Saxo Review 2026

What Saxo actually is in 2026

Saxo is not a forex broker that added shares later. It is a Danish bank — Saxo Bank A/S, founded in 1992 and headquartered in Copenhagen — that built a retail trading platform on top of a banking licence. That distinction matters, because it explains almost everything about how Saxo prices, who it accepts, and where it is uncompetitive.

The proposition is one account, 71,000+ instruments. Shares from more than 50 markets, ETFs, over 5,500 government and corporate bonds, mutual funds, listed options, futures, CFDs, 185 FX spot pairs plus 140 forwards, FX options, spot metals and crypto ETPs. You can hold Singapore Airlines on SGX, an S&P 500 ETF, a US Treasury and a short EURUSD position in the same login, margined against the same cash.

Two things have changed at the top of the house recently and you should know both. First, ownership. In March 2026 the Swiss private banking group J. Safra Sarasin completed the acquisition of roughly 71% of Saxo Bank from Geely Financials Denmark, Mandatum and other minority shareholders, at a valuation of about EUR 1.6 billion. In July 2026 it agreed to buy founder Kim Fournais’s remaining stake, taking Bank J. Safra Sarasin to 100% ownership of Saxo Holding AG. Fournais stepped back from CEO to Chairman of the Board; Daniel Belfer, previously CEO of Bank J. Safra Sarasin, now runs Saxo Bank. If you last read about Saxo being Chinese-owned, that is out of date.

Second, the platform. The old SaxoTraderGO and SaxoTraderPRO split has been consolidated into a single product called SaxoTrader, running on web, desktop and mobile, sitting alongside the simpler SaxoInvestor app. Reviews still referencing GO and PRO as separate platforms are describing a lineup that no longer exists.

Who Saxo is for — and who should walk away

Let me be blunt about this before we get into numbers, because the fee structure only makes sense once you know which trader you are.

Saxo works well for

• The Singapore or Malaysia-based trader who wants one MAS-regulated account for both an investment portfolio and a leveraged FX or index book.
• Anyone with SGD 300,000 or more to fund. Platinum pricing changes the arithmetic materially, and VIP changes it again.
• Position and swing traders in equities, bonds and futures who trade in size but not in volume — a handful of large, considered tickets a month.
• Traders who want a serious platform with depth-of-market, algo order types and API access, and who will actually use TradingView, MultiCharts or OpenAPI.
• People who care that their broker is a rated bank rather than a licensed intermediary with a marketing budget.

Saxo is wrong for

• Scalpers and high-frequency FX traders. Saxo prices FX as spread-only with no commission, which sounds attractive until you compare it against a raw-spread-plus-commission account. Advertised EURUSD is from 0.7 pips at Classic; independent measurement by ForexBrokers.com puts the realistic Classic average nearer 1.0 pip. That is a mid-tier all-in cost, not a tight one.
• MT4 and MT5 users. Saxo offers neither. There is no expert advisor ecosystem, no copy trading, no signal marketplace. If your edge is coded in MQL, this is a dead end.
• Small accounts trading US shares frequently. The 0.25% currency conversion charge and the USD 1 minimum commission are a heavier percentage burden on a USD 500 order than most people expect.
• Traders in Indonesia, the Philippines or Vietnam. Saxo’s own list of serviced countries covers Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong. Indonesia and the Philippines are not accepted.
• Australians. Saxo sold out of Australia. More on that below.
• Anyone hunting high leverage. Saxo has no offshore entity. Every arm is a tier-one regulated one, with the leverage caps that implies.

Regulation and which entity you actually contract with

This is where most Saxo reviews go wrong, so read this section twice. Saxo is a group of separately licensed entities, and the one you sign with is determined by your country of residence. Leverage, product range, protections and some fees differ between them.

Singapore. You contract with Saxo Capital Markets Pte Ltd (UEN 200601141M), at 88 Market Street, CapitaSpring #31-01. MAS’s Financial Institutions Directory lists it as a Capital Markets Services Licensee and an Exempt Financial Adviser. Its licensed activities cover dealing in securities, collective investment schemes, exchange-traded derivatives, OTC derivatives and spot foreign exchange for leveraged trading, plus product financing and providing custodial services. It has been MAS-licensed since 2006 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saxo Bank A/S.

