AC Markets (Europe) Ltd review.

Overview

AUSPRIME is the trading name of AC Markets (Europe) Ltd, a Cyprus Investment Firm holding CySEC licence 350/17 since 11 December 2017. The firm sells prime of prime liquidity and direct access trading to brokers, funds and professional traders, not retail trading accounts. Its own notice page states plainly that “AC Markets (Europe) Limited is dealing only with professional clients and eligible counterparties”, and its RTS 28 execution statement repeats that “the company accepts only professional clients and eligible counterparties”. If you are an individual looking for a place to open a normal trading account, this firm does not offer one, and that is the single most useful thing on this page.

We fetched ausprime.eu from eleven countries (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Singapore, Japan, India, UAE, South Africa, United Kingdom and Germany) through a residential exit in each. Every one of the eleven returned byte for byte identical content naming the same Cyprus entity and the same licence number. There is no offshore arm, no second entity and no country switch. That is unusual in this industry and it is the firm’s strongest point.

Overview Table

Facts List

• Legal entity AC Markets (Europe) Ltd, Cyprus company number HE 348274.
• CySEC licence 350/17, licence date 11 December 2017, confirmed on the CySEC register entry 46453.
• Previous names on the register: Lttrader Ltd and NBF International Ltd.
• Register authorises reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders on behalf of clients, and dealing on own account.
• Ancillary permissions cover safekeeping and custody, granting credits or loans, and foreign exchange connected to investment services.
• Cross border passport recorded on the register for 25 EU member states. Belgium is not among them.
• Five employees at the end of 2025, all in Limassol, per the firm’s own Pillar 3 report.
• CET1 capital of 762,300 against a permanent minimum requirement of EUR 750,000, a total capital ratio of 101.64%.
• In 2024 the firm was its own largest execution venue at 52.45% of client volume.
• Four domains are approved on the CySEC register. Only ausprime.eu serves a site; two redirect to it and one does not resolve.

Key Takeaways

• Not a retail broker. The firm states in two separate published documents that it accepts only professional clients and eligible counterparties. There is no retail account to open.
• One entity, everywhere. Eleven country fetches returned identical pages naming AC Markets (Europe) Ltd and CySEC 350/17. No offshore entity appears at any vantage we tested.
• The licence is real and covers the onboarding entity. CySEC 350/17 is on the register with company number HE 348274 and matching contact details.
• No costs are published. No spread, commission, swap, withdrawal or inactivity figure appears anywhere on the site or in the legal documents. The order execution policy says fees arrive by email in contract specifications after an account exists.
• The firm is the counterparty to your trades. Its order execution policy says it “is always the counterparty (or principal) to every trade” and is “the sole Execution Venue”, which sits awkwardly beside the direct market access language on the marketing pages.
• Its own slippage data contradicts its own homepage. The homepage advertises no slippage. The 2024 execution quality statement reports slippage on 74.91% of trades, 65.18% of it negative.
• Capital sits just above the floor. Own funds of 762,300 against a 750,000 permanent minimum, a surplus of 1,050 after the firm’s Pillar II allocation, down from a 103.99% ratio in 2024.
• Small operation. Five employees and total assets of 985,816 at the end of 2025.
• No negative balance protection. The professional client page states clients are obliged to make additional payments if an account goes negative.

Licenses & Regulation

AC Markets (Europe) Ltd appears on the CySEC register of Cypriot Investment Firms under licence number 350/17, licence date 11 December 2017, company registration number 348274, with a Limassol address and the phone number +357 25 752 420. The same number and address appear in the site footer and on every legal document the firm publishes, so the identity chain from brand to legal entity to register entry is complete. The register also records two previous names for the company, Lttrader Ltd and NBF International Ltd.

The register lists three investment services: reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders on behalf of clients, and dealing on own account. Ancillary services are safekeeping and administration of financial instruments, granting credits or loans where the firm is involved in the transaction, and foreign exchange connected to investment services. The firm’s Pillar 3 disclosure reproduces exactly the same list, so register and filing agree.

One claim on the site is not supported by the register. The About Us page says the firm has “the CySEC license to provide investment advice and ancillary services”. Investment advice does not appear anywhere in the register entry for 350/17, and it is absent from the firm’s own Pillar 3 list as well. Readers should treat the advisory framing on the marketing pages, including the repeated phrase “direct access trading advisory”, as marketing language rather than a licensed permission.

