BrokersView – Global Forex Broker Research & Regulatory Inquiry Platform

BrokersView is a broker research and regulatory inquiry hub. It brings together broker profiles, regulators, licence records and regulator warnings so you can check a forex or CFD firm before opening an account. Its most useful job is to keep separate four questions that broker marketing tends to run together. Is the firm authorized, and through which legal entity? What protections apply to your account at that entity? What does the complaint evidence say? What remains unresolved? A strong score or a well-known regulator answers only part of the first question.

What the BrokersView figures count

BrokersView’s database holds 55 brokers, 45 regulators and 209 licences. Here is what each number means in practice:

• Brokers listed are the firms with profiles. A firm missing from the list has simply not been profiled. Its absence says nothing good or bad about it.
• Regulators are the authorities the database references. They range from national securities commissions to self-regulatory bodies such as the US National Futures Association.
• Licences on file are licence records. A record means a licence was listed for an entity. Whether that licence is active today, covers the service you want and belongs to the entity that would hold your account are separate questions for the regulator’s register.

Broker brands often operate through several companies in different countries, each with its own licence. When one brand has several licences on file, it usually has several entities, and the protections differ from one entity to the next. Which entity onboards you depends on where you live and sometimes on the account type you choose.

Reading a broker card

Each card in the popular brokers section pairs a score with one regulator label. AvaTrade shows 9.4 with “ASIC · Tier-1 regulated.” Exness and FOREX.com each show 9.2 with “FCA · Tier-1 regulated.” Pepperstone shows 9.1 with “FCA · Tier-1 regulated.”

The score is BrokersView’s own rating. It is not a regulator grade and not a guarantee about how a firm will handle your money. It is most useful for ranking firms within the database.

The regulator label names one authority attached to the brand. “Tier-1” is a shorthand used across broker research to group strict regulators such as the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC). It is not a legal category. A Tier-1 label on a card does not mean every customer of that brand is served by the FCA- or ASIC-authorized company. A client outside the UK might be onboarded by an affiliate in another jurisdiction with lighter rules, a different leverage limit and no compensation scheme. The entity name and registration number on your account agreement decide this, not the logo on the card.

Four separate questions for any broker

Authorization: entity, licence, regulator

Authorization is a fact about a specific company, its specific licence and a named regulator. To establish it, match three things:

1. the legal entity named in the client agreement,
2. the licence or registration number that entity claims, and
3. the regulator’s own public register entry for that number, including the firm name, status and permitted activities.

If the website domain, the company name and the register entry do not line up, the licence does not cover you. Clone firms exploit exactly this gap by copying a real firm’s name or number. A valid authorization means a regulator admitted the entity and supervises it. How the firm treats customers and whether it will stay solvent are separate matters.

Client protections

Protections come from the rules of the entity’s jurisdiction, not from the brand. Some long-standing examples:

• UK (FCA): client money must be segregated from the firm’s own funds. If an authorized firm fails, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme can cover eligible claims up to £85,000 per person per firm. Retail CFD clients get negative balance protection and leverage caps of 30:1 on major currency pairs.
• EU (ESMA rules applied by national regulators): the same 30:1 major-pair cap, lower caps on other instruments, negative balance protection and a margin close-out at 50% of required margin for retail accounts. Investor compensation depends on the member state. Cyprus’s scheme, for example, covers up to €20,000 for eligible clients of member firms.
• Australia (ASIC): client money segregation and, since 2021, retail leverage limits and negative balance protection under a product intervention order. Australia has no general compensation scheme equivalent to the FSCS for forex clients.

Compensation schemes cover firm failure under defined conditions. They do not cover trading losses, and they do not automatically cover clients of an offshore affiliate of a protected firm.

Complaint evidence

Trader disputes on BrokersView are filed in its Mediation Center. An empty or sparse complaint board means only that nobody has filed there, not that the firm has no disputes, and a single complaint does not establish a pattern. Weigh what a complaint actually alleges (withdrawal refused, account closed, price manipulation claimed) and whether the firm responded.

