IC Markets Review

IC Markets is a Sydney-based forex and CFD broker built around low-cost, commission-based pricing and support for automated trading on MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader and TradingView. Its case rests on two things: a Raw Spread account where the commission works out to 0.70 pips per round trip on EUR/USD, and an infrastructure (free colocated VPS hosting, unlimited strategy testing, FIX API access on cTrader) aimed at traders who run expert advisors or scalp at size. Outside that core, it is a more ordinary broker. There is no in-house platform, research is spread across several places, and education is a library of short articles rather than structured courses.

Which IC Markets you deal with matters as much as any feature. The group operates through four licensed companies in Australia, Cyprus, Seychelles and the Bahamas, and the entity that opens your account determines your regulator, your maximum leverage, your client protections and, in some cases, the instruments and accounts available to you. The top-tier and offshore entities differ sharply.

Everything IC Markets offers is a CFD. You can trade price movements in currencies, stock indices, commodities, bonds, individual shares and cryptocurrencies, but you never own the underlying asset. CFDs are leveraged, and the broker’s own risk warnings state that most retail CFD accounts lose money, with the exact percentage published per entity.

IC Markets pros and cons

Pros

• Raw Spread pricing with a $3.50 per side commission per standard lot on MetaTrader, and a lower commission on cTrader and TradingView.
• Four third-party platforms, all with algorithmic trading support: MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView.
• Free VPS hosting in Equinix data centers for accounts that meet a monthly volume threshold.
• A volume rebate program (Raw Trader Plus) for high-turnover forex and metals traders.
• No deposit or withdrawal fees charged by the broker, and no minimum deposit.
• Swap-free (Islamic) accounts available.

Cons

• No proprietary web, desktop or mobile platform, and no native Mac desktop client.
• Order types are basic: no OCO, OTO or guaranteed stop-loss orders.
• Research is scattered across a blog, the client portal and YouTube.
• No structured courses, progress tracking or quizzes.
• Leverage up to 1:5000 is available only through offshore entities with thinner protection.
• The broker acts as principal to client trades under its execution policy.

Who operates IC Markets

IC Markets is a privately held group headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and founded in 2009. It is not publicly traded and does not operate a bank, so there are no published annual reports of the kind a listed broker files, and no deposit-taking banking license sits behind client accounts. The group trades under more than one brand name (IC Markets and IC Trading among them), and the brand you see on the website is not always the name of the company that holds your money.

The four licensed entities are:

The Australian entity sits under a Tier-1 regulator. The Cypriot entity is authorised by CySEC and operates under the EU’s MiFID II framework, which allows it to passport services across the European Economic Area. The Seychelles and Bahamas companies are offshore entities.

Several terms depend on the entity, so confirm them before funding. Search the license number on the regulator’s own register and check that the company name there matches the company named in your client agreement. Then check that entity’s own terms for negative balance protection and compensation coverage (offshore), margin call and stop-out levels, swap-free conditions, the deposits and withdrawals sequence, whether the Raw Pro tiers are offered, and which instruments appear in Market Watch on your live account.

Is IC Markets safe?

Safety at IC Markets is a question about the entity, not the brand. The same logo covers companies that operate under very different rules.

Australian entity (ASIC). Since 2021, ASIC’s product intervention order for retail CFD clients has capped leverage (30:1 on major currency pairs, lower on other asset classes), required negative balance protection so a retail client cannot lose more than the account balance, and set a margin close-out rule. Australian financial services licensees are also required to hold retail client money in trust accounts separate from company funds. These are statutory rules for retail clients; they do not apply to clients classified as wholesale.

EU entity (CySEC). Under ESMA’s product intervention measures, now applied through national rules in Cyprus, retail CFD clients get the same 30:1 cap on major pairs, mandatory negative balance protection and a 50% margin close-out rule. Cyprus investment firms are members of the Investor Compensation Fund, which can compensate eligible retail clients up to €20,000 if the firm fails and cannot return client assets. EU rules also restrict how CFDs can be marketed to retail clients and require standardized risk warnings.

Offshore entities (FSA-SC and SCB). These regulators do not impose the retail leverage caps above, which is how a 1:5000 maximum becomes possible. Protections such as negative balance protection and compensation coverage are not set by the same statutory rules, so what applies depends on the client agreement of the entity you sign with.

