XM review.

Overview

XM runs one website with two companies behind it, and the one you end up contracting with is not settled by where you live.

We loaded www.xm.com from eleven countries on 13 August 2026: four samples of the homepage per country plus six or seven inner pages each, every request routed through a country-specific exit, with seven of the eleven exits verified against a geolocation service before the sweep. Only two legal entities were ever served. XM Global Limited, licensed in Belize under number 8557558, reached nine of the eleven. Trading Point of Financial Instruments Ltd, the Cypriot investment firm holding CySEC licence 120/10 [CySEC], reached six. Four countries got both, on the same URL, on repeat requests.

The United Kingdom exit split two and two across four loads. Two samples carried the Cyprus footer, the 75.12% retail loss disclosure and a 30:1 cap. Two carried the Belize footer, no loss percentage anywhere on the page, and a page advertising 1000:1.

Germany and Japan got Cyprus four times out of four. Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Singapore, India and the United Arab Emirates got Belize four times out of four. Indonesia, Thailand and South Africa each returned the off-pattern build once in four.

The two builds are not the same product. The Cyprus entity is an EU-licensed firm, capped at 30:1 for retail clients, with the loss figure on the page and Investor Compensation Fund membership written into its client agreement. The Belize entity offers 1000:1, publishes no loss percentage, adds cryptocurrencies and Turbo Stocks to the instrument list, and its client agreement provides for no compensation scheme at all. Same logo, same login button, different consequences when something goes wrong.

XM says it started in 2009 and reports more than 20 million clients across over 190 countries and 13.5 billion executed trades. Those are company figures. We checked none of them, and none of them is a safety fact.

Our score is 5.6 out of 10, which sits in the risky band, so be clear about what that does and does not mean. Both entities a sampled reader was actually shown are verified on their own regulator’s register, and both registers publish xm.com back [CySEC]. Neither xm.com, nor xmglobal.com, nor any Trading Point name appears on CySEC’s non-approved domains list, which we re-read at source on 13 August 2026 [CySEC]. What drags the number down is disclosure. The cost of trading here is published nowhere, and the loss figure reaches a minority of readers.

Overview table

Facts list

• Two entities were rendered across eleven country exits on 13 August 2026: nine of the eleven regulated entities the group claims were never shown to anyone we sampled, and the licences section tables all fourteen names the group uses, including unlicensed parents.
• CySEC 120/10 carries licence date 05/08/2010 and company registration 251334, matching the HE251334 printed in the site’s own EEA footer [CySEC].
• Belize licence 8557558 shows status active, with www.xm.com and www.xmglobal.com in the regulator’s own domain field.
• No FCA authorisation carries the XM brand today; the group’s live UK firm trades as Trading.com under FRN 705428.
• The Cyprus entity’s UK record has read “No longer authorised” since 19 December 2023.
• The 75.12% retail loss figure appeared on none of the ten pages we fetched in Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Singapore or the United Arab Emirates.
• No spread, commission or stop-out number appears in the server HTML of any page, in any of the eleven countries.
• /funding-and-withdrawals returns a 404 from XM’s own server, and neither sitemap variant lists a funding, deposit or fees path.
• The dormant fee is USD 10 a month after 90 days without activity, capped at your free balance.
• Minimum deposit is $5 on both retail accounts and $10,000 on the Shares account.
• We hold no approved user reviews for XM, so no part of this score comes from community reports.

Key Takeaways

What the eleven-country sweep and the register searches add up to, before you read the detail.

• Your counterparty is a coin toss in some countries and a foregone conclusion in most. Belize served nine of eleven exits; only Germany and Japan got the Cyprus firm on every load.
• The regulatory story is real but it is not XM’s story. The group’s strongest permissions, a live FCA authorisation with client-money rights and a current Australian licence, sit under the Trading.com brand and cover no XM account.
• Protection is entity-shaped: the Cyprus client agreement gives the Investor Compensation Fund its own clause, and the Belize agreement has no compensation provision at all.
• You cannot price this broker before you join it. Spreads, commissions, swap rates and stop-out levels are all absent from the public site.
• The one number XM does publish, a USD 10 monthly dormant fee, is capped and fairly written, and it lives in a PDF rather than on a fees page.
• The loss disclosure that European rules exist to force is missing from the build most of the world sees, and it went missing on half the UK homepage loads too.
• Local licences exist in the UAE and South Africa and were never served to readers there; the DFSA permission is futures-only in any case.
• One claimed licence, XM (BVI) Limited, is not on the register that should hold it, on a search that finds comparable firms.
• Nothing here is a scam signal: no warning list, no non-approved-domain entry, no clone [CySEC].

