BINARY OPTIONS, CHECKED

Binary options apps: legit, or banned where you live?

TrueBroker is a free broker safety checker, and this page is its plain account of binary options trading apps: what the product is, which regulators have banned selling it to ordinary traders, and what our own reviews found behind two of the best known names. Read it before you deposit, not after.

What is a binary options app?

A binary option is a fixed bet on a price. You pick an asset, a direction and a time window, often minutes or less, and stake an amount. If the price finishes on your side you receive a fixed payout, and if it does not you lose the stake. There is no position to manage and nothing in between. The apps that sell them advertise the payout: Pocket Option’s own homepage promises “Payouts of up to 218%”. The firm on the other side of every bet is the app itself.

Which regulators ban binary options for retail traders?

Three we have read at source, and each published its reasons.

• United Kingdom: the Financial Conduct Authority confirmed a permanent ban on 29 March 2019. All firms acting in or from the UK are prohibited from selling, marketing or distributing binary options to retail consumers, in force from 2 April 2019. The FCA estimated the ban could save retail consumers up to 17 million pounds a year.
• European Union: the European Securities and Markets Authority agreed on 27 March 2018 to a prohibition on the marketing, distribution or sale of binary options to retail investors.
• Australia: the Australian Securities and Investments Commission banned the issue and distribution of binary options to retail clients from 3 May 2021, initially for 18 months. Its reviews found that approximately 80 percent of retail clients lost money trading them, with net losses of around 490 million Australian dollars in 2018.

We have not read the rules of every country, so the absence of yours from this list is not permission. The useful question is narrower: is the company behind the app licensed by anyone, and does its own small print say it serves you?

Is Pocket Option legit?

It is an operating business with its own web platform, mobile app and Mac client, and it matched none of the 1,441 warning list entries we mirror from CySEC, the FCA and the FSC Mauritius. What we could not find is a regulator. No page on pocketoption.com that we fetched names a financial regulator or a licence number, the one regulatory claim on file traces only to an earlier review and not to the firm’s current pages, and the WebMoney badge on its legal page is, in the page’s own words, an identity check. Its terms and conditions pages returned “Page not found” when we fetched them, so the document that would name the contracting company was not readable. The full findings are in our Pocket Option review.

One more thing from its own footer. The risk warning on the South African version of the site states that it does not provide service to residents of the EEA countries, the USA, Israel, the UK, the Philippines, Japan and Brazil. If you live in one of those places and the app still lets you sign up, the firm’s own text says you are not a client it serves.

Is IQ Option regulated?

Partly, and probably not for you. IQBroker Europe Ltd holds CySEC licence 247/14, confirmed on the register, and that licence covers EEA residents only. Everyone else is onboarded by SKY LADDER LLC in Antigua and Barbuda, for which no financial regulator is named anywhere in the firm’s material. The firm’s own accounts page says its services are not available to residents of the United States, Canada, EU and EEA member states, the United Kingdom and Australia. The detail is in our IQ Option review.

What about Quotex, Olymp Trade, Binomo and EO Broker?

They are among the most searched names in this category, and we hold no review of any of them. NOT ON RECORD is not a verdict in either direction: we have not checked their companies, their licences or their terms, so we say nothing about them. The checks below apply to each, and the legit check will tell you whether a name or a website appears on the regulator warning lists we mirror.

How do you check a binary trading app before you deposit?

• Find the company. A legal name, a country and a registration number should be in the terms or the footer. An app that names no company has answered the question.
• Find the regulator, then leave the app and search the licence on the regulator’s own register. A badge is not a licence, and neither is a payment provider’s verification mark.
• Read the excluded countries in the app’s own risk warning. Being able to register is not the same as being a client the firm says it serves.
• Read the withdrawal and bonus terms before you fund the account. A bonus usually carries a trading volume condition that must be met before any of it can be withdrawn.
• Search the exact name and domain. Lookalike domains exist for the big names: regulator lists we mirror carry forexiqoptions.co and iqoptionfx.org, neither of which is IQ Option.

The same method, register by register, is in how to check a broker.

Real or fake: what does that question actually mean?

Usually two different things. A fake app is a clone of a real brand, built to take a deposit and vanish, and the check for that is the exact domain and the warning lists. A real app from a real company can still be unlicensed, can exclude your country in its own terms, and can sell a product that regulators have banned for people like you. Real is the lower bar. Licensed, and willing to serve you under that licence, is the one that matters.

Fair questions

THE SHORT VERSION

A binary option is a fixed bet against the app that sells it, and the UK, the EU and Australia have each banned selling it to retail traders. Of the two big names we have reviewed, one shows no regulator at all and the other is licensed only for a region it says it does not serve. Check the company, the licence and the excluded countries, then run the name through the legit check.