The difficulty in assessing a dealer-priced broker is that the prices arrive after the account does. Saxo is the rarer case: minimum spreads pair by pair, a commission schedule, and the deposit thresholds that move a customer between price tiers, all published before anyone fills in a form.

The liturgy first, because it is not optional. Saxo states on its published pages that its UK entity holds FCA authorisation, and prints a firm reference number alongside the claim. Printing it is to the firm’s credit; reprinting it here would not verify it. So the reader performs the search on the Financial Services Register — number matched, permissions read, the recorded contact details preferred over any others. The Register is not a decoration.

The firm in brief

The UK company is SAXO CAPITAL MARKETS UK LTD, incorporated on 20 October 2010, registered at 40 Bank Street, Canary Wharf, and active on the public record. The firm’s own About page claims 30-plus years in the industry, 1,500,000 clients worldwide, more than £130bn in client assets and around 220,000 trades a day. Those figures describe scale, not ownership: the page names no majority shareholder, a curious omission on a page otherwise generous with numbers.

What the price list actually says

Saxo’s published FX rates give retail minimums of 0.7 pips on EUR/USD, 0.8 on GBP/USD and 0.9 on USD/JPY, across a range the firm puts at more than 185 pairs with forwards and options alongside spot. The FX options table samples three minimums — 6 pips on USD/JPY, 8 on GBP/USD, 180 on gold — and none for the other forty-odd. Index CFDs start at 0.70 points on the US 500 against 5% initial margin. Share CFDs are commissioned: 0.1% on UK shares, minimum £8.

Two cautions attach. “From” is a floor, not an average, and a minimum published in calm conditions is not one available in disturbed ones. Set against a house that publishes no schedule at all — the position reached with Spreadex — a floor is still something.

Three tiers, and where the small account sits

The tier table is the most revealing document Saxo publishes. Classic takes no minimum deposit and pays 0.08% on UK stocks and ETFs — the cash product, not the CFD above — plus 0.2% on bonds and $2.00 a stock option. Platinum, at a £200,000 deposit, pays 0.05%, 0.1% and $1.00; VIP, at £1,000,000, pays 0.03%, 0.05% and $0.75. On shares the headline is honest: the 0.08% the front pages advertise is the entry-tier rate, though it is better than double what the VIP tier pays. On bonds it is not. The front carries commissions from 0.05%, which is the VIP line; the entry tier pays 0.2%, four times as much. The page adds that other fees may apply without listing them, which is the least satisfactory sentence on it.

What is absent from the range

Spread betting does not appear in the published UK product list — material for a British audience, since the spread bet is the wrapper much of this market is compared in. Nor does MetaTrader appear in the platform list: SaxoTrader and SaxoInvestor are proprietary, and the third-party tools named are TradingView and MultiCharts, so an expert advisor does not come across. The rest of the published range is broad, which is what makes the two gaps conspicuous.

The protections, hedged

On the authorisation Saxo states, the retail apparatus applies: leverage caps, negative balance protection, the client-money rules. Eligible clients also have recourse to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme should the firm fail owing them money — up to £85,000 per person per firm for failures after 1 April 2019, per the scheme, which says plainly that it cannot compensate poor investment performance. It covers collapse, never a losing position. The firm also displays, as the rules require, that 60% of retail investor accounts lose money trading CFDs with it.

Bottom line

Saxo suits the reader who wants a broad multi-asset range, will work inside a proprietary environment, and values reading a cost schedule before committing. It suits less well the reader who wants a spread bet, arrives with a MetaTrader workflow, or assumes every advertised rate is the entry-tier one. None of it is concealed; it is printed, which is the compliment this desk pays most rarely.

The customary caution: CFDs carry substantial risk of loss, most retail accounts lose money on them, and nothing above is advice.