Unresolved risks

Some questions cannot be closed from a profile: whether a firm’s offshore entity will honor withdrawals, how it handles disputes, or whether the person contacting you actually works for the firm. These risks stay open until the entity checks above are done. Making a small deposit to see what happens does not close them. Some fraudulent operations deliberately pay out small withdrawals to build trust before larger deposits.

Regulator warnings on the page

BrokersView’s Warnings & unlicensed brokers section lists public notices from regulators, each reviewed against its source on Nov 8, 2026.

• ICForex: Spain’s securities regulator, the CNMV, issued a 2022 warning about unauthorised entities. It referenced IC-FOREXMARKET.COM and related domains. A CNMV warning states that the entity is not authorized to provide investment services in Spain. Our ICForex review covers the profile.
• TAG Markets: Austria’s FMA warned in 2026 that Tag Markets, T.M. Financial Ltd and Tag Markets Ltd were not authorised to conduct licensable securities transactions in Austria. The notice names three entities, so check every company name in any agreement you are offered.
• Loyal Primus: the NFA reported in 2023 that the firm claimed NFA ID 0555433 but was not an NFA member. This is a classic misused-credential pattern. In the US, a forex dealer serving retail clients must be registered with the CFTC and be an NFA member, and the NFA’s BASIC database shows the real status behind any ID.
• Binetrix: Italy’s CONSOB blacklisted the website in 2023 for offering financial services without authorization. CONSOB can order Italian internet providers to block such sites. See Is Binetrix safe? for the full check.

A warning shows what one regulator concluded about activity in its jurisdiction at a point in time. The absence of a warning establishes nothing. Regulators issue notices only for firms that come to their attention, and a firm can operate for years before that happens.

A verification routine before you open an account

1. Get the legal entity name from the client agreement or the website footer, not from an advertisement or a chat message.
2. Find the licence number that entity claims, and note which regulator it belongs to.
3. Search that regulator’s public register directly. Confirm the firm name, status, permitted activities and the authorized website domains. A mismatched domain is a clone warning sign.
4. Search warning lists of your own country’s regulator and of the regulator named on the licence.
5. Identify the protections for that entity: segregation rules, negative balance protection, leverage limits and any compensation scheme, with its limit.
6. Read the complaint evidence for substance. Look for what was alleged and whether it was resolved.
7. Stop if any link breaks. If the entity, licence and register do not match, the open question is not resolved by trying the platform with real money.

Comparing trading costs after the safety checks

Broker research also covers account types. Accounts generally fall into three cost models: low spread without commission, mid-to-high spread without commission, and low (raw) spread with a separate commission. Spreads on a raw or ECN account can approach zero on major pairs, while standard accounts build the cost into a wider spread.

To compare them, convert everything to cost per round trip. As a hypothetical example, take a standard account quoting a 1.2-pip EUR/USD spread and a raw account quoting 0.1 pips plus a $3.50 commission per side per standard lot. With one pip worth $10 per standard lot:

• standard account: 1.2 × $10 = $12 per round-trip lot
• raw account: (0.1 × $10) + (2 × $3.50) = $8 per round-trip lot

Commission is often quoted per side, so it has to be doubled for a round trip. Quoted spreads are also averages, and actual spreads can widen at rollover and around news. Cost only matters among firms that have already passed the authorization checks. A cheap spread at an unverified entity is not a saving.

Risk warning

Leveraged forex and CFD trading can lose part or all of the money deposited. At entities without negative balance protection, losses can exceed the deposit. Leverage magnifies gains and losses equally, so size positions from your stop distance and account equity (a position size calculator does the arithmetic). Broker data on research pages may not be real-time. Indicative prices from market makers can differ from executable prices, and no profile or score is a recommendation to trade with a firm.