26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd review.

Overview

26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd is a Cyprus Investment Firm holding CySEC licence 435/23, granted on 4 September 2023. It is not a retail broker and it is not a professional client broker either. Its own Client Categorisation Policy is unusually direct about this: “The Company’s decision is not to deal with any Retail Clients and Professional Clients, therefore, if you do not qualify as an Eligible Counterparty, you will be rejected.” Its Business Terms repeat the point about anyone asking for more protection: “If you make such a request, we are entitled to decline, and we will decline, transacting with you.” If you are an individual looking for a trading account, there is nothing here to open, and that is the most useful sentence on this page.

The firm is the European arm of a group built out of Invast Global, the Australian prime broker. The Australian Business Register records 26 DEGREES GLOBAL MARKETS PTY LTD, ABN 48 162 400 035, active since 15 February 2013, with Invast Global registered as one of its business names from 14 April 2016 and 26 Degrees Global Markets from 17 March 2023. The Cyprus company was registered on 25 October 2021 as Invast Financial Services (EU) Ltd and renamed later, a previous name the CySEC register still carries.

The group runs two websites that a reader should not confuse. 26degreesglobalmarkets.com is the Australian company’s site, carries an ASIC licence claim in every footer, and publishes the product guide, the funding instructions and the withdrawal form. 26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy is the Cyprus company’s site, is three pages long, and publishes no product, no price and no bank detail at all. It is also the only domain CySEC has approved for this licence. We fetched both from eleven countries and every country was served the same page.

Overview Table

Facts List

• Legal entity 26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd, Cyprus company number HE 427102.
• CySEC licence 435/23, licence date 4 September 2023, register entry 96061, previous name Invast Financial Services (EU) Ltd.
• Register permissions: reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders on behalf of clients, and dealing on own account, across all eleven instrument categories domestically.
• Ancillary permissions on the register: safekeeping and administration of financial instruments, and granting credits or loans where the firm is involved in the transaction.
• Cross border passport into ten EEA states, recorded against a single instrument category rather than all eleven.
• Only approved domain on the CySEC list: www.26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy.
• Eligible counterparties only. Retail and professional applicants are refused by policy, not screened out by price.
• Client money is subject to a Title Transfer Collateral Arrangement by default under clause 28.2, so on insolvency the client “will rank only as a general creditor of the Company”.
• Seven employees in Cyprus, and a Risk Management Committee that “held one meeting in 2025”.
• Three consecutive loss making years in the firm’s own disclosures: 580,937 in 2023, 1,302,238 in 2024 and 814,960 in 2025.

Key Takeaways

• There is no retail account, and no professional one either. The firm accepts eligible counterparties only, and says in two separate published documents that everyone else is rejected. That is a narrower gate than most wholesale firms operate.
• The licence is real and it covers the entity you would contract with. CySEC 435/23 sits on the register with company number HE 427102, the Limassol address and the phone number that appear on the site and on every legal PDF.
• Two entities, and the busier website is the other one. 26degreesglobalmarkets.com is 26 Degrees Global Markets Pty Ltd of North Sydney and names ASIC in its footer. The Cyprus company appears nowhere on it.
• The published funding instructions belong to the Australian company. The Standard Settlement Instructions name 26 Degrees Global Markets Pty Ltd on every one of seven currency accounts. No Cyprus banking detail is published at all.
• Client money can stop being your money. Clause 28.2 applies a Title Transfer Collateral Arrangement by default, under which “All right, title and interest in and to such Money will pass to us directly”.
• Client activity has collapsed on the firm’s own numbers. The client money held requirement fell from 29,033 in 2023 to 19,356 in 2024 to 4 in 2025, and the client orders handled requirement from 21,550 to 7,183 to zero.
• Three loss years, funded by fresh shares. Paid up capital rose from 1,850,000 to 2,850,000 to 3,740,000 while accumulated losses reached 2,724,635 at the end of 2025.
• The 2025 report discloses a liquidity shortfall. It states that “The firm liquid assets are not sufficient for the firm’s Liquid Asset Threshold Requirement (LATR)”, where the 2024 edition had said the opposite.
• No cost is published at any level. No spread, no commission, no swap, no withdrawal fee, no inactivity fee, and no minimum deposit. The Fee Schedule the terms rely on is not on the site.
• The Cyprus terms are a lightly edited Australian document. They still warrant on trustees of a “superannuation fund” and number two consecutive clauses 20.1.7 and 20.1.8 twice each.