There are no known regulator warnings against IC Markets on the main regulator registers, though that does not cover every register worldwide.

Two practical points follow. First, if you are eligible for the Australian or EU entity but are offered an account with the Seychelles or Bahamas company (often with higher leverage as the incentive), you are giving up protections in exchange for margin. Second, scam sites impersonating well-known brokers are common enough that IC Markets maintains its own page warning about fake websites and messages. Only deposit through the client portal reached from the official domain.

Professional and wholesale classification

Both the Australian and EU frameworks allow clients who meet certain tests (trading experience, portfolio size, professional background or, in Australia, wealth thresholds) to opt into professional or wholesale status. IC Markets offers professional accounts and publishes a wholesale client application form for its Australian business. Reclassification typically unlocks higher leverage, but it also removes retail protections such as the leverage cap, negative balance protection and, depending on the jurisdiction, access to certain compensation and dispute resolution schemes. The trade is the same as moving offshore, just done within a Tier-1 or Tier-2 entity.

Execution model: principal, not agent

Whether IC Markets is a market maker or an STP broker depends on whether you look at how it sources prices or at the legal relationship with the client.

IC Markets markets its execution as agency-style, with prices aggregated from multiple liquidity providers (at least eight, according to its own descriptions), no requotes, and fills that can slip in either direction. Positive slippage means you can be filled at a better price than requested; negative slippage means a worse one. Both are normal on fast-moving markets with market execution.

Its published order execution policy for the Bahamas entity states something more specific about the legal relationship: IC Markets deals as principal, not as agent, and acts as the sole execution venue for client orders. In plain terms, you trade against IC Markets. Whatever it does with that exposure afterward (offsetting it with liquidity providers or keeping part of it on its own book) is the broker’s risk management choice. According to the policy, it does not hedge every trade, which means some client positions are retained internally.

This structure is common among CFD brokers and does not, by itself, mean prices are unfair. It does create a potential conflict of interest, because when a position is not passed on, the broker’s result on that position is the mirror of yours. The safeguards against abuse are regulatory (best execution obligations in Australia and the EU, conflict-of-interest policies, complaint and ombudsman routes) and practical (comparing your fills against other price sources, monitoring slippage statistics in your trade history). Under the offshore entities, the regulatory safeguards are lighter.

IC Markets fees

Pricing is the main reason traders choose IC Markets, and the structure has more moving parts than the headline numbers suggest. There are two pricing models, and the commission on the commission-based model varies by platform and account currency.

Standard vs. Raw Spread pricing

Standard Account (spread-only). No commission. The broker’s cost is built into a wider spread, which starts from 0.8 pips on EUR/USD. Spreads are variable, so the quoted figure is a floor under good liquidity, not a guarantee. They widen around news releases, at the daily rollover and in thin sessions.

Raw Spread Account (commission-based). The quoted spread is close to the interbank price, often a fraction of a pip on EUR/USD, and the broker charges a separate commission. On MetaTrader, that commission is $3.50 per side per standard lot (100,000 units of the base currency), or $7.00 for a round trip.

The lowest all-in EUR/USD cost is 0.70 pips. The commission alone accounts for 0.70 pips round trip on EUR/USD (explained below), so that lowest figure reflects moments when the raw spread is at or near zero; any spread above zero is added on top.

IC Markets quotes variable spreads only. There are no fixed-spread accounts.

How the commission converts to pips

On EUR/USD, the quote currency is the US dollar, so one pip on a standard lot is worth $10.

• Commission per round trip on MetaTrader: $3.50 × 2 = $7.00
• $7.00 ÷ $10 per pip = 0.70 pips

The same logic applies to other pairs, but the pip value changes with the quote currency and the exchange rate, so 0.70 pips is specific to USD-quoted pairs on a USD account.

Commission by platform and currency

MetaTrader is the most expensive of the three routes on commission, which matters because it is the default choice for many clients and for most expert advisors.

On cTrader, commission is calculated on notional volume and converted to normalize the pip value, so the “about $3.00” figure is an approximation that can move slightly with exchange rates and account currency.