The register records a cross border passport into 25 EU member states, from Austria to Sweden. Belgium is absent, which matches the footer statement that services are provided to the EEA “excluding Belgium”. The firm’s own page titled 21 EU Regulators lists a shorter set of 21 countries and includes Norway, which does not appear in the register’s cross border list. We did not verify the two national authorisation numbers quoted on that page, 151071 for Germany and 4534 for Spain.

What each country is served

We fetched the homepage from eleven vantages. The result is the same everywhere, which is the opposite of the pattern this section usually documents.

The absent percentage disclosure is worth explaining rather than scoring. The familiar wording about the share of retail investor accounts that lose money is a retail marketing disclosure, and this firm says it has no retail clients to market to. It puts the point in its own words on its professional client page, where it says professional clients “may not be provided additional disclosures that are required to be provided to retail clients”, naming standard risk warnings specifically. A long unnumbered risk warning does appear in the footer of every page.

We searched the FCA register for “Ausprime”, which returned no entries, and for “AC Markets”, which returned twenty loosely matching firms, none of them this company and none of them a clone entry using either name. The firm’s four domains all appear on the CySEC list of approved domains and none appears on the CySEC list of non approved domains. We did not check ASIC, the FSCA or any offshore register, because no evidence pointed to a licence there.

Prudentially the firm is thin. Its 2025 Pillar 3 report gives CET1 capital of 762,300 against a permanent minimum capital requirement of EUR 750,000, a total capital ratio of 101.64%, and a surplus of 1,050 once its own Pillar II allocation is counted. The 2024 report gave 779,950 and 103.99%, so the buffer narrowed year on year. Total assets at the end of 2025 were 985,816, of which 743,147 was cash. The reports state that they are audited by the firm’s external auditors and published alongside the audited financial statements, and the 2025 edition was signed by the board on 28 April 2026. One caution on the figures: the report’s capital table is headed in dollars and labelled in thousands while the values are plainly euro units, so we have quoted the numbers as printed and used the euro amount the report gives in its own prose for the minimum requirement.

How to Trade

Trading happens either over a FIX API connection or through a browser based interface the firm calls its trading user interface. There is no MetaTrader 4, no MetaTrader 5, no cTrader and no mobile application. The interface page states that it is “Fully responsive no additional mobile apps required”. Credentials for either route are issued by the back office team after an account is funded.

The marketing describes direct market access to tier one venues and an ECN model. The legal documents describe something different, and where the two disagree the legal documents are what a client is bound by. The order execution policy states that the firm “is always the counterparty (or principal) to every trade”, that a position opened with the firm “can only be closed with the Company”, and that it “acts as principal and not as agent on the Client’s behalf; therefore, the Company is the sole Execution Venue”. Re-quoting is disclosed in the same document as a possible response to a delayed market order.

The firm’s own RTS 28 execution quality statement for 2024 puts numbers to this. Its top execution venues were AC Markets (Europe) Limited itself at 52.45% of volume and 51.2% of orders, Broctagon Prime Ltd of Cyprus at 47.55% of volume, and Equiti Capital UK Ltd at 0.0015%. Just over half of client volume was executed against the firm. The relationships with Broctagon and Equiti are dated 26 November 2018 and 3 September 2020.

The same statement reports an average execution time of 57ms, a fill likelihood of 98.02% and order rejection of 1.98%. It also reports that 25.09% of trades had zero slippage, meaning 74.91% had some, of which 9.73% was positive and 65.18% negative. The homepage banner advertises tight spreads and no slippage. The firm’s own regulatory filing says close to two thirds of trades filled worse than requested. Both statements are the firm’s own, and the filing is the one prepared under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/576.

Leverage is set at the professional client level, since retail caps do not apply here. The published table gives 1:100 on major and minor currency pairs, 1:50 on exotics, 1:50 on gold, 1:33 on commodities other than gold, 1:25 on major indices and 1:5 on cryptocurrencies. The April 2023 product list shows per instrument leverage that mostly agrees, with EURUSD at 100 and cryptocurrencies at 5, but lists XAUUSD at 100 where the current page caps gold at 1:50. The product list is three years old and we could not tell which figure governs today.

Account Types

There is one account, and it is a professional account. The firm publishes no retail account, no demo account and no tiered menu of account names. Two client routes are described, professional traders and institutional traders, but both are the same professional or eligible counterparty categorisation with the same FIX API or GUI access and the same onboarding email address.

