ASIC Regulated Brokers: 154 Without a Warning Flag

One hundred and fifty four brokers in the WIKILIX database hold a licence from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and carry no warning label against their record. That is the list below, ordered by WIKILIX score, running from Ebury Partners Markets Ltd on 84.8 down to Grand Markets Limited on 33.3.

ASIC appears on 236 broker records we hold in total. The other 82 are not on this page, and the section below says exactly why. A third of the list is long established: 54 of the 154 have a recorded opening date before 2010, and the earliest date in the set belongs to JPMorgan Chase & Co., recorded as 1799. The median score is 51.9.

The list at a glance

• 154 brokers hold an ASIC licence with no warning label recorded against them.
• 115 are regulated by two or more authorities. The other 39 hold ASIC and nothing else in our records.
• 41 also hold a licence from the UK Financial Conduct Authority.
• 69 are headquartered in Australia. The remaining 85 are not, with the United Kingdom next at 16.
• 54 opened before 2010. Five have no opening date recorded at all.
• 79 record a maximum leverage of 1:500 or higher, and 10 record 1:30.
• Scores run from 33.3 to 84.8, median 51.9.

How we built this list

Two filters, nothing else. The first is the ASIC licence itself: a broker appears here if our licence records show at least one entry issued by ASIC. The second is our own status label, which has to read regulation, meaning no warning has been recorded against the firm by the WIKILIX research desk.

That second filter is what removed 82 entries. Forty carry a suspicious clone label, 19 are marked offshore, nine exceeded, nine no regulation, and two are recorded as scam. A clone label means the record looks like an operation trading on a licensed firm's name or licence number, which is the most common route by which an ASIC number ends up on a website that has nothing to do with ASIC.

The ordering is the WIKILIX score, descending. The score is our own composite, calculated from the records we hold on each broker. It is not a rating of spreads, execution or customer service, and it moves when the underlying records move.

What an ASIC licence covers

An Australian Financial Services licence authorises one named legal entity to provide named services to Australian clients. Since March 2021, ASIC's product intervention order has capped retail CFD leverage at 1:30 on major currency pairs and required negative balance protection. Read that against the leverage figures here. Seventy nine brokers on this page record a maximum of 1:500 or more, which is not a number an ASIC-licensed entity may offer an Australian retail client, so the question worth asking is which group entity is quoting it. Interactive Brokers Hong Kong Limited shows how tangled that can get: eleven regulators sit on its record, ASIC, the FCA and Canada's CIRO among them.

Longevity is easier to verify than reputation. IG Group Limited has a recorded opening date of 1974 and licences from eight authorities. Commonwealth Bank of Australia records 1911. Pepperstone Group Limited records 2010 and a maximum leverage of 1:500.

Before you open an account

• Search the AFS licensee register on ASIC's own site for the entity name printed on the client agreement, not the brand on the homepage.
• Check the licence number on the site against that register entry, since a copied number is exactly what a clone operation relies on.
• Confirm which group entity you are contracting with. An ASIC-licensed parent does not make an offshore subsidiary ASIC-regulated.
• Ask which entity holds client money, and where, before you deposit anything.

What this page cannot tell you: spreads, commissions, withdrawal times, execution quality, or whether any of these firms will accept you as a client from where you live. We hold none of that. Everything above reflects licence and status records in the WIKILIX database as of today, and a licence can be varied, suspended or cancelled between our check and your deposit.