Gold Trading with IC Markets in India: Margin, Holding Fees and the Rupee Step
Spot XAU/USD as a CFD, with the two figures most gold pages leave out — what tiered margin actually locks up, and what a single night of holding costs on a Swap Free account.
Open IC Markets Account →Gold at IC Markets is a CFD on spot XAU/USD: one lot is 100 ounces of exposure, long or short, with no metal delivered and nothing settled in rupees. Three numbers decide what a position really costs — the margin the tier schedule locks, the USD 62 per lot per night holding fee that a Swap Free account pays instead of a swap, and the currency conversion an Indian deposit has to pass through before any of it applies. This page works all three, in that order, using the broker's own published figures checked on 2 September 2026. It is an independent guide, not the broker's own gold page, and CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
Trading gold (XAU/USD) at IC Markets — key facts
| Gold trading at IC Markets | |
|---|---|
| Instrument | Spot gold · XAU/USD (CFD) |
| Max leverage | Tiered, not flat: up to 1:5000 on the first 0-25 lots on MetaTrader, 1:3000 on 25-50 lots, 1:1000 above 50 lots; up to 1:1000 on cTrader |
| Platforms | MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, MetaTrader WebTrader, cTrader, TradingView, IC mobile app |
| Minimum deposit | USD 0 on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread and Standard; USD 5,000 on the early-access Raw Pro account and USD 100,000 on Raw Pro+ (broker's own site, checked 2 September 2026) |
Those rows are account-wide published terms, not a gold quote: margin, spread and the overnight holding fee all move, and every one of them is denominated in the account base currency. India has no entry on the base-currency list and no local funding route on the broker's own funding page, so read each row as a dollar figure that has to be bought with rupees first.
What one night of gold costs on a Swap Free account
Gold carries the largest figure on the broker's published Swap Free table: USD 62 per lot per night on XAUUSD, against USD 25 on the US30 index, USD 26 on GBPCHF, USD 11 on EURUSD and USD 9 on silver (XAGUSD). On a Swap Free account that flat holding fee replaces the swap; it does not remove it. Hold two lots of gold across three nights and the holding fee alone is USD 372 — at an illustrative 88 rupees to the dollar, roughly 32,700 rupees, before a single pip of spread or a rupee of commission. IC Markets also states it may withdraw Swap Free status without being obliged to give any explanation or justification, and it makes no Shariah claim about the product, so a cost model built on that table is a current one rather than a permanent one.
The tier arithmetic on a gold position, worked
A headline of 1:5000 describes the first slice of a position, not the whole of it. Margin is charged per tier on the portion of the trade that falls inside each one: lots 0-25 at 1:5000, lots 25-50 at 1:3000, and everything above 50 lots at 1:1000 on MetaTrader. The broker's own published worked example uses USDCHF, and an individual symbol can carry its own schedule, so read the requirement your terminal shows before you commit rather than the headline on any page.
Take 40 lots of XAU/USD at an illustrative USD 4,000 an ounce, one lot being 100 ounces. Notional is USD 16,000,000. The first 25 lots (USD 10,000,000) at 1:5000 lock USD 2,000; the remaining 15 lots (USD 6,000,000) at 1:3000 lock a further USD 2,000. Total margin is USD 4,000 — a quarter more than the USD 3,200 that a flat 1:5000 headline implies. Stop out sits at 50% on every account type, so the same position begins to be closed once equity falls to USD 2,000. Set the two numbers beside each other: USD 4,000 of margin locked, and USD 2,480 of holding fee for every night those 40 lots stay open.
Gold trades in dollars; an Indian account starts in rupees
IC Markets publishes ten account base currencies: USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD. The rupee is not one of them. Nor is there an Indian route on the broker's funding page — the methods listed are cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, UnionPay, wire transfer and a short set of country-specific bank routes, and the only local bank routes published are Thai and Vietnamese. Cards may be funded in AUD, USD, JPY, EUR, NZD, SGD, GBP or CAD.
So every gold figure above reaches an Indian reader after a currency step the broker neither performs nor prices. IC Markets charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own; the cost sits with the card issuer or bank, and money must return to the source it came from, with a card withdrawal capped at the amount that card deposited. A round trip therefore crosses the rupee line twice. At an illustrative all-in mark-up of 1.5% each way, 100,000 rupees arrives worth about 98,500 and comes home worth about 97,022 — close to 2,978 rupees, or just under 3%, spent before an ounce of gold has been traded. Use your own statement rather than that illustration: no page can quote the rate your issuer will apply.
When gold's busiest hours land on an Indian clock
IST is fixed at UTC+05:30 and never moves. MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 accounts sit on servers in the Equinix NY4 data centre in New York and cTrader accounts on servers in London, and both of those cities change their clocks twice a year while India does not. New York runs 9 hours 30 minutes behind IST from March to November and 10 hours 30 minutes behind from November to March; London runs 4 hours 30 minutes and 5 hours 30 minutes behind on the same calendar.
Read that practically. The New York equity session opens at 19:00 IST in the northern summer and 20:00 IST in winter, and closes at 01:30 or 02:30 IST the following morning. London opens at 12:30 or 13:30 IST. The daily boundary your MetaTrader chart draws is a New York boundary, which is why the night a holding fee is charged rarely lines up with the calendar night in India. Higher Margin Requirement windows are timed the same way — daily from 30 minutes before the market close until 15 minutes after the open, at weekends from an hour before the Friday close until 30 minutes after the Monday open, and around high-impact news from 15 minutes before to one minute after the release — so read them off the terminal's server clock, not off an IST rule of thumb.
The part of gold trading that is not about gold
Before any of the arithmetic matters there is a counterparty question. An Indian resident is onboarded to Raw Trading Ltd, the Seychelles entity holding FSA Securities Dealer licence SD018, and no Indian regulator licenses that relationship. IC Markets appears as entry 22 on the Reserve Bank of India's Alert List, revised 19 November 2025, and the RBI has stated that remittances for margin trading with an overseas counterparty are not a permitted purpose under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme. Both points are published by the RBI itself at rbi.org.in and belong to be read there in full, under the Foreign Exchange Management Act framework they sit in, rather than summarised on a page like this one. This site is independent, states no legal position of its own, and CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money.
How to trade gold with IC Markets in India
- One lot of XAU/USD is 100 ounces of exposure, long or short, settled in the account base currency with no metal delivered and no rupee account available.
- Quoted on MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 from the New York servers and on cTrader and TradingView from the London servers, so the same symbol carries two different server clocks.
- Margin is charged per tier — 1:5000 on lots 0-25, 1:3000 on lots 25-50, 1:1000 beyond that on MetaTrader — with stop out at 50% of margin on every account type.
- Account minimums run USD 0 on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread and Standard, USD 5,000 on Raw Pro and USD 100,000 on Raw Pro+ — every one of them quoted in a currency that is not the rupee.