ThinkMarkets review

Four licences across three regulators, all of them real and all of them naming retail clients. None of them contains the word ThinkMarkets. Searching the brand in any register returns nothing, and the Cyprus entity trades under a name it was renamed into.

Last verified 24 August 2026 · how we check

Type “ThinkMarkets” into the FCA register and you get nothing. Do the same at ASIC and at CySEC and you get nothing there either. The firm is properly licensed in all three places, and the brand appears in none of the records.

What the registers actually hold

Four entries, three regulators, one prefix: TF Global. Companies House number for the UK entity is 09042646.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A consumer who has been told to “check the regulator” does exactly one thing: types the brand into the register search box. Here that returns an empty result, and an empty result reads as “not regulated”.

The firm is regulated. The search simply cannot find it, because trading names and legal entity names are different fields and only one of them is in the register.

This is the failure mode behind a large share of bad broker decisions in both directions. Someone searching a legitimate firm finds nothing and walks away, or finds nothing, shrugs, and deposits anyway. Neither outcome involves reading the actual record.

The fix is one step long: take the entity name from the client agreement or the site footer, not the logo. Every licensed broker prints its legal entity somewhere in the small text, and that string is what the register indexes.

The permissions are the good kind

FRN 629628 carries six regulated activities. The customer type on the substantive ones reads:

Retail (Investment), Professional, Eligible Counterparty

Retail is named, on making arrangements and on the dealing permissions. That is the check we run on every firm, and it separates this from Exness (UK) Ltd, whose live FCA authorisation carries Professional and Eligible Counterparty on all five permissions and no retail at all.

The investment types include shares, options and futures alongside the contracts for difference you would expect, which describes a wider business than a pure CFD shop. We saw the same breadth at Tickmill.

Two Australian licences, not one

ASIC holds two entries: TF Global Markets (Aust) Pty Ltd under AFSL 424700, and TF Global Securities (Aust) Pty Ltd under AFSL 412816, six months apart in 2012.

Separate licences usually mean separate businesses, typically derivatives on one and securities on the other, and the split decides which rulebook covers a given product. It also means an Australian client should establish which of the two holds their account, because the answer is not obvious from the brand.

The Cyprus entity was renamed

The CySEC register lists TF Global Markets (Europe) Ltd with the parenthetical ex A-Conversio Capital Ltd, holding licence 215/13.

Renamings are ordinary corporate housekeeping and prove nothing on their own. They are worth noticing for one practical reason: the licence number and its issue date carry over, so a 2013 licence can sit under a name adopted much later. Anyone reading “licensed since 2013” should know it may describe the licence rather than the brand.

We made the same point about domain age at FinPros, where the archive runs to 2000 and the operating company was registered two decades later. A long history attached to something is not automatically a long history of the thing you are buying.

How far the brand sits from the entity, across this series

The gap is not unusual, and having the pattern in one place makes the habit easier to keep. Every row below comes from a register we read while writing these reviews.

Four of the eight are searchable by brand. Four are not, and one of those returns nothing at all in any register. There is no way to tell which kind you are dealing with except by opening the document and reading the name.

Note also that seven of the eight run more than one entity, which is the second half of the same problem: finding a licence for the group is not the same as finding the licence that covers your account. We set that out in full at IC Markets, where two real licences sit beside a domain the FCA has warned about.

What the licences cap

Retail leverage under all three regulators is capped at 30:1 on major FX with lower limits by asset class, as tabulated in leverage limits by regulator. An account under this brand offering several hundred to one is not the FCA, ASIC or CySEC entity.

Compensation differs by entity: the FSCS behind the UK company for eligible claimants, the Investor Compensation Fund behind the Cyprus company, and neither of those in Australia.

What to establish before funding

Find the legal entity in your client agreement. This review exists because that string and the brand share no words. Yours will begin with TF Global, or it will be an entity in a jurisdiction none of the four rows above covers.

Search the register for that string, not the brand. It is free and it takes a minute, and it is the step this page is really about.

Ask which of the two Australian licences applies, if you are onboarded there.

Read the leverage on offer before the licence claims. It identifies the rulebook faster than any page of marketing.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the FCA register entry for FRN 629628 including customer types and investment types, and searched the ASIC and CySEC registers we hold locally, on 24 August 2026. The firm’s own site blocked automated access, so minimum deposit and account specifics are left unstated rather than taken from third-party reviews.

We have not opened an account, deposited money, or tested spreads, execution, support or withdrawals. caution is our default where we have not been a client. The registers raised nothing against this firm, and the naming gap described above is a fact about how registers work rather than a criticism of the company.

Sources

• FCA — Financial Services Register, FRN 629628
• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, AFSL 424700 and 412816
• CySEC — register of Cypriot investment firms