Readers in Germany or Japan can treat the rest of this review as an ordinary cost-and-platform question. Everyone else should start with the entity table below.

Licenses & Regulation

This is the section that decides whether the rest matters.

Two companies operate xm.com. Both are verified at source, and in both cases the regulator publishes the domain back, which is the check that counts. A licence that never mentions the website is not evidence about the website.

Two caveats on the Belize record, because they change what you are buying, and one of them is about what the register cannot tell you. It publishes twelve fields per licensee, and not one of them concerns client money, compensation or segregation, for any firm on the list. So the register is silent on protection by design, and reading that silence as reassurance would be a mistake. The document that does answer is the client agreement: XM Global’s contains no compensation-scheme provision at all, while the Cyprus entity’s gives Investor Compensation Fund membership its own section at clause 71.

The second caveat is the licence type codes, LIC-TYPE-S06 and LIC-TYPE-S09, which stay unresolved: the FSC’s public classifier endpoint returns 404, so nobody outside the regulator can say what category the firm is licensed in. The register’s initial registration date reads 1 January 2025, which is a migration-shaped date, and we will not publish it as a grant year.

The Cyprus card has a gap of its own. It publishes no approved trade name field, so “XM” is not recorded as a trade name of 120/10; only 34 of the 247 Cypriot investment firms publish one at all [CySEC]. The approved-domains entry does that job instead.

The rest of the group, and who actually holds what

A dozen more names appear in the site’s own footer dictionary or on the parent company’s regulation page. We searched the registers for all fourteen names the group uses, including ones XM does not claim. The group parent, Trading Point Holdings Ltd, holds no licence of its own, which is ordinary for a holding company and is not a finding.

Read that table for what it is. The group clears a fit-and-proper bar in several serious places, and a company holding a live FCA permission with client-money rights is not a boiler room. But none of those permissions covers an XM trading account. The FCA authorisation belongs to a sibling brand, the Dubai one is futures-only, Kenya’s is non-dealing, and the UAE one is a promotion licence held by a company whose regulator-published record contains no link to xm.com.

Which entity each country was served

Two absences in that table deserve names. A United Arab Emirates exit was served the Belize company on every page we fetched, never Trading Point MENA, whose DFSA licence is real and current: the string F003484 returns zero matches across all ten retained UAE page texts. South Africa is the same story, Belize on three of four homepage samples and on every inner page, never XM ZA, whose FSCA number 49976 appears nowhere in the ten retained South African pages. Both local licences exist. The site did not serve them.

Warning lists

Clean, and dated. A 2,506-line extract of CySEC’s non-approved domains register, re-read at source on 13 August 2026, contains no xm.com, no xmglobal.com and no Trading Point name [CySEC]. No warning mirror we hold returns a hit for the brand or its domains.

One register stayed shut on us: FSC Mauritius, behind a bot challenge we did not attempt to defeat. We record that as unchecked rather than as an absence, because those are different claims and only one of them would support a low score. We also did not attempt the BaFin and CNMV passporting registrations the Cyprus entity lists, so nothing in this review rests on either.

How to Trade

MetaTrader, or nothing.

The platform list below comes from the site’s own api-get-platforms payload rather than a marketing page, so it is what the site actually ships.

Full parity across both MetaTrader generations, on every operating system that matters, plus XM’s own phone app. That is more than plenty of larger brokers manage, and it is why the platform criterion scores 7 rather than 5.

What is missing is choice. No cTrader, no TradingView integration, no proprietary desktop terminal. If you have decided you do not want to trade through MetaTrader, XM has nothing else to offer you, and that is a hard stop rather than an inconvenience.

XM says 99% of all trades are executed in under one second, out of more than 13.5 billion executed. That is the company describing itself. We hold no execution data of our own and no third-party audit, so treat it as a claim.

Two things you would normally check before funding an account cannot be checked here. The per-account spread and commission columns and the stop-out level are drawn into the page client-side from an API at apigw.tp-serv.com, and are absent from the server HTML in all eleven countries. So the percentage at which XM closes your positions is not readable on the public site. You get it after you register, which is the wrong order.

Hedging is allowed on every account type, and negative balance protection is advertised as standard. What that protection is worth depends entirely on which entity you signed with, which the next sections take apart.

