GO Markets review: does GO Plus+ beat rival raw-spread accounts on cost?

GO Markets is not shy about its age. Its homepage leads with "20 Years Strong" rather than a spread number, a confidence that only makes sense if the broker plans to compare itself against names that have not lasted as long.

That history is genuine: GO Markets has held Australian Financial Services Licence 254963 since 2006, and that licence has stayed continuously in force through two decades in which plenty of competing brokers have rebranded, relocated, or quietly moved clients to a fresh offshore entity.

01Two decades of the same licence

Longevity matters more in this industry than it sounds. A broker that holds one licence for 20 years has survived multiple rounds of regulatory tightening, market volatility events, and the kind of scrutiny that tends to push weaker firms into a jurisdiction with softer rules. GO Markets has not needed to do that, and the current licence disclosure still points to the same AFSL number the broker opened with, a detail worth more to a cautious trader than another half pip of spread. It also means the client agreements, dispute processes and negative balance protections a trader relies on have had two decades to be tested by real complaints rather than written once and left unchallenged.

02Pricing that competes rather than undercuts

GO Plus+ is where GO Markets puts its raw-spread claim to the test. The account prices EUR/USD around 0.38 pips and charges a $5 round turn commission per standard lot, working out to roughly $8.80 all-in on a full lot.

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That number sits close to, rather than clearly under, what the more established raw-spread brokers in this category typically charge on the same pair. GO Plus+ is a fair price for the regulatory pedigree behind it, but a trader switching purely to save money should not expect a dramatic drop from an already competitive ECN account elsewhere. Gold and index spreads track close to the same pattern, tight enough to be usable for active trading without becoming the story a marketing page would want to tell.

03The account that skips the commission

Traders who want to avoid a per-lot commission can use the Standard account instead, which averages around 0.9 pips on EUR/USD with nothing added on top. That is a workable number for lower-frequency trading, though it does not stand out against other no-commission accounts in the same market, several of which have pushed their spread-only pricing tighter in recent years.

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Neither account carries a hard minimum deposit, though GO Markets recommends AU$200 to start with enough margin to trade normally, a figure low enough to open an account without committing serious capital first. Card and e-wallet deposits typically land instantly, and GO Markets charges no internal fee on withdrawals either, so the cost of moving money in or out stays separate from the cost of actually placing trades.

04One broker, two different toolkits

Where GO Markets does distinguish itself is platform choice, and only for some clients. Australian traders can run MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView execution or GO Markets' own GO TradeX platform, along with Myfxbook social trading and cTrader copy trading tools.

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Clients onboarded through the European CySEC entity, or through the Mauritius offshore entity, get MT4 and MT5 only, with no access to cTrader, TradingView or the copy trading tools available to Australian accounts. A trader outside Australia comparing GO Markets to a rival broker should check which entity they will actually be signing with, since the platform and tool set genuinely differ by region rather than being a formality. That split is common across brokers that hold both a tier one and a European licence, but it is easy to miss when a marketing page lists every platform and tool GO Markets offers without noting which entity actually grants access to each one.

05Our verdict

GO Markets earns its reputation the harder way: not by beating every rival on price, but by holding the same ASIC licence for 20 years while offering a GO Plus+ account priced fairly enough to sit among the raw-spread names it gets compared to. It is not the cheapest option on the market, and non-Australian clients trade with a noticeably smaller toolkit than the marketing homepage implies. For a trader who weighs regulatory continuity as heavily as the spread sheet, that trade-off is a reasonable one to make.

This review describes what we saw on our own accounts. It is not personal financial advice.