A euro-denominated MetaTrader account pays €3.50 per side. When the euro trades above the dollar, €3.50 is worth more than $3.50, so the commission is higher in dollar terms than on a USD account. The difference is small per lot but compounds at volume.

Under the IC brand, the group has also offered Raw Pro and Raw Pro+ tiers with commissions of $1.50 and $1.00 per side. These are tied to that brand and its qualifying conditions, not to every entity.

When Raw Spread beats Standard

The choice between accounts reduces to one comparison: Raw Spread is cheaper when the Standard spread exceeds the Raw spread by more than the commission in pips.

Hypothetical example (EUR/USD, USD account, MetaTrader, one standard lot round trip):

• Standard Account at an assumed 0.8 pip spread: 0.8 × $10 = $8.00
• Raw Spread Account at an assumed 0.1 pip spread: (0.1 × $10) + $7.00 = $8.00

At those assumed spreads the two cost the same. If the Raw spread sits at 0.0 to 0.05 pips, Raw Spread is cheaper; if the Standard spread were narrower than 0.8 pips while the Raw spread stayed at 0.1, Standard would win. On cTrader or TradingView, with a commission of about 0.60 pips, the break-even gap drops to about 0.6 pips, which tilts the comparison further toward Raw Spread.

Two practical factors sit outside the arithmetic. Standard spreads widen more visibly during volatility, while Raw spreads plus a fixed commission make cost easier to model in a backtest. And for very small positions (micro lots), the absolute difference between the two is a few cents per trade, so the choice matters most to frequent or larger traders.

Overnight financing (swaps)

Positions held past the daily rollover are charged or credited a swap, based on the interest rate differential between the two currencies (or the financing rate for index, commodity and share CFDs) plus the broker’s markup. Swap rates vary by instrument and direction and change over time; MetaTrader and cTrader display the current long and short swap for each symbol in its contract specification. As is standard for FX, triple swaps are usually applied once a week to account for the weekend. For swing traders who hold positions for weeks, swaps can outweigh the spread and commission entirely, so the cheapest account for a scalper is not automatically the cheapest for a position trader.

Swap-free (Islamic) accounts are available for clients who cannot pay or receive interest for religious reasons. Swap-free accounts at CFD brokers commonly replace swaps with a different charge (an administration fee after a set number of days, or a wider spread), and the terms differ by broker and entity, so the account is not automatically cost-free to hold.

Raw Trader Plus rebates

High-volume traders can enroll in the Raw Trader Plus program, which returns a per-lot rebate on forex and metals in three tiers:

Enrollment is by email to the broker rather than automatic, and the program includes VPS hosting and dedicated support.

Hypothetical example: a trader closes 1,500 standard lots of EUR/USD on a MetaTrader Raw Spread account. Commission at $7.00 per round trip totals $10,500. If the $2.25 tier applies to all 1,500 lots, the rebate is $3,375, cutting the net commission to $7,125, or about $4.75 per lot. Whether the higher rate applies to all lots or only to those above each threshold, and over what period lots are counted, are terms to confirm when enrolling.

Non-trading fees

The withdrawal line deserves attention for anyone using bank wires. IC Markets does not charge, but correspondent and receiving banks can deduct their own fees from an international wire, so the amount that arrives may be lower than the amount sent. Card and e-wallet withdrawals avoid intermediary banks but may involve the payment provider’s own charges or currency conversion.

The inactivity fee applies only after six full months without a trade. Deposits and withdrawals do not count as activity; holding an open position does. A dormant account with a small balance will be drawn down by the fee over time, so closing unused accounts is cleaner than leaving them.

A $0 minimum deposit removes the entry barrier, but it does not set a sensible starting balance. On a 0.01 lot EUR/USD position, a pip is worth about $0.10, and the commission on a Raw Spread MetaTrader account is about $0.07 round trip. A very small balance limits how wide a stop you can place while keeping risk per trade proportionate.

Account types

The live account lineup comes down to one choice of pricing and one choice of platform:

• Standard Account: spread-only, no commission, available on MetaTrader.
• Raw Spread Account: raw spreads plus $3.50 per side, on MetaTrader.
• Raw Spread cTrader Account: raw spreads plus a commission of about $3.00 per side.
• Raw Spread TradingView Account: raw spreads plus a commission of about $3.00 per side.