Account Types

Four accounts rendered in the eleven countries we sampled. Three more exist only in the site’s language files.

The blank column is the story. XM publishes no spread and no commission figure for any account, on any public page, in any of the eleven countries. A Thai promotional banner claims gold spreads as low as 2.0 pips on Ultra Low and “as low as zero pips” for an account called Zero, and neither of those is a EURUSD number, which is the one figure a reader can actually compare against another broker.

Our old catalogue row for XM listed a 0.6 pip minimum spread. Nothing on the current site supports it, so we removed it rather than reprint it.

Zero, Micro and an elective professional account sit in the account-types language bundle and rendered in none of the eleven countries. They may be real and geo-restricted. They may be stale strings from an older site. We cannot tell you which, and neither can the site.

The gearing split

1000:1 is the Belize number. The Cyprus entity caps retail clients at 30:1, and a UK exit was served the Belize page advertising the higher one. The arithmetic is worth sitting with: at 1000:1, a move of a tenth of a percent against a fully committed position consumes all the margin behind it. That is not an argument against high ratios in the abstract. It is an argument for knowing which of the two companies is holding your deposit before you choose a size.

Bonus language appears on the Standard account on the Belize build only: “Open our most popular account to get bonuses that boost your trading power”. The EEA build has no bonus or promotions page at all.

Every account is advertised with negative balance protection, hedging and an Islamic swap-free option on request.

Negative Balance Protection

XM advertises negative balance protection as standard on both builds and on every account type. What the promise is worth depends on which company holds your money.

On both builds, that protection is XM’s own promise, written by XM. We found no rule cited for it anywhere on the site, and we are not going to supply one it does not claim.

The difference between the two entities sits one step further back: what stands behind the firm if the firm itself fails. The Cyprus entity states that it belongs to the Investor Compensation Fund, on its own regulation page and again at clause 71 of its client agreement.

Those are two different protections and people confuse them constantly. One caps what a gap can do to your balance. The other decides what happens when the broker cannot pay you back at all.

XM Global’s Belize agreement contains no compensation provision at all. Its negative balance protection is a contract term the company writes and can amend, and there is no second layer underneath it. The Belize register cannot settle the question either way, because it publishes no field about client money or compensation for any licensee on its list.

That asymmetry is why our structured record marks investor protection as false for XM as a whole. The entity serving nine of eleven sampled countries has no compensation clause in its contract, and presenting the Cypriot cover as a product-wide feature would mislead most people reading this.

We did not trigger a stop-out, hold a position through a gap, or test the protection in any way. This is what the agreements and the registers say, and nothing more.

Trading Instruments

XM advertises “Easy Access to 1,400+ Global Assets” on the homepage and over 1,400 on its stable-gearing page. No per-class breakdown is published anywhere. The forex page shows ten pairs and a “Register to see More” link, which is the pattern across the whole site: detail lives behind the signup.

Crypto and Turbo Stocks are Belize-only. A German or Japanese reader who arrives from a page listing them is reading about somebody else’s account.

What we cannot tell you: how many FX pairs, how many single shares, which indices, or the contract size on any of them. The figure 1,400 is XM’s own, unaudited and unbroken down, and it counts two builds that do not offer the same list.

For a retail account this range is wide enough that the missing detail is a disclosure problem, not a product problem. You will find something to trade. You will not find out what it costs.

Education & Analysis

The research layer is real, and every item below is named on XM’s own tool pages.

• Trading Central supplies the analysis suite: Market Buzz, Fundamental Insight, Crowd Insight and TC Newsdesk, all sitting on the analytical tools page.
• An economic calendar runs on the site.
• Forex calculators are listed as an all-in-one tool, with a separate currency converter.
• A research portal publishes news and market analysis.
• The Learning Center hosts written material, and live education rooms run alongside it.
• A VPS service is offered under its own separate terms document.

The analysis carries the Trading Central name on XM’s own page, so the research is licensed in rather than written in house. That is common and it is not a criticism. It does mean the quality signal here is Trading Central’s, not XM’s.

We did not open an account, so we have not sat in one of those education rooms or read a single premium note from the inside. Everything above is what the public site publishes it has.

The calendar and calculators are table stakes at this point. Live rooms are the more useful part for someone new, and they double as a sales channel. Both of those things are true at once, and treating the second as a scandal would be silly.

One gap is worth naming here rather than in the fees section: none of this material tells you what your own account will cost, because that number is not published anywhere on the site either.

Special Offers

Promotions exist on one build only.

