Best Forex Brokers in the United Arab Emirates in 2024

This guide helps to compare and find the best forex brokers in UAE. Currency trading is a popular investment for beginners and advanced traders in UAE to achieve financial gains. However, with 174 local and offshore online brokers available in UAE offering different trading conditions, it is tough to select the ideal option for individual needs.

To help beginners and advanced traders make the right choice, the services of available providers have been assessed considering: the range of forex trading instruments, fees, accessibility, trading tools & platforms, research & education materials, islamic accounts availability and customer support.

This guide compares 174 providers for users to review and find the ideal forex broker for their needs. To help them make an informed decision, a list of the best forex brokers in UAE is shared below, followed by in-depth reviews and comparisons.

Best Forex Brokers in United Arab Emirates

1. AVAtrade – Overall Best Forex Broker in UAE
2. eToro – Best Beginners Broker
3. Pepperstone – Best Forex CFD Broker
4. ActivTrades – Execution speed
5. Saxo Bank – Best Advanced Forex Broker

The Top Choices Compared

Key features of the highest ranked brokers for forex trading in UAE are compared in the table below.

Broker	AvaTrade	eToro	Pepperstone	ActivTrades	Saxo Bank
Nr. of Forex Pairs	65	49	60	49	190
Leverage	7:40	1:30	7:40	7:40	1:30
Min. Deposit	$100 (370 AED)	$100 (185 AED)	$0 (0 AED)	$0 (0 AED)	$2000 (7,345 AED)
Trading Platforms	MT4 MT5 WebTrader AvaGo	eTorro app	MT4 MT5 TradingView cTrader	MT4 MT5 TradingView ActivTrader	SaxoTraderGo SaxoTraderPro TradingView MultiCharts UpData
Copy Trading Tools	Ava Social DupliTrade Mql5.com	CopyTrader	N/A	ZuluTrade, Mql5.com	IC Social ZuluTrade Myfxbook AutoTrade Mql5.com
Algorithmic Trading	YES	NO	YES	YES	YES

Forex Spreads and Commissions Compared

Spreads and commissions of top choices are compared in the table below.

Top 5 Forex Brokers in UAE Reviewed

The best forex brokers in UAE are reviewed below including key features.

How To Find The Ideal Broker and Forex Trading Platform in UAE?

Criteria that help selecting the best forex broker and forex trading platform in UAE are listed below.

• Availability of forex trading instruments. Brokers with access to a wide range of forex instruments should be preferred. They allow deverzification, flexibility and hedging which increases chances for profit. The most common instruments are forex currency pairs, forex derivatives (forex CFDs, options, futures), ETFs and currency swaps, micro lots etc.
• Fees. There are two types of fees to be considered: trading fees (spreads, commissions) and non-trading fees (overnights, conversion fees, deposit and withdrawal fees). Brokers with low overall fees should be preferred.
• Forex Trading Platforms and Third Party Integrations. A wide range of platforms and integrations are offered by brokers. Some of the most popular forex platforms are: MetaTrader 4 (MT4), MetaTrader 5 (MT5), cTrader, TradingView. Knowledge level, trading style and trading goals consideration will help traders select the right forex trading platform.
• Reputation. Choosing a reputable broker helps avoiding scams. The following criteria build a brokers reputation: number of users, number of positive user feedback, number of tier-one licences.
• Experience level. Brokers offer trading features and tools for different experience levels (beginners, intermediate and advanced). Traders knowledge level needs to betaken into account.
• Personal Preferences. Preferences that need to be to considered when choosing a broker include: Religion (Islamic account options), Language (Arabic, English), Trading style (automated trading, swing trading, day trading, algorithmic trading, leverage)

There are a few things to be considered before choosing the best forex broker. Signing up with the right broker ( with the right trading features and fees), can make the different between making profit and loosing money.

Popularity and Trade Execution Of Top Choices Compared

Number of users and trade execution speed of the top choices are compared in the table below.

User Interface, Application and Dashboard Of Top Forex Brokers in Dubai Compared

AvaTrade

eToro

Pepperstone

ActivTrades

Saxo Bank

What To Consider Before Starting With Forex Trading in UAE?

Characteristics to be considered by forex traders in UAE are listed and explained below.