All accounts use variable spreads. Swap-free versions are available, professional accounts are available to clients who qualify, and a demo account lets you test platforms, execution and swap charges before funding. A demo uses simulated fills, so slippage and spread behavior around news will not always match a live account.

When choosing, consider the platform first. If your strategy depends on an MT4 or MT5 expert advisor, the MetaTrader Raw Spread account is the cheapest route available to you, even though cTrader is cheaper on commission. Moving to cTrader to save about $1.00 per round trip means rewriting the strategy in C# for cTrader’s cBot framework. If you trade manually from TradingView charts, the TradingView account combines the lower commission with the charting you already use.

Funding, deposits and withdrawals

IC Markets supports a wide range of funding methods: debit and credit cards, bank wire, PayPal, Skrill and Neteller, plus crypto deposits and withdrawals. Apple Pay and Google Pay are also supported, though non-wire domestic bank transfers are not offered in every region. Method availability depends on your country and entity.

Brokers regulated in Australia and the EU generally require withdrawals to return to the original funding source where possible, as part of anti-money-laundering controls: a card deposit is refunded to the same card up to the deposited amount, with profits above that sent by another method such as wire. Withdrawing to a method you did not deposit with can be refused or delayed.

Crypto funding is a deposit method, not a crypto trading account. Coins sent to IC Markets are credited as account balance in your base currency, and the crypto exposure you take afterward is through CFDs. Converting between currencies at deposit or withdrawal can add an exchange cost on top of any fee, so funding in the same currency as your account’s base currency avoids a conversion.

Range of investments

IC Markets runs a CFD-only product range of about 2,850 instruments, including 61 forex pairs. The total varies by entity: the EU entity and the offshore entities do not carry identical symbol lists.

Forex

Forex is the core of the business. The 61 pairs cover the majors (EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD and others), crosses such as EUR/GBP and AUD/NZD, and a selection of exotics. Exotic pairs carry wider spreads and higher swaps than majors, so the cost advantage of Raw Spread pricing is most pronounced on the most liquid pairs. For traders who need a very large set of exotics, 61 pairs is solid but not exhaustive.

Stocks, indices, commodities and bonds

The remaining CFDs span:

• Share CFDs on US and international companies. A selection of US share CFDs trades on extended 24-hour sessions, useful for traders in Asian or European time zones who want to react to US names outside regular hours.
• Index CFDs on major global equity benchmarks.
• Commodity CFDs, including gold, silver, oil and agricultural products.
• Bond CFDs on government debt futures.

Share CFDs replicate the price movement of the stock without conveying ownership, voting rights or the protections of holding shares through a custodian. Dividends are typically handled as cash adjustments to CFD positions (credited on long positions, debited on short positions) on the ex-dividend date, and CFD positions are subject to overnight financing.

Crypto CFDs

IC Markets offers 22 cryptocurrency CFDs, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, with relatively high position limits (up to 100 BTC or 2,000 ETH per account). Like everything else in the range, these are CFDs: you cannot withdraw coins, transfer them to a wallet or stake them. Crypto CFDs are not offered to retail clients by any broker’s UK entity under UK rules, and UK residents can only access them as professional clients.

What is not available

There is no direct market access, no exchange-traded shares or ETFs, no listed options or futures, no spread betting and no prediction markets. Investors who want to own assets for the long term, or traders who need exchange-traded derivatives, will need a different kind of broker. IC Markets is built for short- and medium-term leveraged speculation and hedging through CFDs.

Leverage and margin

IC Markets offers leverage up to 1:5000, but only through the offshore entities. Under ASIC and EU retail rules, the cap on major currency pairs is 30:1, falling to 20:1 for non-major pairs, gold and major indices, 10:1 for other commodities and minor indices, 5:1 for individual shares and 2:1 for crypto CFDs.

Leverage determines how much margin a position requires, not how much risk you carry. Your exposure is set by position size.

Hypothetical example (EUR/USD at an assumed rate of 1.1000, one standard lot):

In every row, a one-pip move is worth $10 and a 50-pip adverse move costs $500. What changes is how much of your account balance must be committed as margin and how soon a margin call or stop-out arrives. At 1:5000, a trader with $100 in the account can open a full standard lot, and a move of about 8 pips against the position wipes out the balance. High leverage lets a small account take on positions it cannot absorb, which is why the retail caps exist.