Denmark. Saxo Bank A/S holds a full Danish bank licence and is supervised by the Danish FSA. It is the group parent and the entity S&P rates.

Hong Kong. Saxo Capital Markets HK Limited is SFC-licensed for Types 1, 2, 3, 4 and 9. It also carries a live disciplinary record — see the safety section.

Australia — read carefully. Saxo no longer operates in Australia. It sold 80.1% of Saxo Capital Markets (Australia) to the South African technology provider DMA in February 2025, retaining a 19.9% holding, and the business was renamed Totality on 11 August 2025. Saxo’s Australian website now redirects to totality.com.au. Australian residents cannot open a Saxo-branded account, and any review telling you otherwise is running on 2024 information.

The practical takeaway for a Southeast Asian trader: the numbers in this review are the Singapore entity’s numbers. If you open in Malaysia, Thailand or Hong Kong, check the pricing schedule for the entity that actually onboards you, because it will not be identical.

Safety of funds: what you are and are not protected by

Saxo Capital Markets Pte Ltd is required to segregate client money from its own. Funds are deposited into trust accounts with HSBC Singapore no later than the business day after receipt, under sections 16, 17, 26 and 27 of the Securities and Futures (Licensing and Conduct of Business) Regulations, and Saxo files a quarterly Statement of Assets and Liabilities to MAS certifying compliance. Client securities are held in segregated custody accounts and, in Saxo’s own words, are excluded from the assets available to Saxo Markets’ creditors.

Now the part the marketing pages do not lead with. The Danish Guarantee Fund’s EUR 100,000 cover does not apply to you as a Singapore client. That scheme protects clients of Saxo Bank A/S in Denmark. Singapore has no equivalent statutory investor compensation scheme for brokerage clients. If the Singapore entity failed, your recovery route is the segregation regime and the insolvency process — not a guaranteed payout.

That is not a reason to avoid Saxo. It is a reason to understand that the comfort here comes from the balance sheet and the segregation, not from insurance. On the balance sheet: S&P Global Ratings upgraded Saxo Bank A/S to A- in April 2024 and affirmed that rating with a stable outlook on 4 March 2026. For a retail-facing broker, an A- from S&P is unusual and it is the single strongest thing in Saxo’s safety case.

One blemish worth knowing. On 6 January 2026 the SFC reprimanded and fined Saxo Capital Markets HK Limited HK$4 million for distributing virtual-asset funds not authorised by the SFC and VA-related products without meeting applicable requirements, across 1,446 transactions in 32 products for 136 clients between November 2018 and November 2022. The SFC found the firm had no dedicated product due diligence procedures for virtual assets, relied on inadequate group-wide protocols, and failed to run VA knowledge assessments or issue VA warning statements. It is a Hong Kong entity matter and it concerns conduct that ended in 2022, but it is a control failure at a group that markets itself on institutional rigour, and it belongs in an honest review.

Account tiers: Classic, Platinum, VIP — and Elite

Saxo has no minimum deposit. What money buys you is pricing, through three tiers.

• Classic — no minimum funding. This is where most retail traders sit, and it is the most expensive tier on every line item.
• Platinum — SGD 300,000 at the Singapore entity (USD 200,000 or EUR 200,000 equivalents at other entities).
• VIP — SGD 1,500,000 at the Singapore entity (USD 1,000,000 elsewhere).

Tiers are driven by Saxo Rewards points. In the first 30 days from initial funding you earn points on the net value of cash deposits and securities transfers, and those points can qualify you for a higher tier directly — deposit SGD 1,500,000 and you earn 500,000 points and hit VIP immediately. Upgrades take effect two working days after the balance reaches the qualifying level. Falling below a threshold later does not close your account, but pricing can revert.