Usage Of Demo, Micro-Lot and Cent Accounts

The usage of demo accounts (paper trading accounts), should be considered by beginners (unexperienced traders). These accounts allow users to test trading strategies without the risk of loosing money. They increase overall chances for profitable trading and prevent unnecessary looses. Micro lot accounts and cent accounts can be used instead of demo accounts.

Fixed Spread VS Variable Spread Brokers

Variable spreads change based on current market conditions (they are sensitive to volatile price movements) and can unexpectedly increase overall trading costs. Fixed spreads on the other hand allow forex traders to know exactly how much their current positions cost. To avoid unexpected increases of trading costs, fixed spread broker should be preferred (especially by high volume traders and day traders).

Trading Courses and Mentors

Forex trading courses and trading mentors help users expending their knowledge on trading. Better education of traders helps choosing the right broker, avoiding scams and making better investment choices. Courses and mentors to follow as a UAE trader are listed in this article.

Trading With Leverage

Trading with leverage (borrowed money from the broker) allows traders to amplify their trading position. While it increases potential profits, it also amplifies the risk of potential losses. Trading with leverage should be avoided by beginner traders because of the greater chances of loosing money.

Forex Trading Hours in UAE

Forex trading in UAE follows trading hours of the global forex markets. The forex market is open 24/5, from Sunday evening until Friday evening. The forex market has four major trading sessions: the Sydney session (5:00 AM to 2:00 PM UAE time), the Tokyo session (7:00 AM to 4:00 PM UAE time), the London session (11:00 AM to 8:00 PM UAE time), and the New York session (8:00 PM to 5:00 AM UAE time).

How Is Forex Trading Regulated in the UAE?

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a federation of seven emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah, and Fujairah). Forex trading regulation in UAE has two regions: the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and the rest of the UAE.

Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) is an economic free zone in Dubai, founded in 2002. It is regulated by the Dubai Financial Service Authority (DFSA). The DFSA oversees all financial activities in the area, including forex trading, licensing and monitoring activities.

The rest of the UAE is regulated by the Securities and Commodities Authority (SCA). The SCA is a federal government agency established in 2000. It is issues licences to forex brokers in UAE that meet their regulatory requirements including minimum capitalisation, risk management, client fund segregation, reporting and disclosure. The SCA overseas financial activities on security and commodity markets (exchanges) in UAE including the Dubai Financial Market (DFM), the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX) and NASDAQ Dubai.

Forex Brokers do not require a licence from the SCA to accept clients from the United Arab Emirates. Broker authorisation can be verified by contacting the SCA support.

Getting Started With Forex Trading in UAE and Dubai in 2024

To start forex trading in the UAE or Dubai, choosing a well-regulated forex broker that ideally has a license issued by the DFSA or SCA is crucial. Follow these five steps to ease this process:

1. Choosing a Regulated Forex Broker – Double-check whether your broker is SCA or DFSA-regulated, depending on whether you live within the DIFC or elsewhere in the UAE. Verify that your forex broker is well-capitalized, regulated, and financially stable. 
2. Use a Free Demo Account  – Practice forex trading with a free demo paper trading account before trading with real money. Familiarize yourself with your brokers’ trading platform, software, and features before placing any real-money trades. 
3. Develop a Trading Plan – Develop a solid trading plan that suits your personal needs, goals, and risk appetite. Determine how much you want to make, what amount of money you want to risk per trade (or per day, week, or in total), the ideal trade size, and the duration of each trade. 
4. Identifying Favorable Trading Opportunities – Learn to spot favorable trading opportunities by looking at charts, conducting technical and fundamental analysis, or by using trading signals or Expert Advisors. It is mandatory to identify favorable trading opportunities for your trading strategy promptly.
5. Test Your Forex Trading Strategy With Real Money – After demo trading, test your forex trading strategy with real money by opening a live account and trading the real forex markets. Start with an amount of capital you can afford to lose, and scale this up when you are ready. 

RISKS OF FOREX TRADING:

Our experts want to take the time to warn you of the most important risks associated with forex trading in the UAE and Dubai – leverage and the percentage of retail investor accounts that lose money.

• Leverage – In forex trading, leverage can work to your advantage by magnifying your gains, but it can also backfire as it magnifies your losses as well.
• Rate of Success – Based on our recent studies, as much as 90% of all forex traders are estimated to lose money while trading the markets. 

Paper Trading on Demo Accounts

Demo accounts allow users to practice forex trading, develop profitable trading strategies, and familiarize themselves with the financial markets. Our experts highly recommend opening a demo account before trading the live forex markets. 

