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uBinary Review

Deposit
$100
Payout
90%

uBinary’s commitment to the customer is total. It provides a polished online platform that lets you trade binary options on over 90 stocks, indices, currencies and commodities. You can choose timeframes to suit your style: 60 seconds for quickfire traders, end-of-day for those who like to conduct deeper analysis.

uBinary is a binary options broker registered in Malta whose founders claim to have over 50 years of experience in risk management, forex trading and capital markets. Are they able to leverage this experience into an exceptional brokerage service? Read on to find out.

uBinary OFFICIAL

The uBinary website is heavily themed on black and orange, which gives it quite a slick look. The home page has a fair bit of content (video introduction, scrolling asset price ticker, streaming news) but the navigation bar on top is blessedly uncluttered. The design inspires confidence that the company is at least professional enough to hire decent web developers.

uBinary offers the 4 common asset categories for binary trading: forex, commodities, single stocks and stock indices. It lists a comprehensive selection of forex pairs, including almost every possible G10 cross as well as SEK and NOK (Swedish Krona and Norwegian Krone respectively). However, the only EM currency available is ZAR. Rather than providing such eclectic underlyings as CADCHF, I would have preferred seeing the inclusion of TRY, MXN, BRL etc.

What is more indicting, however, is that when I tried utilising their trading platform to trade these currencies, they were nowhere to be seen. In fact only 10 currency pairs were actually available to trade on.  Perhaps this was because I was looking during early GMT hours (Asian trading session) – however, it was still missing pairs that are heavily traded in that timezone, such as NZDJPY. I went back to take a look later during London hours and found a couple more pairs included but no sign of USDSEK and USDNOK as claimed.

The list of commodities includes Gold, Oil, Silver, NatGas, Corn and Coffee. However once again when I tried to find these on the trading platform, none were available. Again, the time of day may have been a contributing factor, but I would expect at least gold and oil, as super-liquid and super-important assets, to be available to trade on 24 hours a day.

Fortunately this tendency to exaggerate does not hold for indices and stocks; unfortunately, this is because there are few even claimed to be offered of each. The indices include US, Europe and Nikkei but nothing else – no regional stock indices at all. The stocks are slightly better, including most of the main names that traders want to bet on, but are still limited to less than 20 in number.

uBinary splits its binary types into 4 categories. Above/below is the standard binary category. For these, you pick your asset, choose an expiry, enter your stake and hit submit. The range of expiries available is 1 hour, 2 hour and end-of-day; there are no longer term options offered.

60 seconds options allow you to bet on whether the price of your chosen asset will be higher or lower at the end of the next 60 seconds; in fact, the other two categories are variations of this, with different timeframes. Looking at the asset range for these, all the currencies that are available for standard binaries are also available for these.

However, there were only two indices offered – DAX 30 and Dow Jones. Even more strangely, gold and oil were offered despite not showing up in the standard binary selection! The helter-skelter distribution of assets and trading categories is confusing and will leave many traders wondering why their favourite asset is only tradable in one category and not another.

Asset Range: 2/5

For payouts, uBinary opts to provide average headline numbers (around 70% at best). However, they also offer a rebate for losing trades. This sounds great, but the rebate does not seem to follow an obvious formula. For example, in the screenshot below, USDJPY has a rebate of $50 on a $1000 trade (so 5%) but EURGBP has a massive $110 rebate. The best combination I could find was EURUSD with a 71% payout on win and 9% rebate on lose. This is equivalent to an all-or-nothing payout of 80%, which is a fair bit better than average spreads online. It should be emphasised however that this was the best spread I could find and the difference from asset to asset is large.

70% is the most common payout for 60 Seconds, 2 Minutes and 5 Minutes options, although you can find payouts up to 75% in liquid underlyings. This places it firmly in the top category of brokers for very short term spreads.

Spreads: 3.5/5

uBinary’s platform is pleasing to the eye. It displays 4 asset graphs (and corresponding payout information) at once, though it is possible to expand each one to take up the entire space available. The platform is lightweight and responsive; it doesn’t suffer from the latency issues that plague so many online binary brokerages. However, it does have a few shortcomings. The most frustrating part of the platform is that you cannot customise the 4 windows to the assets that you want. For example, to trade EURUSD, you don’t pick it from a dropdown list as is typical of most online platforms; you have to scroll through sets of 4 assets using arrow buttons (screenshot below) until you find it. Needless to say, this is extremely inefficient and poor design. Fortunately, the fact that few assets are offered anyway means that you will likely not need to scroll more than twice to find what you need.

The charting facilities are somewhat better than most online brokerages. You can view any chart as a line graph, but also as a candlestick chart when maximised, which is very useful. The available timeframes are also well thought out, with a good range of 1H to 1Y for standard binaries and an extra option of 5M for the 60 Seconds, 2 Minutes and 5 Minutes offerings. It is a shame however that, like with most other brokerages, there are no technical analysis capabilities at all.

Platform: 3/5

The minimum deposit on uBinary is just $100. This is called a standard account and activates a welcome bonus of 30%. There are also two further account levels: Gold and VIP, which are presumably unlocked at certain deposit thresholds. However there is no information about the precise mechanics of being assigned to these levels. In any case, there is not a substantial difference in the benefits between the account types, except for VIP accounts getting a higher 40% bonus. Volume bonuses for heavy users do not seem to be offered.

As a final note, uBinary has a very slick economic calendar that displays major upcoming data realeases and market events, along with an estimate of their importance. It is not entirely comprehensive, being G10 forex centred, but it is well presented and the currency range matches their offerings.

uBinary offers a responsive platform and good spreads, and in doing so clears two of the major stumbling blocks that trip up so many other online brokerages. However, its lack of option types and relatively poor asset coverage, as well as an absence of volume bonuses, mean that it is not the ideal brokerage for experienced multi-asset traders. If you’re a newcomer though, you could do a lot worse than sign up to uBinary.

Screenshots

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