Separately there is Saxo Elite, which is a service tier rather than a pricing tier. It carries no fee and can sit on top of Classic, Platinum or VIP: a dedicated relationship manager, direct trading desk access, strategist contact and client events. Saxo suggests requesting an introduction if you plan to invest SGD 10 million or more, or trade SGD 300 million or more a year. For the overwhelming majority of AFM readers this is decoration, not a factor.

My honest read: the Classic-to-Platinum jump is the one that matters. Going from 0.08% to 0.05% on share commission, from ±3% to ±2.5% CFD financing, and from no cash interest to cash interest is a real change in your cost base. VIP shaves further but the SGD 1.5 million threshold puts it out of scope for most.

Fees and the real cost of trading

Saxo’s headline pricing is clean and, for once, the marketing does not hide much. Shares and ETFs are charged at 0.08% at Classic, 0.05% at Platinum and 0.03% at VIP, with a per-market minimum. On the Singapore entity’s own pages those minimums are USD 1 on US stocks, SGD 3 on SGX, HKD 15 on Hong Kong, GBP 3 on the UK, JPY 800 on Japan and EUR 2 on European markets. There is no platform fee and no inactivity fee.

The costs that actually decide your annual bill are the ones underneath.

Currency conversion — 0.25%

Saxo charges no more than ±0.25% to convert between currencies. That is competitive against a Singapore bank, and it was a genuine improvement when Saxo cut it from 0.75%. But it is charged every time you cross a currency boundary, and for a SGD-funded account buying US shares it is three times the commission on a mid-sized trade. This is the number to plan around, not the 0.08%.

Custody — 0.12% p.a., or zero

Saxo charges an annual custody fee on shares, ETFs, ETCs and bonds: 0.12% for Classic and Platinum, 0.06% for VIP, calculated daily on closing values and billed monthly. It drops to 0% if you opt into securities lending, under which Saxo may lend your securities out and pays you a monthly share of the revenue. Separately, Singapore residents and Singapore-incorporated entities pay no custody fee on SGX shares and ETFs regardless.

Opting into securities lending is not free of consequence — lent securities carry counterparty exposure and can affect voting rights — but for most retail portfolios it is the sensible default, and Saxo makes it a one-click choice.

The odd charges

A USD 50 service fee applies to Classic clients who ask for reports to be emailed rather than pulled from the platform. Requesting that Saxo add a new instrument to its universe costs USD 200 for Classic and Platinum, and nothing for VIP. Neither will affect most traders, but they tell you something about how the pricing is designed: Saxo charges for anything that touches a human.

Note also that Singapore residents pay the prevailing Singapore GST on equities, bonds, futures and options commissions. It is small in absolute terms but it is real, and it is not in the advertised rate.

The real cost of US equities from a Singapore account

This is the calculation AFM readers ask about most, so here it is properly, on a Classic account funded in SGD.

Buying USD 10,000 of a US-listed share:

• Commission at 0.08% = USD 8 (well above the USD 1 minimum)
• SGD-to-USD conversion at up to 0.25% = USD 25
• Singapore GST on the commission = under USD 1
• Custody for a year, if you have opted out of securities lending, at 0.12% = USD 12; if you have opted in, USD 0

Total to get in: roughly USD 33, of which the conversion is three-quarters. Sell and convert back and you pay another USD 8 commission plus another USD 25 conversion. The commission Saxo advertises is the smallest number in the sequence.

The fix is straightforward and it is the single most useful thing in this review: hold a USD sub-account, convert once, and trade US shares out of USD cash. Saxo lets you run multiple account currencies. Do that and your round-trip cost on the trade above falls from about USD 66 to about USD 16 — a 76% saving from an administrative decision, not a trading one.

The small-trade problem. On a USD 1,000 order, the USD 1 minimum commission works out at 0.10% and the conversion adds USD 2.50. Call it 0.35% to get in. Do that twenty times a year with fresh SGD each time and you are handing over meaningful money for very little.

The large-trade problem. Saxo’s commission is a straight percentage with no cap. A USD 200,000 US share order costs USD 160 at Classic, USD 100 at Platinum and USD 60 at VIP. If you routinely trade six-figure tickets from a Classic account, you are paying flat-fee-broker money several times over, and the case for funding to Platinum becomes financial rather than aspirational.