Professional account eligibility

The site says an applicant qualifies by satisfying at least two of three criteria: significant transactions at an average frequency of ten per quarter over the past four quarters, a financial instrument portfolio exceeding EUR 500,000, or at least a period working in the financial sector in a professional capacity. The site is explicit that shares, derivatives, debt instruments and cash deposits count towards the portfolio test while property, direct commodity ownership and the notional value of leveraged positions do not.

The two published versions of this test do not match. The Client Categorization Policy states the frequency test as ten transactions per quarter “over the previous ten quarters” and requires at least one year in a financial sector role. The website states four quarters and no minimum period. A prospective client reading only the policy would be held to a materially harder bar than one reading only the website, and the firm does not say which governs. The policy PDF dates from 2022 and the page is undated, so we could not resolve it.

What the professional categorisation costs a client

The firm sets this out unusually plainly on its own professional traders page. Product restrictions are not imposed. Leverage caps do not apply. Negative balance protection is not provided. Standard risk warnings may not be given. Communications may use more complex language. On best execution it says that under Article 27 of MiFID II it must act in the client’s best interests but is not required to treat overall cost as the most important factor and “might prioritise other factors that we deem more important”.

The Client Categorization Policy adds that a professional client or eligible counterparty may request retail treatment in writing, and that the firm “may agree to provide a higher level of protection”. That is a request the firm may decline, not an entitlement. For an eligible counterparty the policy is blunter still: the firm is not required to provide best execution nor to disclose fees and commissions it pays or receives.

No minimum deposit is published for any of this. The onboarding page says wire instructions follow approval, so the number, if there is one, is disclosed privately.

Negative Balance Protection

The firm’s two published positions on negative balance protection contradict each other, and a reader should know which one is binding.

The homepage lists “Negative balance protection per account basis” among its risk management tools. The professional traders page says the opposite: “We are not required to offer professional clients negative balance protection. Therefore, should your account fall into negative balance, you are obliged to make additional payments. This means you may incur losses exceeding your deposits.”

The second statement is the one that matches the firm’s client base. Negative balance protection under the ESMA 2018 measures is a retail client protection, and this firm states it takes only professional clients and eligible counterparties, so it carries no obligation to provide it. The practical position is that a client here can owe the firm money beyond the amount deposited, and the homepage line should not be read as a promise.

On client money, the Risk Disclosure Policy says the firm “may be required to hold client’s money in an account that is segregated from other clients and the Company’s money in compliance with current regulations, but this may not afford complete protection”. The Pillar 3 balance sheet carries an Investor Compensation Fund asset of 28,259, so the firm participates in the Cyprus scheme. The Client Categorization Policy names the Investor Compensation Fund only in its list of retail client protections. We could not establish from the firm’s own documents what cover, if any, a professional client of this firm would have, and we have left that unresolved rather than guessing.

Trading Instruments

The site markets “over 600 instruments” across forex, indices and energy, commodities and metals. The product list the same pages link to, dated April 2023, is more generous than the marketing: it runs to 116 pages and itemises roughly 1,220 instrument lines.

Two things about that table are worth flagging. The stock CFDs and cryptocurrencies make up the great majority of the list yet neither has a page in the site’s own instruments menu, which covers only forex, metals, indices and energy, commodities and trading hours. And the list is three years old, so a live quote sheet may differ. The firm does not publish a dated instrument count anywhere current.

No spread, commission or swap figure appears in the product list. The columns are name, security type, base, quote, digits, minimum trade, contract size, trading hours and leverage. Pricing is not part of the published document.

Education & Analysis

There is very little here, which is consistent with a B2B firm rather than a shortcoming it is hiding. The site carries a news section split into Articles and Market Updates. Market Updates are posted regularly and were current at the time of writing, with entries dated 22, 23 and 27 July 2026, so the site is actively maintained rather than abandoned.

Beyond that there is no education programme, no webinar schedule, no economic calendar, no trading academy and no research desk output that we could find. There is a downloadable brochure and the product list, both linked from the services pages. The Risk Disclosure Policy is the closest thing to explanatory material, and it does describe what a CFD is and how leverage magnifies losses in plain terms across 15 pages.

