The idea that HFM is "an FCA-regulated broker" survives one search of Companies House and no longer. HF Markets (UK) Limited is real, it is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority under number 801701 on its own directors' report, and its accounts for the year to 31 December 2025 were filed at Companies House on 26 June 2026. Those same accounts say the company employed an average of one person, including directors, across the whole of that year. They also say where its money comes from, and it is not from trading with British retail clients. What the UK sign on the door describes is a small London services company inside a much larger group, and the group's money-holding entities sit in Cyprus, Mauritius and elsewhere. That distinction is the entire subject of this review.
Here is the line that does the work, from note 1.3 of the audited FY2025 statements: "Turnover represents management fees reimbursed by HF Market (Europe) Ltd and HF Markets Ltd (Mauritius) in respect of services provided to both companies." Every pound of the £521,478 the UK company booked last year came from two affiliates. Not from spreads, not from commission, not from British clients. Cross-check that against the CySEC register and the picture sharpens further: the Cypriot licence-holder, HF Markets (Europe) Ltd, has one set of approved domains on file with its regulator, and hfm.com is not among them. Both facts are public, both are free to read, and neither appears in any HFM review I have seen.
Key facts, every one read on 2 September 2026
- HF Markets (UK) Limited, company number 11118651, is active, incorporated 19 December 2017, registered office Bloomsbury Building, 10 Bloomsbury Way, Holborn, London. Source: Companies House, read 2 September 2026.
- FY2025 turnover £521,478 (2024: £421,222) and profit of £98,929 (2024: £67,112), all of it intercompany management fees. Source: audited accounts filed 26 June 2026.
- Average monthly headcount: 1, including directors, in 2025 and again in 2024. Aggregate staff cost £140,378, of which £123,321 is directors' remuneration. Source: notes 5 and 6, FY2025 accounts.
- No person with significant control has been declared since 2 March 2023. On that date the Cypriot parent ceased as PSC and the company filed a statement that it believes no registrable person exists. Source: Companies House PSC register, read 2 September 2026.
- The Cypriot licence-holder, HF Markets (Europe) Ltd, holds CIF licence 183/12, granted 20 November 2012, and is listed Active with six MiFID services. Source: ESMA registers, read 2 September 2026.
- CySEC fined that entity €105,000 in a decision announced 19 August 2016, one component of which concerned an outsourced provider's staff who "downgraded the risk of loses". Source: CySEC board decision.
- Spreads, commissions, minimum deposit, platforms and the published loss-rate percentage could not be verified. Every HFM-operated domain returned a Cloudflare block to every automated request made for this review on 2 September 2026.
The entity map, read off the registers rather than the website
Start in Larnaca. The CySEC register of Cypriot Investment Firms lists HF Markets (Europe) Ltd with licence number 183/12, a licence date of 20 November 2012 and Cyprus company registration number 277582. The ESMA register carries the same firm as an Active investment firm supervised by CySEC, at Spyrou Kyprianou 50, Irida Tower 3, 10th Floor, 6057 Larnaca, and lists exactly six authorised services: reception and transmission of orders, execution of orders, investment advice, safekeeping and administration, granting credits or loans, and, added on 16 January 2014, foreign exchange services.
One service is conspicuous by its absence. Dealing on own account does not appear on the ESMA list for this firm. That is a factual observation about a register entry rather than a conclusion about how any individual trade is filled, but it is the kind of detail a client comparing two CFD venues should be able to see, and it is on no marketing page anywhere.
Now the domains. CySEC requires its firms to register the websites through which they operate, and it publishes the result. Entry 106 on the List of Approved Domains reads: HF Markets (Europe) Ltd, www.hfeu.com and hfaffiliates.com/eu. That is the complete list. The global brand domain, hfm.com, is not on it, and neither is hfmarkets.com. Requesting hfmarkets.com on 2 September 2026 produced two redirects in sequence and landed on the /sv/ path of hfm.com. I could not read the page that sits there, so I make no claim about which company is named in its footer. What the Cypriot register does establish is which domain the CySEC-supervised entity is on the hook for, and it is hfeu.com.
The Larnaca address matters for a third reason. Companies House records that HF Markets (UK) Limited's person with significant control until 2 March 2023 was Hf Markets Holdings Ltd, a Cyprus company numbered HE 336491, registered at Spyrou Kyprianou 50, Irida 3 Tower, 10th Floor, Larnaca 6057. Same floor, same tower. The UK company, the EU licence-holder and the group holding company all trace back to one building.
Since that date the UK register shows nothing. Zero active persons with significant control, and an active statement, notified 2 March 2023, that "the company knows or has reasonable cause to believe that there is no registrable person or registrable relevant legal entity in relation to the company". There are lawful structures that produce that filing, and a company is entitled to make it. It is still a gap. A British client can read who controls ActivTrades or Tickmill UK from the same register in about thirty seconds, and cannot do the same here.
What one employee looks like on a balance sheet
The FY2025 accounts run to twenty-five pages and are worth reading in full, because they are unusually candid. Turnover of £521,478 against administrative expenses of £428,755 produced a profit before tax of £101,718 and a tax charge of £2,789. Net assets stand at £776,354, up from £537,425, helped by £140,000 of fresh shares issued in December 2025 and £130,000 the year before. Cash at bank is £478,078. Total creditors falling due within one year: £36,323.