Licenses & Regulation

26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd appears on the CySEC register of Cypriot Investment Firms at entry 96061 under the name “26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd (ex Invast Financial Services (EU) Ltd)”, licence number 435/23, licence date 4 September 2023, company registration number HE 427102, address 28th October Avenue 261, View Point, 4th floor, 3035 Limassol, telephone +357 25 030 938, email [email protected]. Every one of those details also appears on the firm’s own site or in its own legal documents, and the company number is reproduced as HE427102 in the site footer and as 427102 in the firm’s regulatory disclosure report. The identity chain from brand to legal entity to register entry is complete.

The register grants three investment services, reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders on behalf of clients and dealing on own account, across all eleven financial instrument categories domestically, plus two ancillary services, safekeeping and administration of financial instruments and the granting of credits or loans where the firm is involved in the transaction. The firm’s own 2025 disclosure report reproduces that list and adds foreign exchange services connected to the provision of investment services. The register entry shows no instrument categories against that foreign exchange row, so the two are not identical, and we have not treated the firm’s version as authoritative.

Which entity a reader is served, by country

We fetched both group domains from eleven vantages through a residential exit in each: Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Singapore, Japan, India, the UAE, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Germany. Neither domain switches entity by country, which removes the most common trap in this catalogue but leaves a different one.

The absent percentage disclosure is the correct outcome rather than an omission. The familiar wording about the share of retail investor accounts that lose money is a retail marketing disclosure, and neither entity has retail clients to market to. Both footers say so, the Cyprus one in the form that its services “are directed only at institutional clients and eligible counterparties” and the Australian one that they “are not intended for distribution to retail clients”.

The two sites do not point at each other. The Cyprus page carries a header toggle reading EU and AUS, but the page as served contains no link to the Australian site, and the Australian site contains no reference to the Cyprus domain anywhere in its markup. A European reader who searches the brand will land on the Australian site, read an ASIC licence number, download a withdrawal form and a set of bank details in the Australian company’s name, and never learn that a Cyprus company exists. Nothing about that is unlawful, and the Australian terms are plainly labelled Wholesale Terms and Conditions, but it is the sort of split a reader should know about before assuming which company would hold their money.

The passport is narrower than the licence

The register records cross border services into ten EEA member states: Denmark, Greece, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. In each of the ten, the permissions are recorded against a single instrument category, number 9 of the eleven, rather than the full set the firm holds at home. We have not independently confirmed which instrument that category denotes and have not assumed it, though the firm describes its own business as “offering MiFID II regulated financial instruments with a particular focus on Contracts for Difference”. Nineteen of the other twenty nine EEA states are absent from the list, including France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Poland and Belgium.

What the filings say

The firm publishes disclosure reports for 2023, 2024 and 2025 under Regulation (EU) 2019/2033. They are the sharpest documents on the site, and they do not read the way the group’s marketing does.

Two of those rows matter more than the rest. The client money held and client orders handled requirements are fixed percentages of the underlying client money balances and client order flow, so a fall from 29,033 to 4, and from 21,550 to zero, is a fall of the same proportion in the business itself. On the firm’s own regulatory return, the Cyprus entity handled effectively no client orders in the year to 31 December 2025 and held almost no client money, while the group’s website was announcing prime brokerage awards. The permanent minimum capital requirement of 750,000 euro, not the size of the business, is what sets the capital the firm must hold, which is why the ratio can read 135% while the activity behind it reads zero.

The 2025 report also contains a disclosure the 2024 one did not. Under its internal capital assessment the firm states that “The firm liquid assets are not sufficient for the firm’s Liquid Asset Threshold Requirement (LATR)”, where the 2024 edition had said liquid assets were in excess of it. The regulatory liquidity requirement is given as 105,752 against total liquid assets of 579,634, so the shortfall is against the firm’s own internal threshold rather than the regulatory floor, but the firm chose to publish it and it should be read.

