EC Markets Review

EC Markets lists seven companies. Three of them hold real retail licences: EC Markets Financial Limited under ASIC AFSL 414198, which since February 2012 has been authorised to deal in and make a market for FX and derivatives with retail and wholesale clients; the same company under FSCA licence 51886 in South Africa; and its New Zealand registration FSP197465. EC Markets Group Ltd is authorised by the FCA under FRN 571881. The UAE company, licence 20200000281, is licensed for ranking and advice only and states in EC Markets' own words that it is "not authorised to hold client assets or client money."

None of that describes the account most readers of this page would open. The footer of ecmarkets.com says the site is operated by EC Markets Limited in Mauritius, FSC licence GB21200130, and the disclaimer adds that the site is not intended for residents of the UK, the EU or the US. So the licences that carry compensation schemes sit on entities the international client never signs with, and the Mauritius company that does hold the money offers neither a compensation fund nor an ombudsman.

The FCA authorisation is worth a second look, because the marketing presents it as evidence of a decade of history. Companies House records EC Markets Group Ltd, company number 07601714, as incorporated on 12 April 2011 — but under the name DNL Finance Limited. It became AlumFX Limited in April 2013, GCM Prime Ltd in August 2015, and only took the EC Markets name on 29 January 2020. Its SIC code is 64999, financial intermediation not elsewhere classified.

That is not itself wrongdoing; buying an authorised shell is a normal and legal route into UK regulation. It does mean the "over 10 years of professional experience" line on the about page is measured from a company that spent most of that decade operating under other brands. The EC Markets brand as international traders meet it dates from 2020, and the Mauritius licence number GB21200130 points to an issue date of 2021.

Three accounts, and the pricing is genuinely competitive on paper. STD opens at $10 with spreads from 1.0 pips and no commission. ECN also opens at $10, with spreads from 0.0 pips and $1.50 per lot per side — $3 round turn, which is at the cheaper end of the market. PRO needs $5,000 and offers spreads from 0.0 pips with no commission, which means the cost is folded into a markup you cannot see. All three run a fixed leverage model up to 1:1000 with a 50% margin call level and a 0.01-lot minimum.

There is no deposit fee, no withdrawal fee from EC Markets, and no inactivity fee published in the fee documentation. Swaps adjust at 00:00 GMT+2 and Wednesday positions are charged three days' interest. Swap-free status is available on STD and ECN but not on PRO, which is an odd restriction given that PRO is the account aimed at the largest balances.

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 on desktop, web and mobile, plus an EC Markets app for funding and account management. There is no proprietary trading terminal, no cTrader, no TradingView integration and no copy-trading service, so anything beyond stock MetaTrader has to come from third-party expert advisors you install yourself.

The instrument list is modest: around 100 CFDs in total, built on roughly 48 currency pairs, gold and silver, Brent and WTI, a set of global indices and a handful of crypto CFDs including BTC, ETH, XRP and DOT. Share CFDs are offered but the range is small. EC Markets publishes execution statistics — 0.004 seconds average, 95.71% of orders filled at the requested price or better, a 99% fill rate — which are the broker's own numbers and are not independently audited.

Funding is the strongest part of the offering for Asian clients. Alongside cards and bank transfer, EC Markets runs local rails — UnionPay, IndonesiaPay, MalaysiaPay, ThailandPay, VietnamPay and PoliPay — with processing from instant to T+5, and accepts USDT through OTC123. Account currencies include CNY, IDR, MYR, THB, VND and INR as well as USD, which removes a conversion step that costs most offshore clients real money.

Published withdrawal limits are $50 to $6,800 by bank transfer, $200 to $90,000 by international wire, $200 to $50,000 by STICPAY and 50 to 50,000 USDT via OTC123. EC Markets advertises an average processing time of two hours and charges nothing. That advertised speed is exactly what the complaint record contradicts, which is covered below — treat the two-hour figure as the best case, not the expected case.

Trustpilot does not display a score for EC Markets. The profile carries a warning that reads, in Trustpilot's words, that the company's rating is unavailable due to a breach of its guidelines, alongside a notice that the platform removed a number of fake reviews. That is a sanction Trustpilot applies rarely, and it is the single most important fact on this page.

What remains is 120 reviews, 93 of them from the past year, distributed 50% one star, 48% five star, 2% three star and nothing at all at two or four. A bimodal split like that is the signature of a review file that has been worked on from both sides. The negative half repeats one story: a withdrawal request marked failed, then the account placed under a "trading activity review" with no trade and no rule identified, typically after a profitable run. A September 2026 reviewer documents two withdrawals of $1,047 and $946 handled that way. EC Markets does reply to most negative reviews, but the replies direct the customer to support rather than answer the allegation.