Developing a Trading Plan

‘’If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’’ is a common expression in business, and the forex market is no exception to this rule. Most traders methodically follow a written trading plan, which entails:

• Goal Definition – Determine your financial objectives, time horizon, and risk tolerance if you are new to trading. 
• Trading Style Selection – Identify your trading style, reflecting your personal preferences, such as day trading, swing trading, position trading, or long-term investing.
• Strategy Development – Create a detailed forex trading strategy that outlines how you approach the markets. Criteria and methods that can be included are technical and fundamental analysis, indicators, entry and exit strategies, risk management techniques, and position sizing. 
• Realistic Expectation Setting – Set realistic expectations for your forex trading journey to avoid disappointment later.
• Comprehensive Market Analysis – Conduct comprehensive market analysis to detect potential trading opportunities. Analyze charts, trends, news, economic indicators, and more, and consider the overall market situation. 
• Risk Management Development – Protect your forex trading capital by deploying risk management strategies. Allocate only a certain amount of money or percentage of your portfolio per trade and stick to it. Naturally, this amount should be the maximum amount of money you are willing to lose per trade. Additionally, use Stop-Loss and Take-Profit orders to secure your profits timely. 
• Trade Management Plan – Decide how you will manage and adjust your trades by using Stop-Loss and Take-Profit orders, trailing stops, or exit your trades manually. 
• Trading Discipline Maintenance – Follow your developed trading plan thoroughly. Do not abandon or adjust your trading plan because of emotions or significant market volatility. 
• Monitoring and Trade Evaluation – Keep a detailed record of your forex trading activity, including entry and exit values, profits and losses, and the reasons for taking each trade. Our experts recommend frequently reviewing and evaluating your trades to identify patterns, strengths, weaknesses, and more. 
• Continuous Education—Stay up-to-date about the latest forex market trends, trading techniques, economic news, and more by attending seminars and webinars, reading books, following educational guides, watching tutorial videos, interacting with other traders, etc. 

Identifying Trading Opportunities

Successful forex trading requires identifying profitable trading opportunities, which is done by watching out for strong currencies, researching well, focussing on a small set of forex pairs, keeping an eye on the news, accurate timing, using tools and indicators, and finding the right trading platform.

• Watching out for Strong Currencies – Forex traders should identify strong and weak currencies quickly. Strong currencies move with the trend and are often less volatile. Weak currencies are not traded as much as strong currencies and are less liquid. 
• Research Well – Conducting research on the currencies you want to trade is crucial as a forex trader. Keep a close eye on major economic and global events that can effect currency prices, and try to spot positive or negative market surprises as fast as possible to profit from them.
• Focus on a Small set of Currencies – We recommend focusing on a small set of currencies in order to fully understand their trends, price patterns, and behavior. Trading fewer currencies leads to an increased focus on each currency and eases the procedure of researching them and conducting due diligence.
• Keep an Eye on the News – Keep an eye on the news to be up-to-date about the currencies you want to trade. It is crucial to follow all important economic, national, political, micro, and macro factors that can impact the values of these currencies. 
• Focus on Timing – Forex traders need to act fast to capitalize on their trading opportunities. The markets are the most volatile during opening and closing, which could be ideal if you are risk-aversive. 
• Using Tools and Indicators – Use tools and indicators like support and resistance, RSI, MACD, and more to support your technical analysis. 
• Finding the Right Trading Platform – All the above factors are just as important as finding the right trading platform. Compare the best forex brokers in the UAE and Dubai in 2024 in this guide to find out which broker suits your personal needs the best.

Avoiding Forex and CFD Scams in the UAE and Dubai in 2024

The forex market is the largest financial market globally, with a daily turnover of over $6 trillion. This high number, combined with the effects of leverage, means there are always profit-making opportunities. However, this also counts for unethical business practices and outright scams because of the market’s size. 

It is crucial to identify common forex scams promptly, understand the importance of regulated brokers, and trade with a broker that keeps its clients’ funds in segregated accounts and offers them negative balance protection. 