FX and CFD costs

Saxo charges no commission on FX spot. You pay the spread, and the spread is where Saxo sits mid-pack rather than cheap. The Singapore site advertises EURUSD from 0.7 pips at Classic, 0.6 at Platinum and 0.5 at VIP, with a group-wide headline of ‘as low as 0.4 pips’. Independent measurement by ForexBrokers.com puts the realistic Classic average closer to 1.0 pip, 0.9 at Platinum and 0.8 at VIP. Treat the advertised figures as best-case minimums during liquid hours, not as what you will average.

The cost most FX traders miss at Saxo is the Tom/Next swap mark-up: ±0.60% at Classic, ±0.50% at Platinum, ±0.45% at VIP, applied to the rollover on positions held overnight. If you hold FX positions for days or weeks, that mark-up compounds and can easily exceed everything you paid in spread. Intraday traders will never see it; swing traders will feel it.

On CFDs, the equivalent drag is financing. Saxo applies a mark-up to the benchmark rate of ±3% at Classic, ±2.5% at Platinum and ±2% at VIP. On a leveraged index position held for a month, that is the dominant cost, not the commission. US stock CFDs start at USD 3 per trade. Index CFD initial margin runs at 5% on major indices, commodity CFDs at 20%, and single-stock CFDs from 10% up to 110% depending on Saxo’s internal rating of the stock.

FX and CFD margin at Saxo is tiered — the average margin requirement rises as your exposure in a pair grows. That is sensible risk management and it is also a trap if you size a position on the headline margin figure and find the blended requirement climbing as you add. Check the pre-trade ticket, which shows the real number for your account.

Platforms and tools

Saxo now runs two platforms rather than three.

SaxoTrader is the full product, on web, desktop and mobile. Everything is in it: FX, CFDs, futures, listed options, commodities, margin trading. Market, limit, stop, trailing stop and algorithmic orders; depth of market; multi-venue liquidity routing; proper screeners and charting. It is a platform designed for someone who trades for a living and it carries the learning curve that implies — a beginner opening SaxoTrader for the first time will find it dense. That is a fair trade, not a flaw, but be honest with yourself about which side of it you are on.

SaxoInvestor is the stripped-back web and mobile app for buy-and-hold investors: portfolio view, research content, recurring ETF investments. If your Saxo account exists to hold a long-term portfolio, use this and ignore SaxoTrader entirely.

Third-party connectivity is a genuine strength. TradingView integration means you can chart and execute in the environment most retail traders already live in. MultiCharts is supported for systematic traders. OpenAPI and FIX API are available for anyone building their own execution, along with an Excel plugin. Level 2 market data requires a subscription; the platforms themselves are free.

What is absent: MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and any form of copy trading or EA marketplace. Saxo has never offered MetaTrader and shows no sign of starting. If that is a dealbreaker, it is a dealbreaker — no amount of platform quality substitutes for a strategy you cannot run.

Markets and instruments

Breadth is Saxo’s strongest single argument. The Singapore entity gives access to 71,000+ instruments, and unlike some brokers quoting large numbers, the depth is real across asset classes rather than concentrated in CFDs.

• Shares from New York, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Singapore and more than 50 other markets.
• ETFs across global sectors and geographies.
• Bonds — more than 5,500 government and corporate issues, with US government bonds from USD 5 commission. This is genuinely rare in retail broking and it is a real reason for a Southeast Asian investor to consider Saxo over a share-only platform.
• Mutual funds at zero commission, zero custody and zero platform fee.
• Listed options from USD 0.75 per lot and futures from USD 1 per lot on equity indices, energy, metals and rates. Commodities from USD 1.25 per lot.
• FX — 185 spot pairs and 140 forwards across majors, minors and exotics, plus spot metals. FX vanilla options from 3 pips.
• CFDs on shares, ETFs, indices, commodities, options and bonds.
• Crypto ETPs and crypto FX — exposure via exchange-traded products and CFD-style instruments, not spot coin custody.

