Tier-4 Regulated Brokers: What a Tier-4 Licence Means

One hundred and seventy-one brokers in the WIKILIX database hold at least one tier-4 licence, the weakest of the four regulatory tiers we track. Holding one does not place a broker at the bottom of the market, and it does not place it at the top. The tier describes a single licence, not the company behind it.

That gap is the first thing to understand. Interactive Brokers sits at the head of this list with a score of 72.5, and it holds eleven licences, among them the UK's FCA and Australia's ASIC. Its tier-4 entry is one line in a long register. At the other end, xChief holds a single Comoros MISA licence and nothing else, and CapPlace, scoring 4.0, is the same shape. A tier-4 licence is common to all three. What it buys the trader is not.

What a tier-4 licence is, and what it is not

Tier-4 authorities ask the least of the brokers they register. In practice that means light capital requirements and little ongoing supervision, with limited recourse if a firm fails or refuses a withdrawal. Two bodies issue almost every tier-4 licence in our data: the Comoros' MISA, recorded against 103 of these brokers, and Vanuatu's VFSC, recorded against 77, with a handful holding both. A licence from either lets a firm call itself "regulated" without submitting to the oversight the FCA or ASIC applies.

This is why the tier reads better as a floor than as a label. Eighty-nine of the 171 hold nothing beyond their tier-4 registration, and for them the tier is the whole story. It is a thin one. The other 82 hold at least one further licence, and for many that includes a stronger tier, so the tier-4 entry becomes a minor line rather than their only protection.

How the list reads

Scores run from 72.5 down to 4.0, and the median is 29.1, below the midpoint of that range. Clean records are the minority. Fifty-nine brokers carry our "regulation" status, while 110 carry a warning of some kind: 68 are marked offshore, 23 as operating without regulation, 13 as suspicious clones, five as having exceeded their licence and one, HTFX, as an outright scam despite a score of 62.9. That last case is the clearest argument against reading a score, or a licence, as a safety rating on its own.

Age varies as widely as everything else. The oldest firm here, Plotio Global Financial, opened in 1983, and 36 of the 171 were trading before 2010, though most are far younger and a cluster registered only in the past three years. Leverage tells its own story. Forty-seven brokers advertise a maximum of 1:1000 or more, and three, among them CapitalXtend and INGOT, reach 1:5000. Where a broker also answers to the FCA or ASIC, that ceiling drops hard, which is why a name such as Trading 212 shows 1:30 while the tier-4-only firms reach for four figures.

What this list does not tell you

It does not tell you which brokers accept clients from your country, and it says nothing about spreads or execution quality, neither of which we hold here. It is built from the licences recorded in our database as of today, so a firm that gains or loses a tier-4 licence moves on or off this list without anyone editing the page. Before depositing anywhere, confirm the licence on the issuing authority's own register, and read the broker's own terms for who it will actually onboard.