Three points of caution on the figures themselves. The capital tables are headed in euro thousands while the values are plainly euro units, the same printing quirk we have seen in other Cyprus filings, and we have quoted the numbers as printed. The 2025 capital table is headed Unaudited while the report text says the information “is audited by the Firm’s external auditors”, so the newest numbers are the least settled. And the 2024 report is titled 26 Degrees Global Markets without the (EU) Ltd suffix that identifies the reporting entity.

Registers we checked and what they returned. CySEC: found, verified, and the licence number, entity name, company number and approved domain all agree with the firm’s own material. CySEC list of approved domains: www.26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy, and nothing else. CySEC list of non approved domains: no entry for 26degreesglobalmarkets, 26dgm or Invast. FCA: we searched 26 Degrees, 26 Degrees Global Markets, Invast, Invast Global and Invast Financial Services, and all five returned zero entries, including zero clone entries, despite the group publishing a London office at 75 King William Street. The Australian Business Register: ABN 48 162 400 035 confirmed active, ACN 162 400 035, with Invast Global among its former business names. ASIC’s own licensee register is not reachable to us, so AFSL 438283 is recorded as claimed rather than checked.

How to Trade

Trading is done on an unnamed proprietary Trading Platform. The Business Terms never name it, never describe it and never link to it. Clause 4.2 adds three manual routes: the firm “may in our sole discretion accept instructions for Trades (including closing only Trades when our Trading Platform is not in operation) by telephone, email or Bloomberg Chat, but not through any other medium”. A Bloomberg terminal as a supported order channel tells you who the client is more clearly than any marketing page does. There is no MetaTrader, no cTrader, no mobile application and no demo account.

The firm deals as principal. Clause 2.5 states that “We will deal with you as principal and not as agent. This means that any Trades are agreed directly between you and us and we will be the counter-party to all of your Trades.” The same clause records that because the client is an eligible counterparty, the firm “does not have an obligation to apply best execution when executing Client orders, or receiving and transmitting orders for execution”, while undertaking to act honestly and professionally. Its Conflicts of Interest Policy sets out the consequences plainly, including that the firm “may act as principal for the Client in relation to the transactions” and “may trade its proprietary positions and at the same time has knowledge of Client’s future transactions via stop limit orders”.

We found no published execution quality statement, no venue list and no fill or slippage statistics for the Cyprus entity. That is consistent with a firm whose only client type it is not obliged to give best execution to, but it also means there is nothing to test the group’s execution marketing against. The Australian site sells “a suite of intuitive TCA and market impact tools” and quotes its Global Head of Electronic Trading saying the firm encourages clients “to analyse execution reports and metrics as often as possible”. None of those reports is public, and none of them is published by the Cyprus company.

Margin is set by the firm and disclosed only inside the platform. Clause 10.3 says Margin Requirement is calculated using a Margin Factor for the relevant market and that the details “can be found in Market Information on the Trading Platform”. Clause 10.7 lets the firm alter the Margin Factor on any account or any single trade, and clause 10.8 makes the change effective immediately, with 24 hours of notice promised for increases on open positions and that promise made subject to the firm’s rights under clauses 15 and 16. Failure to maintain margin is an Event of Default under clause 16. No leverage figure appears anywhere in public.

Clause 13 allows the firm to allocate Credit to an account at its discretion. The wording is worth reading twice: Credit “is to be used primarily for testing purposes”, “may not be used to pay Realised Losses”, “is not cash”, and “The provision of Credit is not a risk management tool and you acknowledge that the Credit on your Account and your indebtedness to us in respect of this Credit is not a limit as to your potential financial liability to us and it will not restrict your losses.” The firm can reduce or withdraw it on 14 days of notice.

Accounts are denominated in a base currency, and clause 3.7 makes that base currency euro unless the firm agrees otherwise, adding that the firm “will only accept funds in your Base Currency”. Trade confirmations arrive by email daily and become binding after 48 hours in the absence of a written objection, under clause 11.3. Statements arrive no less than monthly.

Account Types

There is one account and one client category, and the gate is narrower than at any other Cyprus firm in this catalogue. The Client Categorisation Policy sets out the three MiFID II categories and then states: “The Company’s decision is not to deal with any Retail Clients and Professional Clients, therefore, if you do not qualify as an Eligible Counterparty, you will be rejected.” Clause 2.2 of the Business Terms says the same from the other direction, that a client asking for a different categorisation with more protection will be declined, and that “The Company does not accept or offer its services to any retail or professional clients.”

