Tier-1 Regulated Brokers: 601 Firms With a Clean Record

601 brokers and trading firms in our records hold at least one tier-1 licence and carry a clean regulatory status, and this page ranks all of them by overall WIKILIX score. The firm at the top, Marex, scores 91.3 and is licensed by the FCA, Hong Kong's SFC and the US NFA. What surprises most readers is who sits below it: alongside the retail names are banks and asset managers, because those are the firms that actually clear tier-1 authorisation.

What "tier-1" means on WIKILIX, and which authorities count

A tier-1 licence is one issued by a major-economy regulator with real enforcement powers and, usually, a compensation scheme behind it. On WIKILIX the tier-1 authorities include the FCA in Britain, ASIC in Australia, Hong Kong's SFC, the US SEC, NFA and FINRA, Singapore's MAS, Germany's BaFin and Japan's FSA. Not every source agrees on the membership. CySEC and the DFSA are widely called tier-1 elsewhere, but our records place them a tier lower, so a broker whose only top licence is CySEC will not appear here.

In our records the FCA alone licenses 252 firms and ASIC 238, the two largest tier-1 groups, with the SFC close behind at 188. Age runs deep in this set: 345 of the 601 have traded for at least 16 years and 216 for at least 26. The oldest names predate the industry itself, with Bank of Scotland's record reaching back to 1695 and the Swiss house Pictet to 1805.

The 268 firms that hold a tier-1 licence but are not on this list

Holding a tier-1 licence is not the same as being safe to trade with. Of the 869 firms in our records that show a tier-1 licence, 268 carry a status flag and are left off. 144 of them are recorded as suspicious clones and 32 as operating without regulation. The clones matter most, because a cloned firm copies the licence details of a real tier-1 broker precisely so it looks legitimate. A licence number in a company's paperwork is a claim, not proof that the firm quoting it is the one the regulator authorised.

What the list does not tell you

These rankings cover licences and recorded status, nothing more. They do not measure spreads or execution quality, and they cannot tell you whether a given firm will accept you as a client from where you live. A group can hold a tier-1 licence for one subsidiary while onboarding you through a different, offshore entity. Leverage shows how wide the set really is: 173 firms here offer 1:500 or more, led by StoneX and FXCM at 1:1000, while 176 cap at 1:30 or less, several institutional names effectively at 1:1.

Before you rely on a tier-1 badge

• Match the entity: check that the company opening your account is the one named on the tier-1 licence, not a sister firm in another jurisdiction.
• Read the licence number on the authority's own register. For UK firms that is the FCA Financial Services Register, not the broker's site, and confirm the permissions cover retail trading.
• Treat a clone warning as final. If a firm carries a suspicious-clone flag, the licence it displays almost certainly belongs to someone else.
• Remember that a group holding several tier-1 licences does not multiply your protection. Only the entity you actually contract with counts.