Gold at IC Markets, Priced from Manila

What one lot of gold is, and in whose currency

Conditions above are IC Markets' own published figures, read on 2 September 2026. Spread, commission and margin move with the market and with the account type - the terminal, not this page, is the authority on the number you will actually be charged.

Four things a Manila-based gold trader settles first

• One lot is 100 ounces of gold, traded as a CFD on spot XAU/USD - long or short, with no metal ever delivered and no storage to arrange.
• The quote, the commission and the overnight holding fee are all denominated in US dollars; the peso appears nowhere in the instrument and nowhere in the account.
• Margin is charged per tier, so the headline 1:5000 applies only to the first slice of a large position and the real requirement is always higher than the headline implies.
• Gold is the most expensive instrument to carry overnight on the published Swap Free fee table - more than five times what the same table charges on EUR/USD.

USD 62 a night: the number most gold pages leave out

On a Swap Free account IC Markets does not charge a swap. It charges a flat holding fee, published per symbol, for every night a position stays open - and the fee is not proportional to anything a trader would guess from the instrument. Gold (XAUUSD) is listed at USD 62 for each lot held overnight. The same published table lists BTCUSD at USD 41.85, GBPCHF at USD 26, US30 at USD 25, GBPJPY at USD 16, EURCHF at USD 15, EURUSD at USD 11, and both silver (XAGUSD) and AUDCAD at USD 9.

Put those side by side and gold costs about 5.6 times what EUR/USD costs to carry, and roughly 6.9 times what silver costs, on the same account and the same fee schedule. One lot carried from a Monday evening to a Friday morning crosses four nights: 4 x USD 62 = USD 248, charged whether the position is in profit or in loss. A swing trade in gold that is right about direction can still be wrong about carry.

Two further facts belong next to that number. The broker's own pages call the product Swap Free and nothing else - no board is named for it and no certification is claimed - and IC Markets reserves the right to withdraw Swap Free status from an account without being obliged to provide any explanation or justification. Swap Free is a different cost structure, not a discount.

Whose clock decides when a night begins

The overnight fee is triggered by a rollover, and the rollover belongs to the server, not to the trader. IC Markets prices MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 from the Equinix NY4 data centre in New York, and cTrader from servers in London. Manila sits at UTC+8 all year and never shifts for daylight saving, so the gap is asymmetric in one direction only: 13 hours ahead of New York in the EST months and 12 hours ahead in the EDT months, 8 hours ahead of London in winter and 7 hours ahead in summer.

The practical reading for someone trading gold from Manila is that closing a position at the end of a Philippine evening is not the same act as closing it before the broker's day ends, and the terminal's own server clock is the only one that settles the question. The same asymmetry governs the Higher Margin Requirement windows, in which available leverage is temporarily cut: daily, from 30 minutes before market close until 15 minutes after the open; over a weekend, from one hour before the Friday close until 30 minutes after the Monday open; and around a high-impact release, from 15 minutes before it until one minute after. Gold reacts hardest to United States data, and United States data lands in the Philippine late evening and small hours.

Margin on 100 ounces, tier by tier

IC Markets publishes leverage of up to 1:5000 on MetaTrader and up to 1:1000 on cTrader, and both are ceilings rather than flat rates. In the broker's own published USDCHF example, the first 0-25 lots of a position are margined at 1:5000, the next 25-50 lots at 1:3000, and everything above 50 lots at 1:1000, with each slice margined at its own tier.

Run that over gold. Take an illustrative USD 4,000 an ounce - substitute the live quote, the arithmetic is the point - so one lot of 100 ounces carries USD 400,000 of notional value. A single lot inside the first tier locks USD 80 of margin. Forty lots do not: the first 25 lots (USD 10,000,000 of notional) lock USD 2,000 at 1:5000, and the next 15 lots (USD 6,000,000) lock another USD 2,000 at 1:3000, for USD 4,000 in total against the USD 3,200 that a flat 1:5000 would suggest - a quarter more, before any Higher Margin Requirement window is applied. The same forty lots on cTrader, capped at 1:1000 throughout, require USD 16,000.

Stop out is 50% on every account type, and it is measured against equity rather than against the number of lots. On a position this size the tier arithmetic is not a detail; it is the difference between a margin call that arrives and one that does not.

The peso leg that no gold quote shows

An IC Markets account is held in one of exactly ten base currencies - USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD or CAD - and the Philippine peso is not among them. Nor is it among the currencies the published funding rails settle in: the card rail lists AUD, USD, JPY, EUR, NZD, SGD, GBP and CAD, and the bank wire rail adds CHF. IC Markets publishes country-specific deposit routes for exactly two markets, Thailand and Vietnam; there is no Philippine equivalent on its funding page, so a trader in Manila uses the general international methods - bank cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, UnionPay, a bank wire or FasaPay.

That means the money crosses a currency boundary twice over the life of the position: pesos into the base currency on the way in, base currency back into pesos on the way out. IC Markets states that it charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own, and it does not perform either conversion - the card issuer or the bank does, at its own rate, and third-party bank or intermediary charges are outside the broker's control. If your bank's all-in margin on a crossing is r per cent, the round trip costs roughly 2r per cent of the capital before a single ounce is traded. Put your own bank's number in: on a PHP 250,000 deposit at an illustrative 1.5 per cent per crossing, that is about PHP 3,750 on the way in and about PHP 3,750 on the way back.

None of this is a criticism of the gold instrument, and none of it appears in a spread comparison. It is simply the part of the cost of trading gold from the Philippines that is settled outside the terminal, in a currency the terminal never quotes.

Where the account itself sits

The gold position is opened with Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company registered under number 8419879-1 and holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. On the broker's own registration feed, checked on 2 September 2026, the Philippines shows as an open market routed by default to that entity. The Securities and Exchange Commission of the Philippines has issued IC Markets no secondary licence, and SEC Philippines separately publishes advisories about unregistered offshore forex and CFD platforms - a list worth checking at the source rather than second hand. This page is produced by an independent, affiliate-supported site covering IC Markets for readers in the Philippines; it is not IC Markets' own page, and CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.

Related IC Markets pages