What 123 Forex Brokers Advertise, and What a Retail Client Actually Gets

What this is. We hold four verified facts on the front of every broker review we publish — regulation, costs, account terms, standing — written by hand from the broker's own pages. Across 123 broker reviews that is just under 500 checked statements. This piece counts what they say. The most useful finding is a contradiction that sits in plain sight on a third of them.

Method, and how this differs from our prop firm study

Our prop firm study was built on a normalised register: the same six fields for every firm, each with a source URL. This one is not, and the difference matters.

• What the data is. Four fact statements per broker, written to tell a reader something useful about that specific broker. They were never designed to be a comparable dataset, so a broker that does not mention leverage may still offer it — we simply did not record it as one of its four most relevant facts.
• So read every count as a floor, not a census. When we say 55 brokers advertise leverage above 1:500, that means 55 of 123 have it recorded in our checked facts. The true number is higher. We do not know by how much, and we are not going to estimate.
• The exception is the contradiction in Finding 1, which does not depend on completeness. It counts brokers where both halves are recorded, so a missing record can only make that number smaller than reality.
• Population. 123 published broker reviews, all rated, all with a source. Excluded firms are still counted here, and named in Finding 3.

Finding 1: 32 brokers advertise a tier-1 licence and leverage no tier-1 regulator allows

Start with the two numbers separately.

63 of 123 brokers name the FCA, ASIC or CySEC in their checked facts. Those are tier-1 regulators: client-money segregation, a complaints process, and in some cases a compensation scheme if the firm fails.

69 brokers have a leverage figure recorded, and 55 of those advertise 1:500 or higher. Eighteen advertise 1:2000 or 1:3000. One advertises unlimited leverage.

Now put them together. Retail forex leverage in those jurisdictions is capped at 1:30 on major pairs — the FCA, ASIC and the EU regulators all landed there between 2018 and 2021. A firm cannot hold an FCA licence and offer a UK retail client 1:500.

Both statements are true at once, because they describe different companies. The licence belongs to the UK, Australian or Cypriot entity. The leverage belongs to an offshore subsidiary — typically Seychelles, Mauritius, Vanuatu, Saint Vincent or Belize — and which one you sign with depends on where you live and, often, on which button you click.

This is legal, disclosed, and almost invisible. The licence appears in the footer of every page. The entity you are actually contracting with appears in the client agreement. Only four brokers of 123 put both numbers where a reader would see them together.

What it costs you is not the leverage. It is everything attached to the licence: segregated client money, a route to the ombudsman, and the compensation scheme. Trading at 1:500 usually means you have none of them.

Finding 2: what “regulated” turns out to mean

Categories overlap, because most brokers hold several licences at once. That is the point: multi-entity structure is the norm, not the exception, and a single-word label like “regulated” carries almost no information without naming which entity.

The eight described as unregulated are worth separating out. Three of them also advertise leverage of 1:500 or higher. No licence, no cap, no recourse.

Finding 3: six brokers on this site are gone, and one of them scored 4.6

Running a closure test across all 123 reviews in September 2026 flagged six brokers as closed, offline or carrying a scam warning.

CLMarkets held a 4.6 rating while the company behind it was deregistered. Until we caught it, it would have ranked seventh on our own best-brokers page. We are publishing that because it is the most useful thing in this piece: a rating measures how good an offer looked on the day it was assessed. It does not know whether the company still exists.

Only KOT4X had a rating low enough to keep it out of a ranking on merit. The other five would all have appeared in a top-twenty list on score alone. If a comparison site does not run a liveness check separately from its scoring, its rankings will eventually recommend a company that has stopped answering.

Finding 4: the cheap-entry claims

Two of these deserve a caveat rather than a headline.

“From 0.0 pips” is a floor, not a price. It describes the best case on the most liquid pair at the quietest moment of the session, and it almost always sits on a commission-bearing raw account. The number that matters is the total round turn — spread plus commission, on the pairs you trade, at the hours you trade them. A raw account with a commission is often cheaper than a zero-commission account with a wider spread. Often it is not.

A low minimum deposit is a marketing threshold, not a viable starting balance. Sixteen brokers will open an account for a dollar or nothing. That has no bearing on whether a dollar can absorb a drawdown.

What we could not measure

Stating this plainly, because the gaps are as informative as the counts.

• 54 of 123 brokers have no leverage figure in our checked facts, and 70 have no minimum deposit. Some publish those numbers and we recorded something more useful about them instead. We cannot separate the two without re-reading every page, and we will not guess which.
• We did not verify any licence against a regulator's register for this piece. The regulator counts are what the broker says and what our reviewers recorded, not independent confirmation.
• We hold no structured record of payment methods, withdrawal times, commission by asset class, or which entity serves which country. This is the single biggest gap in our broker coverage and we are working on it.
• Advertised, not achieved. Every figure is what the broker publishes. Nothing here evidences that a client received a withdrawal, a spread or a leverage tier.

How to check a broker in five minutes

The whole of Finding 1 is something you can test yourself before depositing.

Step 3 is the one that settles it. If you are being offered 1:500 and the site advertises an FCA, ASIC or CySEC licence, you are not signing with that entity. Step 5 is the one people skip: a company register search takes about a minute, and six of the brokers on this site failed that test in September.

Limitations, stated plainly

• This is not the market. It is the 123 brokers we review, chosen over time by reader interest and visibility.
• Counts are floors. They reflect what our checked facts record, not everything a broker publishes. Only Finding 1 is robust to this, and only in the direction of understating.
• It is a single month. Ratings and closure flags are current to September 2026.
• We rate these brokers and earn commission on some of them. Our rating methodology is published, and the CLMarkets case above is a live example of that method failing until a separate check caught it.

Using these figures

Cite any statistic here with a link back. Per-broker facts are on the individual review pages with their sources. Corrections are welcome and we will date them.

Related reading: our forex broker ranking, the prop firm equivalent of this study, and our head-to-head broker comparisons.