A disciplined approach starts from risk per trade, not available margin. Decide the dollar amount you are willing to lose, set the stop distance from the chart, and derive the lot size from those two inputs. A position size calculator does this arithmetic for any pair and account currency.

Margin call and stop-out levels (the equity-to-margin ratios at which the broker warns you and then starts closing positions) are set per entity and per account in the client agreement. Note that stop-out is measured on equity, which includes floating profit and loss, not on balance. A position deep in loss can trigger a stop-out even if your balance looks healthy.

Trading platforms

IC Markets does not build its own platform. Clients choose between MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader and TradingView, all developed by third parties. That has two effects. The platforms are mature, well documented and widely supported by indicator and robot developers. But the experience is whatever those developers ship, and IC Markets cannot add features such as integrated research, one-click signal trading or broker-specific risk tools inside the platform.

There is no native Mac desktop client. Mac users can run the web versions, use TradingView in a browser, or run the Windows terminals through compatibility layers or a hosted VPS.

MetaTrader 5 and MetaTrader 4

MT5 is simple on the surface and deep underneath. The workspace is modular: Market Watch, Navigator, Toolbox and chart windows can be resized and arranged, and the layout reloads as you left it.

• Charting: 21 timeframes in the chart window, a separate tick chart in Market Watch, and around 30 built-in indicators. The built-in set is modest, but thousands more are available through the MQL5 marketplace, and you can code your own in MQL5. Chart templates saved as .tpl files keep trendlines and indicator settings between sessions.
• Order ticket: notional value updates as you adjust volume (0.10 lots of EUR/USD shows €10,000), with tabs for the tick chart, depth of market and pending orders. Experienced users find it fast; new users may find it crowded. Drag-to-modify works for pending orders and for stop-loss and take-profit lines on chart.
• Contract specifications: right-clicking a symbol in Market Watch and choosing Specification shows the full name, contract size, margin rate, swap rates and trading hours, which is the most reliable place to check per-instrument terms on your account.
• Built-in safeguards: fields are clearly labeled, and an order sized beyond available margin is rejected with a “not enough money” message.

MT4 offers a similar experience with fewer timeframes, a single-threaded strategy tester and MQL4 instead of MQL5. Its advantage is the sheer volume of existing expert advisors and indicators written for it. Code written for MT4 does not run on MT5 without conversion.

The FX Blue Advanced Trading Tools suite adds plugins to MetaTrader, including a mini terminal, trade management tools, a sentiment indicator and Correlation Trader, which is useful for pairs and mean-reversion strategies that track the relationship between two instruments.

cTrader

cTrader offers a more modern interface, native depth-of-market views, detailed trade statistics and cBots written in C#, at the lower Raw Spread commission. The cTrader platform includes a FIX API, which lets institutional-style systems connect directly for pricing and order routing. cTrader Copy is built into the platform for copy trading.

TradingView

TradingView brings the most widely used charting environment to IC Markets accounts, with a large indicator library, community scripts written in Pine Script and drawing tools well beyond MetaTrader’s defaults. Trading through it on IC Markets uses the Raw Spread TradingView account at about $3.00 per side. Some advanced TradingView features, such as more indicators per chart or deeper historical data, depend on your TradingView subscription, not on the broker.

Order types

Across the platforms, the order types available are:

The absence of guaranteed stops matters most around weekend gaps and major news. A standard stop-loss becomes a market order once triggered, so the fill price can be well beyond the trigger price if the market gaps. Under the Australian and EU entities, negative balance protection limits a retail account’s loss to its balance; it does not limit the loss on an individual trade.

On MetaTrader, trailing stops run on the client terminal, not on the broker’s server. If your computer or the terminal is closed, the trailing stop stops trailing (the last stop level remains on the server as a regular stop). That is one of the practical reasons algorithmic and trailing-stop traders run MetaTrader on a VPS.

Algorithmic trading, VPS and API

This is where IC Markets is strongest outside pricing.

