FP Markets review
One of the oldest Australian FX licences we have looked up, running since 2005 and covering retail clients. Alongside it, the FCA publishes a warning naming fpmarkets.com itself, with a St Vincent address, and the entry is not marked as a clone.
| Verdict | caution |
|---|---|
| Regulators | ASIC, CySEC |
| Minimum deposit | not verified |
| Maximum leverage | not verified |
| Platforms | MT4, MT5, cTrader |
Two facts about this brand sit in public registers and point in opposite directions. Both are checkable in about two minutes, and most reviews carry only the first.
What the registers return
| Register | Entity | Result |
|---|---|---|
| ASIC, 6,525 licensees | First Prudential Markets Pty Ltd | AFSL 286354, licensed 31 May 2005 |
| CySEC, 248 firms | First Prudential Markets Ltd | licence 371/18 |
| FCA warning list | FP Markets | not authorised, published 11 October 2024 |
| FCA warning list | FPMARKETSTRADE / FP MARKETS TRADE | not authorised |
The Australian licence is old and broad
AFSL 286354 has been running since 31 May 2005. That is twenty years, and it is the longest-standing retail FX licence we have found in this series; for comparison, IC Markets dates to 2009 and Eightcap to 2011.
Longevity is not a character reference, but it is a fact that cannot be manufactured. A licence that has survived two decades of ASIC supervision has been through the 2018 product intervention consultations, the 2021 leverage cap, and the reporting regimes in between.
The published conditions are wide. They authorise advice, dealing and market making across derivatives, foreign exchange contracts, securities, non-cash payment products and standard margin lending facilities, and they close with the phrase that decides who the licence protects:
to retail and wholesale clients
We check that clause on every firm now, because it varies more than anyone expects. OX Securities holds a real ASIC licence whose authorisation text stops at wholesale clients, and Exness (UK) Ltd holds a live FCA authorisation with no retail on any of its five permissions. Here retail is named explicitly.
The Cyprus entity, First Prudential Markets Ltd, holds CySEC licence 371/18, which brings the Investor Compensation Fund with it for EU clients.
The FCA warning names the main domain
On 11 October 2024 the FCA published a warning under the name FP Markets. The entry lists the website as
with a correspondence address in Kingstown, St Vincent and the Grenadines, a UK phone number, and links to the LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.
The FCA’s own text is unambiguous:
This firm may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission. You should avoid dealing with this firm and beware of scams.
The entry is not marked as a clone of an authorised firm. That distinction matters and it is the reason this page exists.
We have covered the other shape of this. At Eightcap the FCA warning
names eightcap.vip, which is not the broker’s domain, and the licensed firm is untouched
by it. At FxPro four separate entries cluster around the brand, one of
them explicitly marked a clone. Those are warnings about other people.
This one prints the group’s own address.
What the combination means
Nothing here proves misconduct, and we are not saying that. The reading that fits the public record is the ordinary one for this industry, and it is the reading the FCA warning is designed to surface: the group runs licensed entities in Australia and Cyprus, and it also runs an offshore arm serving clients outside those jurisdictions, from St Vincent.
What separates this from an ordinary offshore structure is that a regulator looked at the main domain and published an instruction to avoid it. That is a different fact from “no regulator covers this entity”, and it is the fact almost no review mentions.
Two things follow for anyone considering an account.
Which entity you sign with decides everything. An Australian client of the ASIC entity sits under AFSL 286354. An EU client of the Cyprus entity has the ICF behind them. A client onboarded through the St Vincent company has neither, and the FCA has said so in writing.
Leverage identifies the entity faster than any licence page. Australian and EU retail leverage is capped at 30:1 on major FX, as set out in leverage limits by regulator. An offer far above that is not the licensed entity.
Where twenty years sits against the rest
We have now read licence start dates for most of the brands in this series, and they are worth having in one place, because age is the one attribute a firm cannot acquire quickly.
| Firm | Licence | Effective |
|---|---|---|
| FP Markets | ASIC AFSL 286354 | 31 May 2005 |
| IC Markets | ASIC AFSL 335692 | 2 July 2009 |
| FxPro UK | FCA FRN 509956 | 10 September 2010 |
| Eightcap | ASIC AFSL 391441 | 29 April 2011 |
| Pepperstone Group | ASIC AFSL 414530 | 4 February 2013 |
| Vantage Global Prime | FCA FRN 590299 | 1 July 2013 |
| ThinkMarkets (TF Global) | FCA FRN 629628 | 23 January 2015 |
| Tickmill UK | FCA FRN 717270 | 29 July 2016 |
| Eightcap Group (UK) | FCA FRN 921296 | 23 December 2020 |
Dates are the effective dates on each register, read across August 2026. They are not comparable as a ranking, because an Australian and a British licence are different instruments, and a group’s oldest entity is often not the one serving you.
What the column does show is that a two-decade licence is unusual in retail FX, and that the same group can hold the oldest licence in the table and a live regulatory warning at the same time. Those two facts do not cancel; they describe different companies.
The second warning entry
The FCA list carries a separate entry for FPMARKETSTRADE / FP MARKETS TRADE, distinct from the one above. Names built around a valuable brand are the ordinary hazard of being well known, and we saw four of them clustered around FxPro.
The practical consequence is the same in both cases: a search for the brand can land on any of these, and the only thing that separates them is the firm reference number checked against the register.
What to establish before funding
Open the client agreement and find the company name. Not the brand in the header, the legal entity in the document. It will be First Prudential Markets Pty Ltd, First Prudential Markets Ltd, or something else, and the something else is the case the FCA warned about.
Check that company in the register that supposedly covers it. ASIC’s licensee dataset and the CySEC register are both public and free.
Ask which compensation scheme applies to your account. The ICF covers CySEC firms for eligible claims. Australia has no equivalent of the FSCS for this. The offshore entity has neither.
Read the FCA entry yourself rather than taking our summary. It is one page, it names a domain and an address, and it takes thirty seconds.
What we checked, and what we didn’t
We read the FCA warning page directly, searched the ASIC and CySEC registers we hold locally, and read the FCA register for entries under this name, all on 24 August 2026.
The firm’s own site blocked automated access, so we have not verified minimum deposit, leverage tiers, spreads or platform details from the source, and we have left those fields unstated rather than take them from third-party reviews.
We have not opened an account, deposited money, or tested execution, spreads, support or withdrawals. Nothing here is a report on how the firm treats clients. It is a statement about which companies exist, what each register says about them, and which of those statements almost nobody reads.
Sources
- FCA — warning: FP Markets, published 11 October 2024
- ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, AFSL 286354
- CySEC — register of Cypriot investment firms
- FCA — Financial Services Register