Who qualifies as an eligible counterparty

An eligible counterparty here is an undertaking falling within the default professional categories of the Cyprus Investment Services Law: authorised or regulated financial firms including credit institutions, investment firms, insurance companies, collective investment schemes, pension funds and commodity derivatives dealers; large undertakings meeting two of a balance sheet total of at least EUR 20,000,000, net turnover of at least EUR 40,000,000 and own funds of at least EUR 2,000,000; national and regional governments, public debt managers, central banks and supranational institutions; and other institutional investors. The categorisation applies only to reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders and dealing on own account, which is exactly the set of services on the register.

The elective route that leads nowhere

The policy still reproduces the standard fitness test for treating a non professional as professional on request: transactions of significant size at an average frequency of 10 per quarter over the previous four quarters, a financial instrument portfolio including cash deposits exceeding 500,000 euro, or at least one year working in the financial sector in a professional position, two of the three to be satisfied. It matters less than it looks. Passing that test makes an applicant a professional client, and the same document says professional clients are refused. The firm may recognise such a person as an eligible counterparty on request, but only for the services for which they could be treated as professional, and it is not obliged to agree. A reader should not take the presence of the test as an opening.

What the categorisation costs

The policy lists the protections an eligible counterparty does not get, and it is a longer list than the professional client waiver most firms publish. No obligation on the firm to provide best execution, though the client may request it trade by trade. No obligation to provide prompt, fair and expeditious execution relative to other client orders or the firm’s own trading interests. No appropriateness assessment. No obligation to disclose execution venues or how the firm is remunerated. No product governance obligation to design instruments for an identified target market. No obligation to avoid remunerating staff in a way that conflicts with the client’s interests, and no obligation to refrain from accepting fees or commissions in connection with the service. Negative balance protection is not provided, and “The Investors Compensation Fund does not cover Eligible Counterparties.”

One document disagrees with the rest. The Risk Disclosure and Warnings Notice describes the target market as “eligible counterparties and small to large scale professional investors”, which names a client type the categorisation policy and the Business Terms both refuse. The two documents cannot both be operative and the firm does not say which governs. No minimum deposit is published for any of this, and no account opening timescale.

Negative Balance Protection

There is none, and the firm says so without hedging. The Client Categorisation Policy states that “Retail Clients will be provided with negative balance protection and as such, may not lose more than the total amount deposited in their trading account. Professional Clients and/or Eligible Counterparties will not be provided with negative balance protection.” Since the firm takes eligible counterparties and nothing else, the second sentence is the only one that applies to anybody it deals with. A client here can owe the firm more than they deposited, and clause 12.6 makes any debit balance “due and payable immediately”, with interest at up to 4% above the relevant central bank base rate under clause 12.8.

The client money position is more consequential than the negative balance one, and it needs the two clauses read together. Clause 28.1 says money transferred to the firm will be held with an authorised credit institution or an approved foreign bank outside the European Economic Area, segregated from the firm’s own money in accordance with the Client Money Rules. Clause 28.2 then applies the exception that swallows it: because the client is categorised as an eligible counterparty, money transferred by way of margin or otherwise “will be subject to Title Transfer Collateral Arrangement (“TTCA”), and you will not have any interest in or proprietary claim over such money. All right, title and interest in and to such Money will pass to us directly for the purposes of covering your obligations to us.” Clause 28.3 states the consequence: “in the event of insolvency, you will rank only as a general creditor of the Company.”

That is lawful. MiFID II forbids title transfer arrangements with retail clients and permits them with professionals and eligible counterparties, and the firm’s own categorisation policy flags the point in its list of retail protections. It is still the single most important fact on this page for anyone weighing the firm as a counterparty, because it converts a segregated client money claim into an unsecured claim on a company that has lost money in each of its three reported years and whose accumulated losses reached 2,724,635 against paid up capital of 3,740,000 at the end of 2025.

The firm’s own filing describes the position differently. Under credit risk mitigation the 2025 disclosure report states that “All Client funds are held in segregated accounts, separated from Company’s funds”. That sits awkwardly beside a default contractual term under which title to those funds passes to the firm. Both statements are the firm’s own and both are published, but only one of them is the contract.