The Belize build carries bonus language, XM Competitions, an XM Traders Club and a Refer a Friend programme. The EEA build has no bonus or promotions page at all. So the promotions sit with the entity whose client agreement carries no compensation provision, and the readers most likely to be offered a bonus are the ones with the least behind them.

We found no figure attached to any of it. No bonus percentage, no cap, no turnover requirement, no expiry, on any page we fetched. A bonus you cannot price is not an offer you can compare, and bonus terms are exactly where withdrawal conditions tend to hide.

XM Copy Trading runs on a separate site, social.xm.com, linked from the Belize build’s own menu. We did not review the strategy providers on it, and no performance figure from that platform appears anywhere in this review.

Opening an Account

Five dollars opens a Standard or an Ultra Low account. The Shares account asks for $10,000.

Past the deposit, XM publishes less about onboarding than most of its peers, and we are not going to fill the gap with guesswork. We did not open an account. Our evidence is the registers, the public site fetched from eleven countries, and the two client agreements. So this review does not tell you how many minutes verification takes, which document formats the upload accepts, or whether a proof of address is required, because the site does not say on any page we could reach and inventing it would be worse than leaving it blank.

What the agreements do spell out is what happens if you stop.

• An account that is never funded is archived after 60 days.
• An account holding less than USD 5 of free balance is archived after 90 days without activity.
• A funded account with no trade, deposit, withdrawal or internal transfer for 90 calendar days starts paying the monthly dormant fee.

Demo accounts are available on both builds. Open one before you fund anything, and while you are in there, read the company name in the footer. Given what the sweep found about entity routing, that one glance tells you more about your protection than any page on the site.

Deposits & Withdrawals

The finding here is an absence: XM has no funding page.

Not a thin one, not one hidden behind a login. The /funding-and-withdrawals URL returns a 404 from XM’s own server, and neither sitemap variant, 80 paths on the Belize build and 72 on the EEA build, contains a funding, deposit, withdrawal, payment or fees path. The help centre renders its articles client-side from Intercom, so no payment method appears in any page we fetched. Three further URL guesses were blocked by our fetching vendor rather than by XM, and they prove nothing in either direction.

That is why the payment options list in our record for XM is empty. Our old row listed cards, bank transfer, e-wallets and crypto. We deleted it. No page on the current site supports that list, and republishing unsourced payment rails on a review people use to decide where to send money is the exact laziness this site exists to correct.

What is published sits in the client agreements, and it is not reassuring reading.

• Both agreements reserve the right to impose withdrawal limits and withdrawal fees at any time: clause 74.3 in the Belize agreement, clause 55.4 in the Cyprus one.
• Bank transfer charges are yours, under clause 74.8 (Belize) and 55.9 (Cyprus).
• The dormant fee is USD 10 a month after 90 calendar days with no trade, deposit, withdrawal or internal transfer: clause 79.3 (Belize) and 61.3 (Cyprus). It is capped at your free balance, and an empty account is not charged.
• Swap is charged at triple rate on Wednesdays for FX and precious metals, and no swap rate table is published anywhere.
• Swap-free accounts are offered on request, subject to proof of need.

So the only trading-adjacent cost XM publishes as a number is the one that applies when you are not trading. It is fairly written: capped, and zero on an empty balance. It also lives in a PDF instead of on a fees page, which is the whole problem in one line.

We scored fees 3.5 out of 10, and the reason is not that the data is unavailable to us. The data exists. The site pulls per-account spreads, commissions and stop-out levels from its own API into the page after load, so those numbers are sitting on XM’s servers right now. They are simply not in anything a person can read before signing up, and a withdrawal fee that the contract lets the firm introduce at any time is not a fee schedule.

Customer Support

You can reach a human, and the channels are not decorative. LiveChat and Intercom both load on every page, in every country we sampled. Email goes to [email protected], with [email protected] as a second address.

The published hours are the problem. XM lists two weekday windows, 07:00 to 15:00 and 07:00 to 21:00 GMT+2, with daylight saving adjustments, and makes no 24/5 phone claim anywhere on the site. A product that trades from Sunday evening to Friday night is supported on a European office schedule, so the New York close and the Asian pre-open fall outside both windows. If your position gaps at 02:00 GMT+2, chat is your only route to a person.

Phone numbers render by entity, which sounds tidy and is not.