The thing to appreciate is not the instrument count but the cross-margining. One cash balance supports a bond portfolio, a futures position and an FX hedge simultaneously. For a trader running a multi-asset book from Singapore, that operational simplicity is worth more than a few basis points of commission.

Funding, withdrawals and currency handling

For Singapore clients this is one of Saxo’s easiest wins. PayNow and FAST fund the account free of charge and typically clear the same business day. Local SGD bank transfers are similarly quick. Card payments are supported, with the fee displayed before you commit and deducted from the amount transferred.

Saxo does not charge for online deposits or for withdrawals submitted through the platform’s cash withdrawal module. What you can still be charged is the correspondent and beneficiary bank fees on international transfers — Saxo covers only the outgoing charges from its own side, and anything an intermediary bank deducts en route comes out of what lands in your account. For SGD transfers within Singapore this is a non-issue; for cross-border USD it is not, and it is worth budgeting for.

Withdrawals submitted on the manual paper form rather than through the online module attract a processing fee, so use the platform.

The important habit, as covered above, is currency discipline. Open sub-accounts in the currencies you actually trade, convert deliberately in larger blocks rather than incidentally on every trade, and you neutralise the biggest recurring cost in the whole schedule.

Cash interest. Platinum and VIP clients earn interest on balances above SGD 5,000 or equivalent, with the best rate applying above SGD 100,000, no cap and no lock-up, in whichever currency the account is held. The Singapore site’s headline figure is up to 2.88% at the VIP tier — rates track the market and are updated daily, so treat that as indicative rather than fixed. Classic clients earn nothing. If you routinely park a large idle balance, that alone is an argument for the Platinum threshold.

Customer support and account opening

Saxo Singapore runs support from its CapitaSpring office: +65 6303 7788 for account opening enquiries and +65 6303 7888 for everything else, plus in-platform live chat reached through the help icon in SaxoTrader or SaxoInvestor. There is a reasonably deep Singapore-specific help centre.

This is bank-style service, not broker-style service. That cuts both ways. You get people who understand bonds, options assignment and corporate actions — which is not true everywhere. You do not get a 24/7 chat window, and support does not run at weekends. Published operating hours are not stated on the contact page itself, so if round-the-clock coverage matters to how you trade, ask before you fund.

Account opening is a full KYC process. Expect to supply identity documents, proof of address and financial background, and expect it to take days rather than minutes. Experiences reported publicly vary widely — some clients are approved within two business days, others describe extended document requests. It is a bank onboarding a client, and it behaves like one. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.

The verdict

Saxo earns its place as a premium multi-asset account for Southeast Asian traders, and it earns it on substance: a MAS Capital Markets Services Licence held since 2006, client money in segregated HSBC trust accounts, an A- rated Danish bank parent now wholly owned by J. Safra Sarasin, 71,000+ instruments in one login, and a platform that a professional would not be embarrassed to use.

What it does not have is cheap. Saxo’s pricing is percentage-based and uncapped at the Classic tier, its FX spreads are mid-pack rather than tight, its overnight mark-ups are meaningful, and the 0.25% currency conversion will quietly cost a SGD-funded US share investor more than every commission combined unless they set the account up properly. Nor does it have MetaTrader, EAs, copy trading, a compensation scheme for Singapore clients, or any presence at all in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam or — since the Totality sale — Australia.

So the decision is genuinely simple. If you are building a multi-asset portfolio and a trading book side by side from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand or Hong Kong, and you have enough capital that the platform’s breadth matters more than a fraction of a pip, Saxo is one of the few accounts that does the whole job properly. Open USD and SGD sub-accounts on day one, opt into securities lending to kill the custody fee, and convert currency in blocks rather than per trade — do those three things and you remove most of what makes Saxo expensive.

If you are a scalper, an EA trader, or someone funding SGD 5,000 to trade US shares weekly, this is the wrong account and no amount of bank pedigree changes that. Be the trader Saxo is built for, or go elsewhere.

Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of loss. Fees, spreads and regulatory terms change — verify every figure against Saxo’s current Singapore pricing pages before you fund.