Octa Pakistan - Is It a Good Broker in 2024?

Octa Pakistan - General Information

Octa Pakistan is Octa's offshore entity for Pakistan, acting as a broker for MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5) platforms for trading in the country. It allows deposits and withdrawals in the local currency through local banks and other international deposit options like credit cards, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Skrill. It also offers copy trading.

Octa Pakistan Review

Octa Pakistan mainly offers two types of accounts: MT4 and MT5. In terms of tradeable instruments, there are less than 50 instruments available, which include 35 currency pairs, ten indices, three energies, gold and silver, and five cryptocurrencies (for MT4, there are four indices).

Regarding indices, it's important to note that trading is only available in the form of CFDs, which are considered high-risk because they are quite complicated for the average retail or casual investor.

Octa Pakistan is among the lower-end MetaTrader brokers in terms of fees and commissions, which is something that works in its favour. Normally, there's no fee on deposits or withdrawals. Additionally, even the fee charged by the depositing platform, for instance, Skrill, is covered by Octa. However, there may be other fees you may be liable for.

Octa Pakistan's spread pricing is low. However, there are no date ranges for the spread claims, which hinders direct comparison with its competitors.

Octa Pakistan also has the copy trading option, which you can use to set your assets to be traded according to the investor you're copying. It offers a dedicated mobile app for this offering, the Octa Copy trading app. The traders you can copy are called 'Masters', and their positions are copied automatically.

In Pakistan, Octa has also introduced bank deposits with three local banks. This is a relatively easier option as compared with Skrill or Neteller. However, as deposits are eventually accepted as either USD or EUR, the official exchange rate of the State Bank of Pakistan is applied. Wire transfers normally take one to three hours for the funds to appear in the Octa wallet.

Octa Pakistan Fees

The fees you pay on Octa Pakistan depend on the account you have. On deposits and withdrawals, you don't have to pay any fee.

Octa spread pricing is dependent on the entity of Octa you're trading on, so in the case of Octa Pakistan, it's dependent on the international entity based in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The lowest spread is 0.6 pips.

Octa Pakistan Trading Assets

There are four main categories of trading assets available for trading on Octa Pakistan.

Currency Pairs: It offers up to 35 currency pairs with both MT4 and MT5 trading accounts. Some of these volatile pairings include EUR/USD, GBP/USD, JPY/USD, USD/CAD, AUD/JPY, and AUD/NZD.

Index CFDs: It offers ten indices for MT5 and four indices for MT4 traders, with a maximum leverage of 1:50.

Commodities: There are two metal commodities (gold and silver) and three energy ones (Natural gas, Brent crude oil, and West Texas Intermediate crude oil).

Cryptocurrencies: This broker currently only offers five crypto trading options, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple.

Does Octa Have an Islamic Account?

Octa Pakistan is one of the first in the industry to bring Islamic accounts into the mix of Forex and other kinds of trading. It does offer an Islamic account in Pakistan, which is basically an Islamic version of the MT4 and MT5 trading accounts.

How is that different? In an Islamic account, there are no swaps applied on rollover. There's a fixed fee, which is not interest. The fee depends on the order nature, whether you're buying or selling a tradable asset.

These swap-free accounts aren't much different from regular accounts in terms of advantages. It's just to ensure that the trading doesn't violate Islamic finance laws, which are quite complex at this point.

Users can choose to go with an Islamic account when signing up for an account. They can indicate that they want an Islamic swap-free account.

This is a good touch from Octa for investors based in Pakistan, which is a Muslim-majority country. It has an elaborate Islamic banking and finance system, with many people preferring to use and invest in Islamic-laws regulated entities and instruments only.

The swap-free account ensures that no money goes as interest, which is prohibited in Sharia law. This Octa is also able to cater and satisfy the Muslims in Pakistan, or other parts of the world, who practice faith-based trading.

Is Octa Regulated? Is This Company Safe?

Octa has been around for a while now, starting ten years ago. It's largely safe, but it's not regulated, at least not in Pakistan. Only the European Union (EU) based entity of Octa is regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC). Although some sites claim that it's regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, it's not.

In Pakistan, the regulating authority for trading is the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP). Although SECP doesn't directly regulate Octa, its rules allow trading of major currencies on the platform, as well as commodities.

Cryptocurrencies are still not regulated by the SECP but can still be traded on the broker platform.

Because of limited regulation, it can be considered a high-risk platform for Forex and, especially, CFDs.

Octa Pakistan Alternatives

Octa Pakistan doesn't really have good reviews on our website, with investors pointing out several key issues with the broker. A better alternative, in our opinion, is Exness.

Overall, if you compare Octa with Exness, the latter offers better services and enjoys good reviews from users worldwide. While both Octa Pakistan and Exness offer negative balance protection, Exness clearly takes the win in the education area, empowering investors with its thorough content.