Two further exposures are disclosed in the Risk Disclosure Notice rather than the terms. Client money may be held with institutions “within or outside Cyprus or the EEA”, and where it is held outside, the notice warns that in an insolvency “the Client’s money may be treated differently from the treatment which would apply if the money was held in a segregated account in Cyprus”. And the institution holding it “may hold it in an omnibus account”, pooled with other clients of the firm. Neither the banks nor the jurisdictions are named.

Trading Instruments

The Cyprus entity publishes no instrument list. Its three page site markets one asset group, headed FX and Metals, and describes it in terms of liquidity sourcing rather than product: “Our extensive Prime Broker relationships with Tier 1 investment banks gives us the capacity to curate bespoke liquidity solutions.” There is no product guide, no contract specification, no trading hours page and no instrument count anywhere on 26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy.

The detailed product documentation exists, on the Australian company’s site, and a reader should treat it as the Australian company’s range unless 26 Degrees confirms otherwise in writing. It is worth reproducing because it is the only concrete product information the group publishes, and because the counts check out against the marketing.

The index and commodity count is one of the few marketing claims in this group that we could test, and it holds: the site says “40 proprietary Index and Commodity CFDs” and the specification sheet lists exactly 40 rows, 25 index and 15 commodity.

Three things about that table need saying. The specification sheets carry no spread, no commission and no swap column, only symbol, currency, minimum and maximum order size, price precision, value of a price move, contract unit and the financing base rate. The borrow availability file the product guide links to is still served from an Amazon bucket named invastglobalpub, a leftover from the Invast Global era. And the CySEC register grants the Cyprus entity permissions across all eleven instrument categories at home but only one of the eleven for cross border business, so what the Australian company can sell and what the Cyprus company may passport into Spain or Sweden are not the same set.

Education & Analysis

The Cyprus entity publishes none. There is no research, no market commentary, no economic calendar, no webinar, no education section and no analysis of any kind on 26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy. The site has three pages, a homepage, a contact form and a legal document index, and nothing else. For a firm whose only permitted client is an institution with its own research function, that is a defensible position rather than a gap, but it means there is nothing on the Cyprus side for a reader to evaluate.

The group publishes a good deal, all of it under the Australian company. An Insights section carries dated market coverage, award announcements and a Fireside Chat interview series that runs to eleven episodes with fund managers including Blue Orca Capital, GAO Capital, Blue Fire AI, Golden Horse Fund Management, Alpha Alternatives, Antiloop, ANDA Asset Management, Blue Creek Capital, the Hedge Funds Club and TradeFlow. Recent pieces quote named staff in trade titles: James Alexander in TradeInformer on the prime of prime model and in e-Forex on liquidity management, Liam Smith on FX prime brokerage, Tiffany Besnard on capital introduction. A Cboe case study describes the firm enabling institutional broker clients to distribute retail market data at scale.

Analytical tooling is sold rather than published. The broker dealer pages describe pre trade and post trade transparency tools, transaction cost analysis and market impact analysis, free proprietary risk data tools, an integrated market data solution, and middle and back office reporting, with low latency environments named as LD4, NY4 and TY3 and dedicated trading servers in London, New York and Tokyo. None of it is documented in enough detail to assess from outside, none of it carries a specification or a price, and none of it is offered on the Cyprus site.

The nearest thing to explanatory material a Cyprus counterparty receives is the Risk Disclosure and Warnings Notice, which runs to six pages and does describe leverage, gearing, third party risk, technical risk, foreign currency risk and regulatory risk in plain terms. It is also the document that states the firm “will not provide you with any investment advice relating to investments or possible transactions in investments or in any derivative products or make investment recommendations of any kind”, which is the correct framing given the register lists no investment advice permission.

Special Offers

There are none, and there should not be. We found no bonus, no deposit match, no rebate, no cashback, no contest, no referral scheme and no affiliate or introducing broker programme on either 26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy or 26degreesglobalmarkets.com. Neither site has a signup funnel to attach a promotion to.

That is the expected answer for a firm selling prime services to broker dealers, hedge funds, family offices and proprietary trading firms. A deposit bonus is a retail acquisition tool, and this firm refuses retail and professional clients by policy. It is also constrained by the Cyprus regime it operates under, and by its own eligible counterparty documentation, which is written around negotiated terms rather than published offers.