There are many types of forex scams in broker and non-broker forms, with the most common ones being:

• Forex Mutual Fund (PAMM) Scams – When forex mutual funds claim their fund managers are professional while they aren’t, claim inflated returns, or charge excessive management fees, they should be avoided.
• E/A Trading Robots Scams – Expert Advisors (EAs) and trading robots are powerful trade automation tools, but ‘’guaranteed’’ or ‘’unlimited’’ returns don’t exist. Some EA trading robot scams involve free software if users deposit with a ‘’recommended’’ broker to generate commission for the scammer by referring new clients to the broker. 
• Trading Signals Scams – Trading signals are trade ideas or suggestions sent to traders to help them spot profitable trading opportunities more easily. Individuals and businesses can create trading signals manually or automatically, relying on technical or fundamental analysis. Inflated accuracy like ‘’90%+’’ or free signals with ‘’recommended’’ brokers are red signals that should always be avoided.
• ‘’Holy Grail’’ Forex Scams – These forex scams promise to profit from the markets 24/7/365 because of some trading software, strategy, or other type of ‘’holy grail’’ system and should be avoided at all costs. There is no such thing as a holy grail in trading. 
• Guaranteed Returns Scams – With these forex scams, users will earn fixed periodic profits in return for depositing funds at a recommended broker. Always keep in mind that there is no foolproof forex trading strategy that doesn’t come with losing positions every once in a while.
• Price Manipulation – Some forex brokers manipulate their trading platforms to be at a disadvantage of traders using techniques like negative slippage and a practice known as ‘stop hunting,’ where the broker takes the Stop-Loss of a trader before providing him with the correct quotes. 
• Unusually High Leverage – Forex and CFD trading with leverage can profitable, but it can also backfire. Usually, brokers will allow retail traders to trade with a maximum leverage of 30:1, whilst professional and institutional traders are allowed to trade with up to 500:1 leverage. Unusually high leverage ratios like 2,000:1 and upwards can virtually only wipe out accounts with a single losing trade, and should be avoided at all costs. 
• Unsegregated Client Bank Accounts – Scam forex brokers will use a single bank account for both their users’ and their own operational funds. This is definitely a bad practice, as traders’ funds will be comingled with the brokers’ in the case of of a bankruptcy, and porbably not returned. 
• Fake Bonuses and Promotions – Many forex brokers offer generous bonuses and promotions to attract and retain clients, but shady brokers lure traders and investors with bonuses and promotions that ‘’lock’’ the trader in, making sure they cannot withdraw their own deposited funds or any profits made. 
• Personal Data Scams – Scam forex brokers harvest personal data from their users and sell it to data brokers or use it themselves to commit credit card fraud and other cybercrime-related felonies. 

Avoiding Broker Scams

Broker scams can be devastating as they can empty unknowing victim’s savings accounts and have their personal and banking details copied and sold on the internet. It is crucial to protect yourself against forex scams by identifying a reputable and reliable broker, that is regulated by top-tier regulators like the DFSA, FCA, ASIC, or CySec. Further reading on what to do if you’ve been scammed.

Regulated brokers keep their client’s funds in segregated bank accounts and separate their working capital. These reputable brokers are also randomly checked to ensure they adhere to the strict rules set out by their regulators.

Most regulated brokers offer negative balance protection, a safeguard that ensures traders cannot lose more funds than they have deposited into their forex trading accounts. This prevents traders from racking up debts with their broker.

Video Summary

Watch a short recap of the top rated broker in the video below.

Conclusion

It can be difficult and time intensive to compare and evaluate services of different brokers in UAE  to find the ideal option. Users need to collect and evaluate relevant information in order to make the optimal choice for their needs. 

This guide does the hard work for our readers by comparing and evaluating the top choices for different types of traders and trading goals. The results of our analysis of the best forex broker in UAE are summed up in the table below.

BROKER	AVG. SPREAD (EUR/USD)	NR. OF FOREX PAIRS	MIN. DEPOSIT	BEST FOR
Avatrade	0.9 pip	59	$100.00	Low fix spreads
eToro	0.9 pip	49	$200.00	Beginners
Pepperstone	0.6 pip	138	$20.00	Forex CFDs and app
ActivTrades	0.8 pip	49	$0.00	Execution speed
Saxo Bank	0.9 pip	300	$2,000.00	Advanced traders

Stefan Grasic

Stefan Grasic is the owner of Business24-7 and has considerable experience in the financial and investment niche, but also enjoys writing articles for the general readership. Stefan is an active stock, CFD, crypto and general investment researcher, advising blockchain companies such as Blockbird, GoCrypto, Hive Terminal at their start up level.

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