XTrade

XTrade is a retail contracts-for-difference brand that has been online since at least 2012 and trades under the domain xtrade.com. Its own Licences and Regulations page states that the service is operated by Xtrade International Ltd, a Belize company licensed by the Belize Financial Services Commission under number 4705379, with a registered office in Belize City. Two further group companies are named in the site footer: Peak Wealth PTY Ltd in South Africa, which holds financial services provider licence FSP44681, and Blacsley Como Ltd in the Union of Comoros, which holds authorisation L15808/BC on the island of Anjouan.

What it offers. XTrade is a CFD-only house covering forex, shares, commodities, indices, cryptocurrencies, bonds and ETFs. It does not offer MetaTrader. Trading is done on the broker's own XTrade WebTrader, a browser platform that uses TradingView charting technology, plus its own Android and iOS apps. The commercial pitch is commission-free trading on fixed spreads with leverage of up to 400:1, and the minimum deposit is 100 USD. The broker does not publish a spread table, an account-tier comparison or instrument counts per asset class, and its own pages give the total instrument range inconsistently as both 400+ and 700+.

Funding. Deposits are taken by bank transfer and by a long list of card schemes: Visa, Visa Debit, Visa Electron, Mastercard, Mastercard Debit, Maestro, Delta, Diners and Discover. The broker charges no deposit fee. The stated maximum transaction is 500,000 USD by bank transfer and 50,000 USD by card. Withdrawals must go back to the method used for the deposit and take about five business days, with the broker warning that a receiving bank can stretch this to three weeks. An inactivity fee of 15 USD per month applies once an account has had no trading activity for three months.

Support. Live chat, an international line on +44 203 8074001, local numbers for several countries, and separate mailboxes for support, compliance and finance. The site is published in more than thirty languages and support is advertised as 24/5.

The caveats, plainly. Every licence behind this brand is offshore or sits with a company other than the one that takes the trades. The Belize authorisation the broker leads with could not be shown to cover forex or CFD dealing: the only Belize permission traceable to Xtrade International Ltd in this review is a securities trading licence, and Belize offers no client compensation scheme. The South African licence belongs to Peak Wealth PTY Ltd, a separate entity, so a client of the Belize company does not sit behind it. The Comoros authorisation is from the lowest-tier offshore regime available. The operating company is also younger than the brand: the Belize registry record shows Xtrade International Ltd incorporated on 22 January 2015, under the earlier name Financial Arena Ltd, while the site claims establishment in 2012. The registration number and registered address the site publishes for that company do not match the registry record either. Clients from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Iran and North Korea are not accepted.

Who it suits. Traders outside the major regulated markets who want a simple, no-commission, fixed-spread CFD app and are willing to accept offshore supervision, no compensation scheme, and no MetaTrader. Anyone who can open an account with an onshore-regulated broker in their own country should expect materially stronger protection elsewhere.