• Backtesting: the MT5 strategy tester runs unlimited backtests with full parameter optimization, visual trade-by-trade playback and performance reports covering metrics such as average profit, average loss and average trade duration. No premium tier is needed for granular data.
• VPS hosting: free VPS hosting is colocated in Equinix data centers in New York and London, near the broker’s trading servers, which reduces latency between your strategy and the execution venue. Eligibility starts at 15 standard lots traded per month, with larger configurations (up to a 4 CPU server) at 75 lots per month. Below the threshold, a VPS can usually be rented from the provider at a monthly cost.
• API access: there is no general REST API into IC Markets’ own servers. cTrader’s FIX API covers direct connectivity on that platform; MetaTrader users connect through expert advisors or third-party bridges.

For a strategy that trades frequently, the combination of raw pricing, rebates above 100 lots and low-latency hosting reduces costs that compound with every trade. For a manual trader opening a few positions a week, these features matter much less.

Mobile trading

IC Markets has no app of its own. On iOS and Android, you use the MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader or TradingView apps and log in with your IC Markets credentials.

On the MT5 app:

• Layout: a bottom bar with Quotes, Charts, Trade, History and Messages, and a menu for settings and other tools, including an economic calendar and news.
• Charting: tapping the chart opens a shortcut wheel for timeframes, drawing tools and indicators. There are around 30 built-in indicators and about 25 drawing tools, including Fibonacci, Gann and equidistant channels. Nine timeframes appear by default, with 21 available in settings; tick charts are not available on mobile.
• Order management: a mini ticket on the chart lets you drag stop-loss and take-profit levels into position, and the app converts the distance into account currency as you move them, so you see the dollar risk before confirming.
• Discovery: there is one watchlist, no screeners, heatmaps or top movers. Search is fast and forgiving: typing “XAU” returns every gold pair, while “GOLD” also returns share CFDs with “gold” in the name.
• Alerts and trailing stops: price alerts set on the desktop terminal can be pushed to the app once you link a MetaQuotes ID, but trailing stops cannot be set from mobile.

The cTrader and TradingView apps offer different interfaces, and for traders who prefer TradingView’s charting, its app is the stronger choice for chart-based mobile trading.

Copy trading

Copy trading at IC Markets runs through third-party services: cTrader Copy, ZuluTrade, SignalStart and IC Social (built on the Pelican network). Each has its own app, login and fee arrangements for strategy providers, typically performance fees or volume-based charges set by the service or the provider. Copying a strategy transfers execution, not responsibility: losses on copied trades are your losses, and a provider’s past track record says nothing about future returns, especially if the provider used a different account size or leverage.

Research

IC Markets produces a reasonable amount of market content, but it is spread across the company blog, the client portal, YouTube and the trading platforms, with nothing that ties it together.

In-house analysis. The Daily Technical Analysis series is the most useful. Each post covers several instruments with a chart marked for support and resistance and a short written view. A Fundamental Analysis series, market news and general commentary sit alongside it. The fundamental posts are long-form and carry no charts, and authors are not credited.

Webinars and podcast. Several live webinars run each day across languages and time zones, split between pre-market briefings and live analysis, and are archived on YouTube. The IC Your Trade podcast, produced with Bloomberg, runs short interviews with industry executives and is professionally produced.

Third-party tools in the client portal.

• Trading Central provides the economic calendar (with a chart of previous releases for each event), Featured Ideas, Technical Insights, Market Buzz and the Alpha Generation indicators for MetaTrader.
• TipRanks content is available through the IC Insights module, though availability depends on your region and entity.
• Autochartist and Acuity are not offered.

Gaps. There is no full earnings calendar beyond a list of reporting dates, financial statement data is limited to what TipRanks and Trading Central aggregate, and client sentiment data is limited to TradingView and the FX Blue plugins. A Trading Central idea read in the portal has to be rebuilt as an order in your platform; there is no one-click route from signal to ticket.

For a trader who already has a charting and news setup, this is adequate supplementary material. For a trader who wants research to drive decisions inside the trading platform, brokers with proprietary platforms integrate it more tightly.

Education

Education is the thinnest part of the IC Markets offering. The core is a “101” article series covering Forex, Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Risk Management, Trading Plan and Trading Psychology. The articles are clear, use screenshots and stay balanced, but each runs only a few hundred words and they are not organized into courses.

