An Australian licence lists products per activity, and CMC may advise on shares while only issuing derivatives

The ASIC authorisation text is structured by what the firm does, not by what it sells. Read as a flat list it says one thing; read by activity it says another. Five of eleven broker licences carry nothing but derivatives and foreign exchange.

Last verified 9 September 2026 · how we check

An Australian licence does not say “this firm is a broker”. It sets out, in plain English, what the firm may do and, for each of those activities separately, which classes of financial product it may do it with.

That second part is where the reading goes wrong, including ours on the first pass.

The same product, two different answers

CMC Markets Asia Pacific Pty Ltd, AFSL 238054. The licence runs to five separate activities, and securities appear under some and not others:

Read as one flat list, this firm “covers securities”. Read properly, it may advise you about shares and buy them on your behalf, and it may not issue a security itself. Those are three different permissions and the licence grants them separately.

A class that appears under one activity does not carry across to the others. That is the same trap we hit on the UK register, where the customer type and the investment type sit in different blocks of the same permission, and reading one block answers the wrong question.

What the eleven licences actually carry

Counting any class that appears under at least one activity:

Five of the eleven carry nothing beyond derivatives and foreign exchange contracts, across every activity on the licence. Four name securities somewhere. The rest sit in between with deposit or payment products.

Why a CFD is not a share

A contract for difference on a share is a derivative. The share is a security. They are different classes and a licence can cover one without the other.

For most people buying a CFD this changes nothing, because the CFD is the product they came for. It matters in one case: when a site offers “share trading” beside its CFDs and the reader assumes both run under the Australian licence on the footer. Five of these eleven licences could not support the first at all, and two of the four that name securities do so only for advising and acting on a client’s instruction.

Where the share side exists, it usually runs through another company in the group under another regulator. That is the entity question, and it is answered by the client agreement rather than by a badge, which is the point of our register check.

Every one of them may be the other side of your trade

Two activities appear on these licences that decide more than the product list does, and they split the set cleanly.

All eleven are authorised to make a market. Not one exception. Making a market means the firm may be the counterparty to your order rather than passing it to an outside venue, which is the dealing-desk question people argue about in review threads. Here it is settled as a regulatory fact: whatever execution model a site describes, the Australian licence permits the firm to take the other side.

That does not mean it does. It means the licence does not stop it, and the marketing language is not what constrains it. What each model actually costs you is set out in ECN, STP and market maker.

Only two hold a custodial or depository authorisation, both CMC entities. That is the permission to hold client assets rather than only to trade against them, and its absence on nine licences is consistent with what those firms sell: exposure, not custody.

The correction we made writing this

We first read these licences as flat lists of product classes, which produced a tidy count and a wrong one. It reported seven firms on two classes and missed that CMC’s securities sit under advising and agency dealing rather than under issuing.

The structure is the content here. Any tool that flattens an authorisation into a set of words loses the activity it was attached to, and the activity is what decides whether a firm may sell you something, buy it for you, or only talk about it.

We record the mistake because the same shape catches readers: a licence “covering securities” and a firm permitted to sell you a share are not the same statement.

How to read one yourself

Open the authorisation text, not the licence number. It is one paragraph per activity, in ordinary language.

Find the activity you care about. Dealing by issuing is the firm creating the product. Dealing on behalf of another person is the firm acting on your instruction. Advice is neither.

Read the class list under that activity, not the classes elsewhere on the licence.

Read to the end of the sentence for the customer type, where we found OX Securities stops at wholesale clients while the other ten reach retail.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the authorisation condition text on eleven Australian licences from our local copy of the ASIC Financial Services Licensee dataset on 9 September 2026. The activity counts and class lists come from that text as published.

We have not checked which products each firm currently offers, which changes without the licence changing, and a firm may hold an authorisation it does not use. Nothing here suggests any firm is selling outside its licence. The narrower point is that the classes on the licence, the activities they sit under, and the tabs on a website are three different lists, and only the first two are regulatory facts.

Sources

• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, full dataset
• FCA: Financial Services Register