Only the office matching the entity you were served appears on your page. A reader in Dubai or Cape Town who gets the Belize build, which is what happened on every UAE page and almost every South African one in our sweep, is handed a Belize City number and a Belize counterparty instead of the local office whose licence covers the market they live in. The support experience and the regulatory problem are the same problem.

Language reach is real and countable: 28 site locales, taken from the sitemap’s own path prefixes. The about page claims more than 30 languages for the support team, which is a bigger and different claim, and we could not check it.

One oddity from the sweep, filed under quality control rather than safety: an Azerbaijan exit was served the simplified Chinese localisation on all four homepage samples. Nobody is harmed by that. It does not suggest a tightly run geo layer either, which is the same layer deciding which company you sign with.

Prohibited Countries

The Belize build names the exclusions plainly: the United States, Canada, Israel, Iran and other sanctioned countries.

The United Kingdom is handled differently, and the mechanism matters more than the list. XM ships a UK-specific modal whose strings sit in the language bundle of every page we fetched: “Unfortunately, the product or service you’re trying to access isn’t available in your country”, followed by a choice between staying on XM and continuing to Trading.com/uk, described as “another entity of the group which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN: 705428)”. That attribution is correct, and we verified the firm behind it.

We never saw the modal fire. It renders client-side and appeared in the server HTML of no UK page, while the UK exit was served the Belize homepage on two of four samples with no loss disclosure at all. A UK reader may be redirected. A UK reader may land on the Belize build and carry on. We cannot tell you which happens in a real browser, and that uncertainty is itself the finding.

A parallel set of strings tells EU visitors the site “is operated by a non-European entity which is not subject to European laws and regulations” and points them to Trading Point of Financial Instruments Ltd instead. XM ships that warning because the Belize build reaches EU visitors, which is what we observed from a UK connection.

US residents are shut out of this brand rather than the group: the group’s US arm, Trading.com Markets Inc, is CFTC-registered and an NFA member, operating under the Trading.com name.

Conclusion

XM is two products behind one login page, and the honest summary depends on which one you get.

If you are in Germany or Japan, or anywhere the Cyprus footer renders consistently, you are dealing with an EU-licensed firm that has held CySEC 120/10 since August 2010, caps you at 30:1, shows the 75.12% loss figure on the page [CySEC] and gives Investor Compensation Fund membership its own clause in your contract. That is an ordinary mid-market European CFD account. The main thing against it is that you cannot see what it costs before you open it.

Everywhere else, you are onboarding with a Belize company at up to 1000:1, with no compensation provision in your contract, no published loss rate, and a register that says nothing about client money in either direction. Same brand, same platform, a materially different bet.

Why the score is 5.6

Five criteria, unweighted mean, no hand-setting.

• Regulation 6.5: both served entities verified at source and real licences elsewhere in the group, held down by Belize onboarding for nine of eleven countries, a missing BVI record and licence categories nobody outside the Belize FSC can resolve.
• Fees 3.5: not one number a reader needs to compare cost is published.
• Platform 7: MT4, MT5 and XM’s app across desktop, web and mobile, with no non-MetaTrader option and execution quality self-reported.
• Support 6.5: real channels and 28 locales, capped by two weekday windows.
• Reviews 4.5: no approved user reviews on our platform, and the only outcome figure XM publishes reaches a minority of its visitors.

Our published score for XM was 8.1 in April 2026 and 7.6 in July 2026. It is 5.6 today, and that movement is a correction to our own record rather than a change at XM. The old row credited XM with ASIC and DFSA regulation: both belong to group entities that were never served to any of the eleven countries, and the Dubai one is futures-only on a matched-principal basis. The old row also carried a 0.6 pip spread and a zero withdrawal fee, neither of which is published anywhere on the current site. We had that wrong for months, and saying so on the page is better than quietly re-ranking.

Who it suits: someone who wants MetaTrader, starts with a very small balance, and is reliably served the Cyprus entity. Who should walk: anyone who needs the cost of a trade before funding, anyone in the UAE or South Africa expecting the local licence they read about, and anyone for whom a compensation scheme is not optional.

Higher-scoring alternatives in our catalogue: Exness at 8.0, Pepperstone at 7.9, eToro at 7.9 and IC Markets at 7.5. The full list sits at our broker directory.

We hold no approved user reviews for XM. If you have funded, traded or withdrawn with either entity, send us what happened and we will check it against the registers.

One practical step before you do anything else, and it costs nothing: load xm.com, scroll to the footer, and read the company name. If it says XM Global Limited, your counterparty is in Belize City, and none of the European protections described in this review apply to you.

FAQ