There are no progress tracking, quizzes or learning paths, and the mobile apps contain no education area beyond what the platform developers include. Platform tutorials mostly point to MetaQuotes, Spotware and TradingView documentation, which is comprehensive but not specific to IC Markets. A YouTube playlist covers placing and managing orders on MT4 and is worth watching for new MetaTrader users. Coverage of broker-specific tools, such as the client portal, is minimal.

The webinars are the strongest learning resource, hosted by traders who explain their reasoning live. A new trader can use them alongside a demo account to practice order entry, stop placement and position sizing before trading live.

Risks to weigh before opening an account

The specific risks at IC Markets come from four sources.

Leverage and product risk. All products are leveraged CFDs. Losses can exceed what a trader expects from a small margin deposit, and under offshore entities, losses beyond the account balance depend on the protection terms in that entity’s agreement.

Entity risk. Two of the four licensed companies are offshore. Their clients have less statutory protection than retail clients of the Australian or Cypriot company, usually in exchange for higher leverage.

Counterparty risk. Your funds sit with the entity that holds your account, and as a private company IC Markets does not publish the level of financial detail required of listed brokers. Segregation of client money, where required by the regulator, protects funds from being used for the broker’s own business, but it is not insurance against every scenario.

Execution risk. Market orders and triggered stops can slip, especially around news, at the weekly open and on thin instruments. Without guaranteed stops, a gap can move a fill far from the stop level. Traders running strategies that depend on precise fills should measure their own slippage on a live account at small size before scaling up.

How we checked IC Markets

We visited on 13 November 2026, connecting from Tallinn, Estonia. Typing icmarkets.com took us straight to www.ic.com, the domain the group now uses. We read the footer, opened the regulation page, and then worked through the spreads, trading conditions, leverage, Raw Spread account and withdrawal pages. The footer names Raw Trading Ltd as the company behind the IC and IC Markets Global trading names, regulated by the Seychelles Financial Services Authority with Securities Dealer’s license number SD018. A separate notice says IC Markets (EU) Ltd is authorized by CySEC under CIF License No. 362/18.

Prices matched what we describe above. The Raw Spread page quotes an average EUR/USD spread of 0.1 pips with a commission of $3.50 per lot payable per side, and the leverage page advertises up to 1:5000 on FX. On withdrawals, the broker says it does not charge any additional fees, though intermediary or international banks may. Account pages sit behind a login and registration wall, so nothing can be started without signing up first. We did not open an account.

Then the registers. On the FSA Seychelles list of securities dealers, Raw Trading Ltd is listed. That public list shows no licence numbers, so we could not match SD018 itself. CySEC’s list of Cypriot Investment Firms, dated 04 May 2026, shows IC Markets (EU) Ltd under licence 362/18, licensed 25/06/2018. ASIC’s register returned INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL MARKETS PTY. LTD. with AFS licence 335692, status Current, since 02/07/2009.

When we read Trustpilot on 13 November 2026, IC Markets held 4.8/5 from 57,581 reviews. The company had replied to none of the eight newest. The Wayback Machine’s first capture of icmarkets.com dates to 2001-04-03, which may predate the current business if the domain changed hands. Some gaps remain. We did not check the Bahamas entity on its regulator’s register, and without a funded account we cannot speak to real fills, withdrawal speed or how support responds.

Who IC Markets may suit

IC Markets is a strong fit for traders whose costs scale with frequency and size: scalpers, day traders and anyone running expert advisors or cBots. For them, raw spreads with a fixed commission, volume rebates and free colocated VPS hosting cut trading costs, and the choice of four platforms means existing code will usually run without changes.

It suits manual traders who already know MetaTrader or TradingView and want low costs without needing the broker to provide research or training. It also suits traders who want swap-free accounts or crypto CFDs alongside forex, within the limits set by their jurisdiction.

It suits beginners less well. There is no proprietary, guided platform, education lacks structure, and research requires knowing where to look. A beginner can still open an account (there is no minimum deposit), but would need to bring their own learning plan and should be especially cautious about leverage under any offshore entity.

It does not suit investors looking to own shares, ETFs or crypto, traders who need exchange-traded options or futures, or residents of the countries IC Markets does not accept.