The only promotional mechanism we found anywhere is a tick box on the Cyprus contact form reading “I would like to receive information on promotions, products and services offered by 26 Degrees Global Markets or any of its affiliates”. Note the phrase “or any of its affiliates”, which on this group’s own structure means the Australian company as much as the Cyprus one. The form itself collects a name, corporate email, company, phone number, country and a free text field, and opens no account.

The commercial signals the group does publish are awards rather than incentives: Best Prime Broker Client Service at the Hedge Fund Services Awards APAC 2026, Best Prime Broker Start-up and Emerging Funds at the Hedgeweek European Awards 2026, and four consecutive years as Best Prime of Prime at FX Markets Asia. Those are third party judgements about the group and we have not verified them with the award bodies, so they are recorded here as claims. If a reader is ever offered a trading promotion in this firm’s name, the absence of any published promotion on either of its own sites is a reason to check the source against the contact details on the CySEC register entry before sending anything.

Opening an Account

There is no signup button on either site. The Cyprus site offers a contact form headed Start a conversation, which collects a name, corporate email, company, phone number, country and a message. The field labelled corporate email is the clearest signal on the page: this is a business to business onboarding process and an individual applicant has no route through it.

The contractual sequence is set out in the Business Terms rather than on any onboarding page. An applicant submits an Application Form. The firm may refuse it: clause 3.1 reserves the right “to refuse to accept your Application Form and/or open an Account without giving you any reason”. If accepted, the firm opens the account, issues a unique account number and agrees Security Information. A Client Classification Letter follows, and clause 2.1 makes execution of that letter the acknowledgement that binds the client to the terms, while adding that using the platform or entering a trade first has the same effect.

Documentation requirements are not published as a checklist. The group privacy policy lists what is collected when an account is created, which is the closest thing available: identity documents including a copy of a national identity card, passport or driving licence; proof of address by way of a recent utility bill or bank statement; financial and tax information including tax residence and tax identification number; and information about the shareholders, directors and other stakeholders of the legal entity applying. That last phrase confirms the applicant is expected to be a company.

Three eligibility conditions are warranted at every trade, not just at onboarding, under clause 20.1: that the client is an eligible counterparty as defined in the Cyprus law, that the client is not accessing the platform or dealing from the USA or from a jurisdiction where trading in the firm’s products would be illegal, and that the money is not the proceeds of illegal activity. Clause 20.2 requires the client to notify the firm promptly of moving to another country, of a change in financial circumstances, and of any change to the basis on which the classification was granted.

No timescale is published for any stage, and we have left account opening time unrecorded rather than estimating it. One oddity is worth flagging for anyone reading the Cyprus terms closely: clause 20.3 requires trustees of a trust “including a superannuation fund” to give a set of warranties, and clause 20.4 addresses trustees of a superannuation fund specifically. Superannuation is an Australian pension vehicle with no Cyprus equivalent, and the same clause block numbers 20.1.7 and 20.1.8 twice each. The Cyprus document is a lightly edited version of the group’s Australian Wholesale Terms and Conditions, and the edit missed several passes.

Deposits & Withdrawals

The Cyprus entity publishes nothing. No minimum deposit, no withdrawal minimum, no fee, no processing time, no funding method, no currency list, no inactivity charge and no bank detail appear anywhere on 26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy. The Business Terms refer repeatedly to a Fee Schedule, defined in the glossary as “a document which sets out the fees and charges that you may incur as a result of entering into a Trade with us, as amended from time to time”, and that document is not on the website. Nobody can compare this firm on cost from public information, including us.

The funding instructions that are published belong to the other company. The group Resource Centre publishes a Standard Settlement Instructions sheet headed Wholesale/Institutional Account. The account name on it is 26 Degrees Global Markets Pty Ltd, the beneficiary address is Sub Base Platypus in North Sydney, and the footer states that the company holds an Australian Financial Services Licence. Seven currency accounts are listed, AUD, HKD, JPY, EUR, GBP, SGD and USD, at JPMorgan Chase in Sydney, Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and New York and at DBS in Singapore, with two of them carrying UK IBANs. There is no equivalent document naming the Cyprus company, and no Cyprus bank account is published at all. Anyone who intends to contract with the Cyprus entity should insist in writing on settlement instructions in that entity’s own name before sending money.

