Top 10 CySEC Regulated Brokers by WIKILIX Score

Ten brokers hold the top WIKILIX scores among the firms we track that carry a Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) licence and a clean status. They are ranked below by that score alone, from Trading.com at 82.4 down to Fortrade at 64.1. All ten come from the 137 CySEC-licensed brokers on our records with a clean regulation status, out of 217 that hold a CySEC licence in total; the other 80 carry a flag such as a scam report or a suspicious-clone label and were left off.

Why the order looks the way it does

The only thing that sets this order is the WIKILIX score, our overall read on a broker. That is why a name you may not recognise can sit above one you do. Trading.com Markets UK Limited leads at 82.4, while Interactive Brokers, in business since 1996 and holding licences from eleven authorities, sits third at 72.5. The score does not measure spreads, trading costs, execution speed or day-to-day support, so read this as a starting shortlist rather than a verdict on which broker is cheapest to trade with.

Two rules kept the list honest. Every firm here carries a clean status on our records, so the scam reports and suspicious-clone entries that appear higher up the raw score order were set aside. And where one company showed up twice under different names, we kept a single record: a duplicate labelled RMS TRADE that actually belongs to Pepperstone scored 79.9, but Pepperstone's own entry scores 62.5, which falls below this top ten.

What a CySEC licence gives a trader

CySEC authorises and supervises investment firms based in Cyprus under the European Union's MiFID rules. A CySEC-regulated firm keeps client money in segregated accounts and must belong to the Investor Compensation Fund, which can pay eligible retail clients up to 20,000 euros if the firm fails. It also has to meet minimum capital requirements. Retail leverage on the Cyprus entity is capped at 1:30 for major currency pairs, which is why Trading.com, eToro and Fortrade all show a 1:30 ceiling here while the offshore arms of other groups show far higher figures. WIKILIX classifies CySEC as a tier-2 onshore regulator: real protection inside the EU, one step below tier-1 authorities such as the FCA.

That FCA point is worth holding on to, because every one of these ten also holds an FCA licence alongside its CySEC one. Six of the ten opened before 2015, so this is not a list of brand-new arrivals.

Where the CySEC licence stops

A CySEC licence covers the Cyprus-regulated entity, not necessarily the account you end up trading through. Only two of these ten, Skilling and FXTIME, are actually headquartered in Cyprus. The rest sit in the United Kingdom, the United States, the United Arab Emirates and the Bahamas, and several run separate offshore arms that a client outside the EU may be routed to instead. Before you deposit, work out which entity your account belongs to and what that specific entity protects.

• Look up the firm on CySEC's public register and match the licence number to the legal name shown here, not to the trading brand.
• Check whether the account you are opening is the Cyprus entity or an offshore branch, since the Investor Compensation Fund covers only the former.
• If the 1:30 retail cap and the 20,000 euro cover matter to you, make sure onboarding routes you to the Cyprus firm rather than an overseas one.
• Read the entity's own terms on who it accepts as clients, because a CySEC licence does not say which countries a broker serves.