TopOption Review

Deposit: $100
Payout: 85%
Max Bonus: 50%
Over 180 Underlying Assets
Up to 85% Payouts
EU Registered
Trade on iPhone & Android

TopOption provides a huge range of tradable assets in stocks, indices, currencies and commodities. It has a plethora of option types including standard binaries, 60 seconds, pairs trading and full customisability with ‘Option Builder’. Whether you’re new to trading or a professional, TopOption is suitable for you.

TopOption is a Cyprus-based binary options broker that claims to be an innovator in offering a wide range of products and trading tools for options trading. It is authorized to operate in most of the major EU markets, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

It is immediately noticeable on visiting the website that it is clean and well-built, unlike many other brokers’ websites. Of course, website aesthetics should not be a primary criterion for deciding which broker to use; nevertheless, it is nice to navigate a well-designed site for a change.

TopOption offers a plethora of option types, including Stock Pair, 60 Seconds, OneTouch and Binary Builder – I will discuss these in detail shortly. This is a comprehensive selection of option types and provides traders with great customisability in their trading.

Asset Range

Let’s take a look at their tradable assets first. Over 180 underlyings are available, grouped into Stocks, Currencies, Commodities and Indices. The selection of single stocks is wide-ranging, and includes some interesting choices which are rarely offered elsewhere, such as LinkedIn and NetFlix. Commodities include Gold, Silver, Oil but also soft commodities such as Sugar, Wheat and Coffee. Indices are well represented and although there are some minor omissions (Topix in Japan, for example) there are also some pretty exotic ones included (Tadwul – the major Saudi Arabian index). Special mention also has to go to the fact that VIX futures are available as an index, which I not seen anywhere else online. The star of the show however are currencies: seemingly every major G10 currency and cross is provided, along with the major EM currencies. You can even bet on Bitcoin/USD! The selection is comprehensive enough to account for the trading desires of >99% of traders, in my estimation.

What about the types mentioned above?

The vanilla binary options they provide cover the entire range of timeframes a trader could need, from next half-hour to end of month to 9 months.

Stock pairs allows you to bet on the outperformance of one asset versus another, such as AAPL vs NASDAQ, rather than simply on the direction of one asset itself. There are not a huge selection of pairs available, and they are confined to stocks (the exception being gold vs silver). The choice of timeframes is also smaller, only going up to end-of-day.

OneTouch is disappointing – on clicking the tab, I was shown a message saying there were no options available to trade. This was at 1700GMT when the US markets were still in full swing – if there are no choices available at this hour, it seems unlikely that there are multitudes at other hours.

60 Seconds, as the name suggests, is a binary that expires in 60 seconds. There are slightly fewer choices for underlying available than for standard binaries, but still a respectable selection in comparison to 60 seconds offerings elsewhere. In particular, you can trade 60 second options on some pairs like AAPL vs NASDAQ!

Option builder initially excited me greatly. It seems to offer the capability to set your own customised expiry time to within 5 minutes, and then choose the payout % you want. The potential here is enormous. However, try as I might, I could not find a combination of assets and expiry times that TopOption would let me trade. It would be great if there was some indication of what combinations are possible, because even very standard tries like S&P500 expiring at 20:00 failed.

A quick mention of some extra features that are offered with trade management. ‘Roll Over’ lets you extend the expiry of the option for an increase in investment. ‘Double-Up’ lets you double your investment mid-trade. ‘Sell Option’ allows you to sell back an option up to 1 hour before expiry, which means that you are not tied in to holding options for their entire period.

Overall, I can’t fault the standard binary and 60 second offerings. If 1-touches and option builder worked, I would have rated the asset range at 5/5.

Asset range: 4/5

Spreads

Platform

The minimum deposit on TopOption is just $100. This is called a starter account and activates a welcome bonus of up to $250. There is also a ‘Pro’ account, activated with a deposit of $100 and with a welcome bonus of $500, and ‘VIP’ at $5000 with $2500 bonus. Apart from the bonuses, the VIP account provides off trading hours assistance which is crucial for serious traders. There is little else of substance to separate the account types – unless you really want free 1-on-1 training (VIP accounts get unlimited hours of this). There do not seem to be any volume bonuses available.

As a final point, TopOption has a fantastic economic calendar that displays the major upcoming and recently passed data releases and an estimate of their impact potential on the market. This can be very helpful for traders, although it has to be said that the same calendar is viewable on other websites.

Apart from a few niggles with platform latency, and the disappointing lack of 1-touch and Option builder options, TopOption is a great options broker, with fantastic spreads and a broad range of tradable assets and option types. Coupled with their well-regulated status, they are an easy recommendation for both newcomers and experienced traders.