The 10 Longest-Established MISA Regulated Brokers

Ten firms lead this ranking, and the oldest of them recorded its first day of business in 1983. Each holds a licence from the Mwali International Services Authority, the offshore registry known as MISA, and each has traded for well over a decade. We have 103 brokers on record carrying a MISA licence. Forty of them have an opening date at least ten years back, and the ten below are the longest-running among those that pair their Comoros registration with oversight from a second authority.

Why age, and why a second licence was the cut

The order here is plain: recorded opening date, oldest first. Longevity is the one thing this list ranks on, and Interactive Brokers Hong Kong (1996) sits above quadcode markets (2008) for no other reason. Where two firms share an opening date, the higher WIKILIX score breaks the tie, which is how FXTRADING.com took the tenth slot over a sister Gleneagle company dated the same day in May 2009.

Age alone was not enough to make the ten. A MISA licence on its own is the lightest oversight a broker can hold, so we kept only firms whose Comoros registration sits beside a licence from somewhere with teeth. That is a real cut. Of the 40 MISA brokers with a decade or more behind them, 32 carry a clean status on our records and just 14 also answer to another authority. Seven of the ten below hold at least one tier-1 licence, and six are authorised by Australia's ASIC. Interactive Brokers, the top scorer at 72.5, holds eleven licences in all, the FCA and Canada's CIRO among them.

What a MISA licence actually buys, and what it does not

MISA sits in the fourth and lowest regulatory tier we record. It is an offshore registry, not a market supervisor of the kind the FCA or ASIC runs, and it is not recognised by those tier-1 authorities. The large brokers here treat it accordingly: they use the Comoros entity for clients outside their onshore reach, not as their main protection. It shows in the leverage. quadcode markets, working under its ASIC arm, caps at 1:30, while INGOT advertises up to 1:5000 and RoboForex up to 1:2000. A MISA registration carries no compensation scheme and no retail leverage limit, so the licence a firm holds elsewhere counts for far more than the Comoros one it shares with the rest of this list.

Reading the list before you act on it

• Check which legal entity you would actually open with. Several names here run one onshore company and a separate offshore one, and only the onshore side carries the stronger licence.
• Confirm the second licence on that regulator's own register. An ASIC or FCA number is verifiable in a minute and is the part worth trusting.
• Treat the opening date as time in business, not proof of safety. YWO has traded since 1998 yet scores 38.4; the year a firm started says nothing about how it handles a client today.
• Match the leverage figure to the entity. The 1:2000 and 1:5000 numbers come from offshore arms, not the ASIC-regulated ones.