iHoptions Review
| Broker | iHoptions |
|---|---|
| US Traders Accepted | |
| Company Name | iHoptions |
| Headquarters | Nicosia, Cyprus |
| Regulation | No |
| Bonus Type | Match bonus |
| Bonus Size | $5,000 |
| Max Payout | 500% |
| Out-of-Money Reward | 10% |
| Trading Platform | SpotOption |
| Deposit Options | Credit card, wirу transfer, CashU, Skrill |
| Deposit Currencies | USD, GBP, EUR |
| Minimum Deposit | $200 |
| Minimum Trade | $10 |
| Maximum Trade | $2,000 |
| Online Since | 2011 |
| Trading Instruments | Forex, commodities, stocks, indices |
| Number of Trading Instruments | 50 |
| Binary Option Types | Option Builder, One Touch, High/Low, 60 Seconds |
| Customer Support Types | Email, live chat, phone (not toll free) |
| Education Offered | Glossary |
| Tools Offered | Weekly and daily market review |
| Commission | $25 fee for wire withdrawal |
| Languages | English, French, Arabic, Turkish |
| Demo Account | No |
iHoptions is a Cyprus-based broker owned by ChargeXP Investments Ltd., a company that owns a number of other binary options brokers. Services are available to US customers, which sets them apart from many other brokers, though the company seems to have a strong focus on the Middle East customer base. The company is not currently regulated, and information on their website is a little bit sparse in areas. They use the popular SpotOption trading platform, which should make the actual trading process intuitive to many customers who may already be familiar with the platform and how to use it. Unfortunately their customer service seems nonexistent.
Getting Started with iHoptions
To get started, you simply need to take a couple of minutes to register a free account. You will not be able to trade until you deposit funds in your account via credit card, wire transfer, or CashU. It isn’t clear from the website how much you need to deposit (we are currently awaiting a reply from customer service about the amount). There is no demo account available for iHoptions, but since SpotOption is such a common platform, you can probably find another binary options broker who does offer demo accounts and uses them. That might be a good way to get your feet wet before you trade with real money, whether on iHoptions or another site. As of right now there also does not seem to be any way for you to trade on your mobile device.
There are more than 50 different assets you can trade including indices, commodities, currencies, and stocks. One good thing about iHoptions is that you are given a number of different ways you can trade. Along with the standard High/Low, you also can try out One Touch, Option Builder, or 60 Seconds. Option Builder is a great type of binary option that allows you to choose your own expiry time. The charts included with the SpotOption platform are better than those we’ve seen on many sites which don’t use SpotOption. You still will need more sophisticated charting software to effectively plan trades using technical analysis. So this isn’t as important as that the system is easy to understand, which it is. You can see at a glance how to use the interface.
There are significant match bonuses (as well as referral bonuses) available when you join the site. You can get a match bonus of up to 80% when you deposit 5,000 USD, GBP, or EUR. That’s a huge bonus, one of the largest we’ve ever seen. Note that the bonuses you can receive from iHoptions are the type that are leverage-based; they aren’t cash bonuses you can withdraw at any time. You need to turnover 20 times the amount of the bonus in order to claim it (with a lot of brokers it’s 30 times the amount). So use your own discretion if you decide to accept a bonus when you deposit. You can receive an additional 5% if you deposit within 24 hours.
In terms of payouts, you can get up to 85% for a successful trade and 10% back on a losing trade (that’s a maximum; you might get nothing back). On specific high-yield trades, you can get up to 500%, which is pretty outstanding. It’s one of the higher payouts we’ve seen to date. So this may be enticing to customers who are interested in trying to win huge payouts for the investments on high risk trades.
Customer Service and Trading Resources
Trading resources at iHoptions are currently a bit sparse. There is a daily and weekly market review section that can help you stay up to date on events that could drive trading decisions based off of fundamental analysis. This is a good feature, but other than that, all we discovered was a glossary and some standard how-to pages that don’t really go in-depth. That doesn’t mean that’s the full extent of the resources available, but that was all we found without getting in touch with customer service.
We did try talking to customer service via live chat on a weekday at a pretty normal time and no one was there staffing the desk, despite the company’s statement that customer service is 24/7 (this must refer to the phone-based service). You can also use the contact form on the website to send through an email with your questions. This doesn’t actually seem to work. Our questions submitted one month ago were never answered.
Conclusion
iHoptions is one of many websites operated by ChargeXP. So far we have reviewed one other site that ChargeXP owns, which is WinOptions. That site, like this one, seemed to offer a lot of flexibility where trading was concerned. We do wish there was more information available on this site however; there are certain questions that remain unanswered. If you look under the FAQ for the maximum investment amount, you get an answer to an unrelated question. We’ve sent off an email to try to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
For the moment there isn’t much we can say definitively about customer service, except that live chat was offline during standard business hours. At WinOptions, we found a live chat desk staffed by a robot and not a human being; we found this a bit duplicitous considering that the bot pretended to be a live person. It’s difficult to be comfortable with a company which is saying one thing and doing another. While this is not the same website, it seems likely that the customer service team responsible is the same group of people, and that traders can expect similar service at both sites as a result. Being as iHoptions hasn’t responded to our month-old email inquiry, we can say pretty definitively that their customer service is useless.
We definitely recommend you actually talk to customer service in person before you consider investing your money with them, but good luck with that. You can’t reach them via chat or email, so that leaves the phone. So far we’ve found other brokers we’d much sooner recommend checking into, like ZoneOptions or TradeRush. As always, do your own research and draw your own conclusions. Check out the rest of our reviews to get some more ideas of brokers to look into.