The published withdrawal process is likewise the Australian company’s. Its Withdrawal Request Form must be signed, scanned and emailed to [email protected], and the form states that “Upon receipt your request will be processed within three business days”. Currencies offered are AUD, EUR, GBP, HKD, USD and SGD. A full withdrawal requires all positions to be settled and converted first. Payment is made only in the name of the account holder, never to a third party, and a first withdrawal to a new bank account must be accompanied by a bank statement. If an account balance stays at zero for more than twelve months the account is closed and a new account number is required to trade again.

The Cyprus terms set out the withholding rights rather than the mechanics. Under clause 12.1 the firm may withhold a requested payment in whole or in part where the client has unrealised losses, where the firm reasonably considers funds may be needed for margin, where any amount is outstanding, or where legislation requires it. Clause 12.4 pays withdrawals back to the same source in the client’s name unless agreed otherwise. Clause 12.5 requires payment in the base currency, credits the account net of bank charges, requires transfers from an account in the client’s own name at an approved institution, and states that third party payments are not accepted unless agreed. Clause 12.2 passes on bank transfer charges. Clause 12.3 lets the firm reverse a credit made in error and cancel any trades that credit made possible.

The one public measure of how much client money is actually involved comes from the filings, and it is small and shrinking. The client money held requirement fell from 29,033 at the end of 2023 to 19,356 at the end of 2024 to 4 at the end of 2025, and the client orders handled requirement from 21,550 to 7,183 to zero. Total assets at 31 December 2025 were 1,304,113, of which 579,634 was cash, against total liabilities of 288,748. Those are the numbers of a firm holding almost no client balances at all.

Customer Support

Support is a single Limassol office, and the firm’s own filing sizes it: “As a Company, we have 7 employees located in offices in Cyprus.” The 2025 remuneration table counts ten people in total across the board, heads of departments and other staff, down from fifteen the year before. The Cyprus site publishes no business hours at all. The group site claims support “24-hours a day, five days a week with a high-touch and responsive multi-lingual service” across its Australia, Cyprus, UK and Japan teams, which is a group claim and not a Cyprus one.

The email domains are worth a moment. The only domain CySEC has approved for this licence is www.26degreesglobalmarkets.com.cy, and that is where the site lives, but the addresses the firm actually publishes for support and complaints both sit on 26degreesglobalmarkets.eu, and its legal documents are served from legal.26dgm.eu. None of those is a problem in itself, and none appears on the CySEC list of non approved domains, but a reader checking whether a message really came from this firm should know that the approved domain and the working domain are not the same string.

Complaints run to a published procedure. Queries go to the Prime Services team, which aims to resolve them within 48 hours. A formal complaint goes to compliance by email with full name, account number, date of the event, a summary and supporting documents, and the firm will not treat it as an official complaint unless all of that is supplied. Receipt is acknowledged within five business days with a unique reference number. The outcome is promised within two months, extendable once by a further month with a written delay notification. A complaint is closed if the complainant fails to respond within one month. Records are kept for at least five years, and an unsatisfied complainant is directed to the Financial Ombudsman of the Republic of Cyprus, with a four month deadline from the final response.

The procedure also contains a drafting error a reader should not be tripped by. The extension sentence reads that the firm “shall provide you with the outcome of our investigation no later than two one (1) month from the issue of the internal dispute resolution delay notification”, where two words have plainly been left in from an earlier draft. Read with the surrounding text the intended period is one month, but the document as published says both.

Governance is small in proportion. The 2025 disclosure names five directors, Anthia Christodoulou and Gavriil Doratis as executives and Takeshi Kawaji, Gavin Charles White and Charikleia Chaidopoulou as non executives, down from a nine person board the year before, and records that the Risk Management Committee “held one meeting in 2025”. Aggregate remuneration for 2025 was 524,170, all of it fixed with no variable or non cash element, against 834,249 in 2024.

Prohibited Countries

26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd publishes no list of prohibited or restricted countries. We looked on the homepage, the legal information page, the contact page, the Business Terms, the Client Categorisation Policy, the Risk Disclosure Notice, the Complaints Handling Procedure and the Conflicts of Interest Policy, and there is no such list in any of them. We are not going to fill that silence with an inferred one.