The Risk Disclosure Policy also draws a boundary worth noting. It says that where the firm provides generic market recommendations these “do not constitute a personal recommendation or investment advice” and that the firm “is not acting as an advisor”. That is the correct framing given the register does not list investment advice among the firm’s permissions, and it is more careful than the About Us page that claims an advice licence.

Analysis tools belong to the trading interface rather than to a research offering. The interface page describes layouts, columns and reporting rather than charting, indicators or backtesting, and reads in places like an unedited website template rather than a description of a trading platform. We could not evaluate the interface itself because access requires a funded professional account.

Special Offers

There are none, and there should not be. We found no bonus, no deposit match, no rebate scheme, no cashback, no contest, no referral programme and no affiliate or introducing broker offer anywhere on ausprime.eu.

That is the expected answer for two reasons. Under the ESMA measures adopted across the EU in 2018 the firm itself notes that restrictions on incentives apply to retail CFD trading, and the firm operates under CySEC rules that constrain what a Cyprus Investment Firm may offer. More simply, this firm sells liquidity to brokers and funds, and a deposit bonus is a retail acquisition tool that has no place in that sale.

The nearest thing to a commercial inducement on the site is the claim of a 24/5 onboarding process with limited requirements, which is a service claim rather than a promotion. We have not seen any promotional term sheet and none is published. If an offer is ever presented to a reader in this firm’s name, the absence of any published promotion on its own site is a reason to check the source carefully against the contacts on the contact page.

Opening an Account

There is no signup button. Both the professional traders and institutional traders pages give the same instruction: email [email protected] to request the account opening form. The site’s contact form collects a name, email, phone, company and message, and nothing about it opens an account.

What an individual professional applicant must supply

• A certified copy of a passport or national identity card, translated by a certified translator if it is not in English or Greek.
• A certified proof of address, such as a utility bill, house deed or bank statement no older than six months, showing name, full residential address and date of issue.
• A CV, described as confirmation of trading knowledge and experience.
• Trading history or other documents showing a financial instrument portfolio, including cash deposits, exceeding EUR 500,000.

What a corporate applicant must supply

• A certified copy of the certificate of incorporation.
• A certified copy of the articles of association or memorandum.
• Certified documents confirming the ownership structure, such as a certificate of incumbency, share registers and share certificates.

After approval the firm issues wire instructions for a first deposit, and once funds are credited the back office sends credentials for the browser interface or for API integration. Both pages describe the KYC step as required under CySEC rules and the Cyprus money laundering regulations.

No timescale is published for any stage. The homepage advertises 24/5 onboarding with limited requirements, which sits oddly beside a certified document list and a EUR 500,000 portfolio test, and we have no way to check which is closer to the real experience. We have left account opening time unrecorded rather than repeating the marketing claim as a fact.

Deposits & Withdrawals

This is the thinnest area of the firm’s disclosure, and it is thin in a way that matters. Nothing on ausprime.eu states a minimum deposit, a withdrawal minimum, a withdrawal fee, a processing time, a currency list or an inactivity fee.

The only funding method named anywhere in text is a bank wire. The professional traders page says that after approval “you will be provided with wire instructions for your first deposit”. The homepage carries a panel headed Supported Funding & Withdrawal Methods, but its content is a single image with an empty alt attribute, so the methods it shows are not readable as text and we could not record them. We fetched that page from eleven countries and the panel was identical in all of them.

On costs, the order execution policy is explicit that the schedule is private. It says the firm “does not incorporate any commissions or fees into its quoted price”, that for some instruments “a commission or a financing fee might be applied”, and that “the fees and commissions are available in the Contracts specifications sent by the Company via email”. It describes two charging models, a commission per trade and a mark-up on spread, and daily financing fees on positions held overnight based on prevailing market interest rates. Which of those applies, and at what level, is not disclosed before an account exists.

For a firm selling to brokers and funds, quoting bespoke pricing per counterparty is normal commercial practice and not evidence of anything wrong. It does mean that nobody can compare this firm on cost from public information, including us, and that a reader should insist on the contract specifications document in writing before funding anything.

One indirect measure is available. The 2025 Pillar 3 report shows a K-CMH client money held requirement of 2.22 thousand euro and a K-COH client orders handled requirement of 1 thousand, both very small, alongside total assets of 985,816 and cash of 743,147. Those figures are consistent with a firm holding modest client balances rather than a large deposit book.

