Rakuten Securities fees explained

It's safe to say that Rakuten Securities's fees are low in general. They either don't charge a brokerage fee for things other brokers do charge for, or they only charge a small amount. This means that you can use Rakuten Securities even in case you trade frequently like multiple times a week or daily.

Here's a high level overview of Rakuten Securities's fees

Online brokerages in general charge much lower brokerage fees than traditional brokerages do - this is largely due to the fact that online brokerages' businesses can be much better scaled: From a purely technical standpoint it doesn't make that much of a difference for them if they have 100 or 5000 clients.

This is not to say however that they don't have any fees at all. They make money by charging you at various events for various rates. Usually you need to keep an eye on these 3 types of fees:

• Trading fees - these are brokerage fees that you pay when you actually do a trade, i.e. buying an Apple stock or an ETF. What you pay is either a commission, a spread or financing rate. Some brokers apply all of these.
  • A commission is either based on the traded volume or it is fixed.
  • A spread is the difference between the buy price and the sell price
  • Financing rate or overnight rate is charged when you hold your leveraged positions for more than one day.
• Non-trading fees. These occur related to some operations you make in your account, i.e. depositing money to your account, withdrawing money from it or not trading for an extended amount of time.

We compare Rakuten Securities fees with its closest competitors, IC Markets and Pepperstone.

Rakuten Securities's trading fees are low which makes it suitable for you even if you trade often (i.e. multiple times a week).

Let's break down the trading fees into the different asset classes available at Rakuten Securities.

Trading fees

Rakuten Securities's trading fees are low.

It is super hard to compare trading fees for forex brokers. What we did at Brokerchooser? Instead of quoting long fee tables, we compare brokers by calculating all fees of a typical trade for two currency pairs.

• EURUSD, a popular currency pair
• EURGBP, another popular currency pair

The typical trade means that you buy for $20,000 using 30:1 leverage, and sell it after a week.

This super catch-all benchmark includes spreads and financing costs for all brokers.

Here is the verdict.

Financing rates

Rakuten Securities financing rates are average.

If you want to trade on margin and prefer to hold your positions long, financing costs can be significant.

When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees Rakuten Securities is an average broker. This means that some of the non-trading fees are high, but the others are low or not charged at all.

Non-trading fees include various brokerage fees and charges at Rakuten Securities that you pay not related to buying and selling assets. Among some others, typical non trading fees are withdrawal fee, deposit fee, inactivity fee and account fee.

Deposit fees are applied when you send money to your trading account from your bank account. Usually brokers don't charge money for that and Rakuten Securities is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods Rakuten Securities offers.

Unfortunately, quite like the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed Rakuten Securities does charge a withdrawal fee of $25 for the bank transfer. This means that you need to pay this amount of money when you transfer your money back to your bank account. It's up to you to decide whether this is a high amount or not as it's dependent mostly on the size of the transferred amount.

Rakuten Securities does not apply an inactivity fee which is great because your account will not be charged even if you do not trade for a longer time period (months or years).