What the firm does publish is three narrower statements. The first is a warranty in clause 20.1 of the Business Terms, repeated at every trade, that “you are not accessing the Trading Platform or dealing with us from the USA or from a jurisdiction where trading in our products would be illegal”. The United States is the only country named anywhere in the firm’s documentation. The second is the footer on every page of the Cyprus site, which says the products and services “are directed only at institutional clients and eligible counterparties” and are “not directed to any legal person in countries or jurisdictions where the distribution of CFDs is restricted or prohibited by local laws and regulations”. That places the burden on the reader rather than naming anywhere.

The third is not a restriction but a permission, and it is the more useful document. The CySEC register records cross border services into exactly ten EEA member states: Denmark, Greece, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. That is the firm’s own passport as the regulator records it, and it is narrow. Nineteen of the other twenty nine EEA states are absent, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Belgium, Poland and the rest among them. A prospective counterparty in one of those countries is not on the register’s cross border list and should ask the firm directly on what basis it proposes to deal with them.

Two cautions on reading that list as geography. A passport records where a firm has notified an intention to provide cross border services, not where it will accept a client, so the ten states are a floor rather than a map, and an eligible counterparty outside the EEA may still be dealt with under a different analysis. And the group’s Australian entity operates its own list under its own law, warranting wholesale client status under the Corporations Act and the same exclusion of the USA, so a reader who found the group through 26degreesglobalmarkets.com is reading a different document from the one that would bind them in Cyprus. The honest summary is that this firm names one prohibited country, publishes a positive passport list of ten, and says nothing at all about anywhere else.

Conclusion

26 Degrees Global Markets (EU) Ltd is a real, verifiable and very small Cyprus Investment Firm that does not sell to the public and does not sell to individual professionals either. CySEC licence 435/23 checks out at register entry 96061, company number HE 427102 matches across the register, the site footer and the firm’s own filings, the single domain CySEC approves is the single domain the firm uses for its website, and eleven country fetches produced one entity and one licence number with no variation. On the question this catalogue exists to answer, the firm gives a clean answer: the same Cyprus entity, everywhere, under a European licence.

The finding that matters most is the gate. Most wholesale firms in this sector accept professional clients and turn retail away. This one turns professional clients away too, in writing, twice. Anyone who is offered a retail or personal trading account “with 26 Degrees” should treat that offer as suspect and check it against the contact details on the CySEC register entry before responding. Only one document on the site, the Risk Disclosure Notice, describes professional investors as part of the target market, and the two documents that govern the relationship both contradict it.

For the institutions the firm does deal with, three things deserve weight before a counterparty decision, and all three come from the firm’s own published material rather than from anything we inferred. Client money is subject to a title transfer arrangement by default, so an eligible counterparty here is an unsecured creditor rather than the owner of a segregated balance, and the firm’s own credit risk section describing all client funds as segregated does not survive a reading of clause 28.2. Costs are published nowhere at any level, so no external comparison of this firm is possible. And the regulatory returns describe a business that has been shrinking hard: the client money held requirement fell from 29,033 to 4 across two years and the client orders handled requirement to zero, while losses of 580,937, 1,302,238 and 814,960 were absorbed by raising paid up capital from 1,850,000 to 3,740,000. The 2025 report also discloses that liquid assets no longer meet the firm’s own internal liquidity threshold, where the previous year’s report had said they did.

The group context cuts both ways. On one side, this is not an offshore shell: the Australian parent has been on the Australian Business Register since February 2013, traded as Invast Global, and publishes a documented product range, named staff and audited style disclosures. On the other, the whole of that published substance sits under 26 Degrees Global Markets Pty Ltd, including the bank details and the withdrawal form, while the Cyprus company publishes three pages and no product at all. The two websites do not link to each other in either direction. A European reader can arrive at an ASIC licence number, a set of JPMorgan account details in an Australian company’s name and a wholesale terms document, without ever learning that the entity licensed to deal with them in the EEA is a different company with a different regulator.

Our score of 5.2 reflects a licence verified on the register and covering the only entity in play, three years of published prudential disclosure that most firms of this size do not produce, and a firm that is honest about what it refuses to do, set against a title transfer default that removes the protection the segregation language implies, no published cost of any kind, a platform that is never even named, an office of seven people, and no verified user evidence in either direction. It is not a warning. It is a record of a wholesale counterparty whose own filings describe a smaller and thinner business than the group’s website implies.