ThinkMarkets Review: Does ThinkTrader Beat the MetaTrader-First ECN Brokers?
ThinkMarkets sells its own ThinkTrader platform alongside a MetaTrader ECN account called ThinkZero. We priced both, tested the charting tools and checked whether ThinkTrader's polish is worth trading away Expert Advisor support for.
Best for: Discretionary traders who want ThinkTrader's charting tools and are not running Expert Advisors
ThinkMarkets splits cleanly in two, and both halves are honest about what they are. Standard and ThinkTrader need no minimum deposit and no commission, trading purely on spread, good for a beginner who wants strong charting without a MetaTrader account. ThinkZero is the real ECN account, needing $500 to open, pricing EUR/USD near 0.11 pips plus $3.50 per side, near 0.9 pips a lot all in. That does not beat Pepperstone or IC Markets' Raw accounts, which post similar or tighter costs. ThinkTrader's charting is genuinely strong, but it drops Expert Advisor support entirely, so an automated trader ends up on ThinkZero's MT4 or MT5 side regardless of how good the app looks.
Price $0 minimum deposit on StandardMaker ThinkMarketsthinkmarkets.com
Most raw-spread brokers ship the same recipe: MetaTrader, a commission account, and a marketing page promising the tightest spread on the block. ThinkMarkets does that too, through its ThinkZero account, but it also builds and maintains its own trading app, ThinkTrader, as a genuinely separate product rather than a rebadged MT4 skin. We opened both account types, charted on ThinkTrader for a week and priced ThinkZero against the raw-spread names traders already compare it with.
Two accounts, two different jobs
ThinkMarkets does not pretend Standard and ThinkTrader are cheap. Both need no minimum deposit and charge no commission, pricing everything into the spread instead, which is a fair trade for a beginner who wants to start small and does not yet care about shaving fractions of a pip. ThinkZero is the account built for anyone who does care: a $500 minimum opens MT4 or MT5 access with EUR/USD spreads averaging around 0.11 pips and a $3.50 per-side commission on top.
Add that up on a standard lot and the total lands close to 0.9 pips once spread and commission are combined, based on the 0.22-pip round-turn spread plus $7 commission that independent testing at CompareForexBrokers measured. That is a competitive number, not a class-leading one. Pepperstone's Razor account and IC Markets' Raw Spread account both post similar or marginally tighter all-in costs, so a trader switching purely to save money should run the comparison on their own typical lot size before assuming ThinkZero wins.
ThinkTrader is a real platform, with a real gap
ThinkTrader's case for existing rests on its charting. More than 125 indicators and 50 drawing tools ship built in, TradingView's charting engine sits inside the app rather than behind a separate login, and the Traders' Gym mode lets a strategy get backtested before it risks real money. For a trader who spends most of a session staring at a chart rather than writing code, that is a genuinely better starting point than the plain MT4 terminal most ECN brokers still hand out by default.
