IC Markets

The fine, in the regulator’s own words

On 1 July 2024 the board of the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission decided to impose an administrative fine of €200,000 on IC Markets (EU) Ltd. The announcement went out on 19 July and it is published in English, which is unusual enough to be worth quoting rather than summarising: the firm was fined for non-compliance with article 42 of Regulation (EU) 600/2014 "as it participated in activities that resulted in the circumvention of the requirements of paragraph 4(1)(a) of DI87-09 and specifically the requirements regarding the payment of initial margin protection" 3.

DI87-09 is the Cypriot implementation of the EU’s CFD intervention — the rule that caps retail leverage at 1:30 on major currency pairs and sets the margin a retail client must post. "Circumvention of the requirements regarding initial margin protection" means clients ended up with leverage the EU does not allow a retail client to have. Trade press covering the decision reported the figure as up to 1:1000, reached through a third-country company in the same group, and reported that CySEC treated it as repeat conduct after intervening over the same thing in 2021 4.

That is the offshore entity described from the other side. Everywhere else on this site the argument is that the company you sign with decides your protection, and readers are left to work out that a group might prefer you signed with the loose one. Here a regulator has found that the tight entity took part in moving people to the loose one, and fined it for doing so.

IC Markets does not accept it. The firm said it would appeal, said CySEC had disregarded "irrefutable audited evidence" in favour of allegations from a terminated employee, and called the decision part of "a pattern of selective and disproportionate application of regulatory authority" 5. An appeal is a real thing and this page will say so when it resolves. It has been open since July 2024.

And a class action, on a different question

In Australia, International Capital Markets Pty Ltd is defending a class action brought by the law firm Piper Alderman over the sale of CFDs to retail investors. The pleaded case is "unconscionable conduct and misleading and deceptive conduct": that clients lost money in circumstances where their objectives and financial situation were not adequately assessed and the risks were not adequately disclosed 6. It is the second such action against the firm, it is funded by a litigation funder, and the same funder is behind a comparable case against another Australian CFD issuer.

The company’s answer is that the claims are "entirely meritless" and will be "vigorously defended", and that its CFD products "have consistently complied with all regulations" 6. Nothing has been decided. A filed claim is an allegation and this page treats it as one — it is here because a reader deciding where to put money is entitled to know that the question is before a court, not because we have a view on how it ends.

What both matters have in common is worth naming. Neither is about a missing withdrawal or a frozen account, which is what most complaints against brokers are about. Both are about whether a retail client was sold more risk than the rules intended them to carry. That is a different kind of finding and, for a broker whose whole appeal is cheap access to leverage, a more central one.

What the registers say, read today

Both of the supervised entities check out. Our own reading of ASIC’s published register finds INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL MARKETS PTY. LTD. holding AFS licence 335692, active 2. CySEC’s register lists IC Markets (EU) Ltd under licence 362/18, authorised on 25 June 2018, registered in Limassol under company number 356877, with permission to passport into 29 member states 1.

The third company is Raw Trading Ltd in Seychelles, licence SD018, and it is the one most readers here will be onboarded to. The group has routed everything outside Australia and the EU through it since mid-2019 7. Seychelles registers firms rather than supervising them closely and runs no compensation scheme, so a client there has the platform and the pricing and none of the recourse.

IC Markets was founded in Sydney in 2007 and remains private, with no published group accounts and no outside shareholder to answer to. As with every private broker in this directory, the licences are the only external check that exists — which is exactly why a fine against one of them is worth more than a hundred reviews.

The pricing, and the numbers we will not print

The raw pricing is genuinely the tightest here, and that is a fact about the record on this page rather than an opinion: the all-in figure is computed from the published spread and commission the same way for all ten brokers, and IC Markets comes out first. It is also why the minimum deposit is what it is. This is not a broker built for someone funding an account with pocket money.

What we are not going to print is the execution benchmarks. Review sites publish IC Markets figures to the millisecond — average fill times, the share of orders filled at the requested price, the balance of positive to negative slippage — and not one of them publishes how it was measured, over what period, on which account type, or on how many orders. Some of those numbers are almost certainly the broker’s own marketing figures with a new frame around them.

A number you cannot check is not evidence, and repeating it would make this page look more authoritative while making it less true. If someone here runs a measured execution test one day, the method will be published with the result.