Customer Support

Support is a small Cyprus office, published honestly as such in the footer and then overstated on the homepage. The footer gives business hours of Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. The homepage claims 24-hour technical support and a 24/5 service. Five employees are recorded in the 2025 Pillar 3 report, all in Limassol, which makes the footer version the more plausible of the two.

The compliance address on the register still points at the lt-markets.com domain, which no longer serves a site of its own. It is a small thing, but a firm that has spent years operating as AUSPRIME might reasonably have refreshed the contact record its own regulator publishes.

Complaints are handled under a published procedure. The firm undertakes to respond within two months, and states the period “cannot exceed three (3) months from the date of submission of the complaint”, with a written final decision and reasons. If the complainant is not satisfied the procedure points to the Cyprus Financial Ombudsman at [email protected], and complaint records are kept for at least five years. Two months is a long first response window by retail standards, though it is within what the Cyprus regime allows.

Two office addresses circulate in the firm’s own material. The register and the site footer give Room 102, Block B, Steratzias Court No. 41. The contact page and the letterhead of the PDF policies give Steratzias Court 2, first floor, flat 103. Both are on the same avenue in Mesa Geitonia. We could not determine which is current.

Prohibited Countries

AC Markets (Europe) Ltd does not publish a list of prohibited or restricted countries. It publishes the opposite construction, a positive list of where it does serve, and that list is the only geographic statement we found on the site. Anywhere not named is simply outside it.

The footer of every page reads: “Provision of Services: AC Markets (Europe) Ltd provides services to residents of the European Economic Area (excluding Belgium), China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Republic of Marshall Islands, Thailand, Lebanon, United Mexican States, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and Ukraine.” That wording was identical in all eleven countries we fetched from.

Belgium is the one named exclusion, and it is corroborated independently: the CySEC register records a cross border passport for 25 EU member states and Belgium is not among them. Two sources agreeing on one absent country is about as solid as a geographic restriction gets. The firm gives no reason for the exclusion and we have not attributed one to it.

We found no mention anywhere of the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, Iran, North Korea or any of the other jurisdictions that commonly appear on such lists, either as permitted or as prohibited. We are not going to fill that silence with an inferred list. The honest statement is that the firm names where it serves and says nothing at all about anywhere else, and that a reader outside the named set should assume they are not served until the firm confirms otherwise in writing.

Conclusion

AC Markets (Europe) Ltd is a real, verifiable and quite small Cyprus Investment Firm that does not sell to the public. CySEC licence 350/17 checks out on the register, the company number HE 348274 matches across the register and every legal document, the four domains the register approves are the four domains the firm uses, and eleven country fetches produced one entity and one licence number with no variation at all. On the question this catalogue exists to answer, which entity would actually onboard you and what protection it carries, this firm gives the cleanest answer we have recorded: the same one, everywhere, under a European licence.

What it does not give is a retail proposition. The firm states in its notice page and again in its regulatory execution filing that it deals only with professional clients and eligible counterparties. Anyone who is offered a retail trading account “with AUSPRIME” or “with AC Markets” should treat that offer as suspect and check it against the contacts published on the firm’s own contact page and the CySEC register entry 46453 before sending money. The firm publishes its own warning to that effect, naming ausprime.eu as its only site.

For the professional and institutional readers it does serve, the picture is mixed and the tension is between the marketing pages and the legal documents. The site sells direct market access, tier one liquidity and no slippage. The order execution policy says the firm is always the principal and the sole execution venue. The 2024 execution quality statement shows the firm itself as the largest venue at 52.45% of volume and reports negative slippage on 65.18% of trades. None of that is unlawful and all of it is disclosed by the firm, but the disclosure lives in PDFs while the contrary claim lives on the homepage.

Two further things deserve weight before a counterparty decision. Costs are not published at any level, so no external comparison is possible. And the capital position is tight: own funds of 762,300 against a permanent minimum of EUR 750,000, a ratio of 101.64% that fell from 103.99% a year earlier, on a five person operation with total assets under one million. Those are the firm’s own audited numbers, published to a schedule the regulation requires, and publishing them at all is to its credit.

Our score of 5.4 reflects a verified licence covering the only entity in play, set against costs we could not check, a platform limited to FIX and a browser interface, support that runs on Cyprus office hours, and no user evidence in either direction. It is not a warning. It is a record of a firm that is exactly what it says it is on its notice page, and rather less than what it says it is on its homepage.