Karoll Brokerage: FSC licence 189-ИП/15.03.2006

The broker publishes no restricted-country list anywhere on its site, and its account-opening page describes a route for non-residents: signing with a qualified electronic signature valid under your own law, or a notarised, translated and apostilled power of attorney, or attending the Sofia office in person. Foreign identity documents must be notarised, translated and apostilled. Absence of a published block is not the same as confirmation that your jurisdiction is accepted, so ask before you begin.

The broker's asset-protection page states that client assets are covered by the Bulgarian Investor Compensation Fund, which pays 90 per cent of the value of a claim up to a maximum of BGN 40,000 per client where the intermediary cannot meet its obligations because of its own financial difficulties. That is a statutory scheme, and it is a protection offshore CFD brands do not carry. It does not cover trading losses.

The site does not say. It states only that a withdrawal is requested by phone or email and is paid to a bank account you have previously declared in your own name. No processing time, fee or limit is published for either deposits or withdrawals, so ask for those in writing before you fund an account.

By bank transfer or in cash at a Karoll office in Sofia, Varna or Burgas. Exchange accounts are funded in EUR at UniCredit Bulbank; forex and international-markets accounts at United Bulgarian Bank in BGN, EUR or USD. The beneficiary is Karoll JSC and the reference must carry your PIN or client number. There is no card, e-wallet or cryptocurrency funding.

Bulgarian Stock Exchange equities cost 0.55 per cent with a EUR 2.50 minimum per trade, falling on a quarterly-turnover scale to 0.50, 0.45, 0.40, 0.35 and finally 0.30 per cent above EUR 500,000 of quarterly turnover. Bonds and government securities are 0.20 per cent with the same EUR 2.50 minimum. Orders placed in an office cost 1 per cent of the transaction value, minimum EUR 15. MTF BSE International transactions carry a EUR 12 minimum. Forex and CFDs are priced through floating spreads the broker advertises from 0.5 pips.

Four. Karoll MetaTrader 4 for forex, Karoll Dealing for contracts for difference on shares from 21 countries plus gold, silver, oil and currency pairs, Karoll Broker for the Bulgarian Stock Exchange with margin buying, short selling and an iOS and Android app, and Interactive Brokers' Trader Workstation for international markets. CMC Markets is named as a further partner.

The current account pages state a ceiling of 1:30 for individual clients on the forex and CFD platforms, which matches the European retail cap. Higher figures survive on older pages of the site, and the Advance FX copy-trading profiles run from 1:10 up to 1:300. Treat 1:30 as the retail ceiling and confirm anything above it in writing before you rely on it.

EUR 100 or USD 100 opens a Karoll MetaTrader 4 or Karoll Dealing account. Interactive Brokers accounts opened through Karoll carry no stated minimum. The site publishes no minimum for the Bulgarian Stock Exchange platform.

The company's own pages state that the investment intermediary was established in 1997, which makes it roughly twenty-nine years old. That is unusually long for a broker offering leveraged products, and it is corroborated by a continuous public record: awards from the Bulgarian Stock Exchange annual rankings across 2002 to 2014, and a news archive of primary offerings it has arranged.

The operating company is Karoll JSC, in Bulgarian КАРОЛ АД, a joint-stock company recorded as active in the Bulgarian Commercial Register under UIC 831445091 at 57 Hristo Botev Blvd., Sofia 1303. It carries LEI 2594009OZZQZDNQS0M10. The company describes itself as part of the wider Karoll financial group, which also includes an asset manager, an insurance arm and several funds.

The broker states on its own regulation page that Karoll is licensed as an investment intermediary by the Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission, and that it is a member of the Bulgarian Stock Exchange - Sofia and an active member and registration agent of the Central Depository. It publishes a photograph of the licence but not the licence number, and it links to no register entry, so the authorisation could not be confirmed against the regulator itself in this research. Two things on the site are consistent with European supervision: a retail leverage cap of 1:30 and the mandatory disclosure that 59.1% of retail investor accounts lose money trading CFDs with the provider.