Lesson 3 of 3. Free to read, no signup.
Reading a broker before you fund one
The five checks that separate a regulated business from a marketing website.
- Level
- Beginner
- Read time
- 8 min
- Cost
- Free
What you will be able to do
- Find which legal entity you are actually being onboarded to
- Verify a licence number against the regulator, not the broker
- Identify the costs that never appear on the pricing page
Find the entity, not the brand
Large brokers operate several licensed companies under one brand. The website you land on is chosen by your IP address, and it decides your leverage cap, your compensation scheme and your complaints route.
The entity is named in the client agreement and usually in the footer. Read it before the pricing page. Everything else follows from it.
Verify the licence at the source
A licence number printed on a broker site is a claim. Regulators publish searchable registers, and checking takes under a minute.
Search the register for the entity name from the previous step, not the brand. Confirm the number matches, the status is active, and the permissions cover what you intend to trade.
- United Kingdom
- FCA Financial Services Register
- Australia
- ASIC Professional Registers
- Cyprus and EU passporting
- CySEC public register
The costs that are not on the pricing page
Spread and commission are advertised. Swap, inactivity fees, withdrawal fees and currency conversion are usually a click or two deeper, and for a position held over weeks the swap can exceed everything else combined.
Ask for all five before funding. A broker that makes them hard to find has told you something.
Test the withdrawal, not the deposit
Deposits are frictionless everywhere. That is a sales process, and it says nothing about the firm.
The check that matters is a small withdrawal, early, before you have a balance worth arguing over. How long it takes and how much explaining it requires is the most useful signal a broker will ever give you.
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