that BlackBull’s clients are not just satisfied but overwhelmingly so. This is something the company should capitalise on using its own website.

There are negative reviews as well, but it seems those with criticisms are aiming them at the company’s website log-in system and verification procedures, most notably the amount of paperwork involved in getting started. While these are problems the company can iron out in time, it’s safe to say none of the negative reviews is criticising the firm’s professionalism or competence. It could also be argued that these customers’ problems may stem from their own internet connection or hardware running the platform.

Platform Features and Tools

For our BlackBull review, we took a deep dive into its platform to assess its tools and features as well as its functionality and style. A pitfall many broker websites face is too many screens and graphics that can overwhelm and distract the user.

This can be particularly intimidating to new traders, so it’s excellent to see that BlackBull’s platforms are simple to navigate and aesthetically pleasing to use. At no point did we feel overloaded with figures and metrics. The information we needed was clearly displayed, and by clicking on certain details, we were able to investigate further.

Nobody taking part in active trading will ever risk missing any vital update as long as the platform is functioning. As mentioned in the customer service section of this review, negative feedback has been aimed towards the sign-up process, but for our BlackBull review, our sign up was fairly straightforward and simple.

The website also features a live chat service that upon first use was slow to reply, although we did try it out of office hours at first. A friendly team member who was happy to answer our questions met us on our second attempt. Usually, live chats are hosted by bots that are loaded with stock answers based on keyword prompts, but due to the complexity of our questions, we felt confident we were talking to a human being.

Mobile Trading

BlackBull provide a downloadable platform that can be used with nearly any device. It’s actually quite impressive to see how many different forms its platform can occupy.

Robo Trading

BlackBull also engages in ‘Robo trading’. This is when a smart bot is installed into the platform, which uses a basic artificial intelligence to help the client make decisions that will be profitable to them.

It can also issue basic alerts to prevent the client from making errors. The service is basic at this stage. Arguably, BlackBull is behind some of its competitors when it comes to this particular piece of technology, but when you compare its platforms overall, BlackBull usually comes out on top.

It’s important to point out that using robot trading features doesn’t mean errors and risks are no longer an issue. The bot can only do so much, and human error will still happen. This is a purely advisory feature, and the bot, and therefore BlackBull, is not responsible should a trade ultimately turn out to not be a fruitful one.

Research and Learning Section

BlackBull scores top marks where research and learning are concerned. Not only is its site and various trading platforms simple to master but it also contains resources that help coach customers to become better traders. BlackBull goes above and beyond just having an FAQ page or lazily titled ‘Help’ section.

Instead, its website contains a section called Education that is dedicated to helping customers learn more about the ins and outs of trading. This section contains detailed guides, video walkthroughs and a glossary of terms associated with trading. It even contains a section offering to teach newcomers how to trade rather than simply catering for those who already do it.

Regulatory Details

The company services clients from all over the world. BlackBull originated in New Zealand and continues to be regulated there by the FMA under licence number FSP403326. It doesn’t accept clients from the US, France and some smaller EU countries such as Belgium due by and large to CFD regulations and differences in regulation in these territories.

BlackBull passports into Australia under a FMA and ASIC mutual recognition agreement, which provides users with a great additional option to choose from. The company has all its anti-money laundering, privacy and compliance policies readily available on its website as well as the various registrations.

OUR SUMMARY