Read that creditors line again. A firm holding client balances would show them. This balance sheet shows £36,323 of short-term liabilities against a company whose stated ambition, in its own strategic report, is "being regarded as a leading CFD broker in UK". The two facts are not contradictory in law. They do tell a reader that the London company is not currently where a retail balance would sit.
Note 5 gives the headcount: an average monthly number of persons employed, including directors, of one, in both 2025 and 2024. Note 6 shows directors' remuneration of £123,321 against total staff costs of £140,378. The board has two members, Marie Antoinette Boosey and Peter Owen Romilly, and the directors' report states that "the Board meets on a quarterly basis but as the business starts to grow it will be done on a monthly basis".
Set that against the four peers on this site whose UK entities also file at Companies House.
| UK entity | Avg monthly employees | Accounts year | Turnover or revenue as filed |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActivTrades PLC (company column) | 150 | FY2025 | Group revenues £33.1m |
| Capital Com (UK) Limited | 30 | FY2025 | Net trading revenue £18,824,013 |
| Tickmill UK Ltd | 15 | FY2024 | Trading revenues £6,206,794 |
| Swissquote Ltd | 9 | FY2025 | Net turnover £301,201 |
| HF Markets (UK) Limited | 1 | FY2025 | Turnover £521,478, all group fees |
Swissquote's UK arm is the instructive comparison, because it is also small. Nine people, £301,201 of net turnover, and a directors' report saying the company takes no market trading risk because flow goes to the Swiss bank. That is a thin UK entity too, and it says so in plain words. The difference is that Swissquote's British client sits behind a Swiss banking licence, a structure the accounts describe in a paragraph. HFM's UK accounts describe a services company billing two affiliates.
Marie Antoinette Boosey, Director at HF Markets (UK) Limited, signed a strategic report on 17 April 2026 containing this sentence: "Since Brexit we are no longer entertaining clients from the European Economic Area." The audit opinion is clean. Ravi Hungsraz, Senior Statutory Auditor at Azets Audit Services, reported that the statements "give a true and fair view of the state of the company's affairs as at 31 December 2025 and of its profit for the year then ended", with no going-concern qualification and nothing to report by exception. Nobody is hiding anything. Both statements sit in the same document, filed, signed and free to download.
The 2016 fine, in the regulator's own words
On 19 August 2016 CySEC published a board decision imposing a total administrative fine of €105,000 on HF Markets (Europe) Ltd. The document states that the board resolved the matter at a meeting held on 18 January 2016, while the decision-date field on the published record reads 1 August 2016. The discrepancy is CySEC's, and both dates are reproduced here.
The fine breaks into six components, and the breakdown carries more information than the headline number.
| Component | Amount | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| A | €10,000 | No direct agreement with the outsourced service provider, no records of the provider's telephone calls with clients, and no record of the services the provider supplied |
| B | €10,000 | Inadequate supervision of outsourced marketing and sales; the provider gave reception and transmission of orders and investment advice "which were not permitted under the agreement signed between them" |
| C | €20,000 | Failure to act fairly, honestly and professionally in clients' best interests in relation to the provider's practices |
| D | €30,000 | Information given to clients was not fair, clear and non-misleading, because the provider's employees "downgraded the risk of loses" in trading the products offered |
| E | €15,000 | Website information at the time was not adequate for clients to understand the nature and risks of the service and the instrument |
| ΣΤ | €20,000 | No record of documents setting out the essential rights and obligations of the parties |
The misspelling in component D is CySEC's own and appears verbatim in the published English text. Precision matters about what the record supports and what it does not. This was a regulatory fine for compliance failures, most of them centred on an outsourced provider the firm had engaged and then failed to control. It was not a finding of fraud. The decision itself records mitigation: the company terminated its relationship with the provider, revised its introducing-broker and service-provider agreements to make clear those providers' staff may not give investment advice, and had not committed a similar violation before. A decade on, the CySEC register shows licence 183/12 active, and no further administrative sanction against the entity surfaced in the board-decision archive searched for this piece.
What this review could not verify, and why that is stated rather than buried
A broker review normally opens with spreads. This one cannot, and the reason belongs in the body rather than in a footnote.
Every HFM-operated host tried on 2 September 2026, hfm.com and hfeu.com and hotforex.com among them, returned an HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare interstitial to every automated client used, including two independent reader proxies on separate networks. The following are therefore recorded as unverified rather than estimated: raw and standard account spreads on EUR/USD or anything else; commission per lot; the minimum deposit; which platforms are offered and on which account types; funding and withdrawal methods and their fees; and, for a UK or EU reader most of all, the published percentage of retail investor accounts that lose money, which regulated CFD firms must display. No number goes in this review that was not read at its source with a date attached.
Two register items also failed verification. A Dubai Financial Services Authority reference, F004885, could not be checked, because dfsa.ae returned 403 to every request, direct and proxied. A South African FSCA over-the-counter derivative provider application could not be resolved either: the FSCA's ODP search is a browser-only application that served ten of its fifty rows to a non-browser client, and HF Markets was not among those ten. Neither item is asserted here in any direction. Both remain open.
What could be verified is the part that usually is not. Licence numbers, licence dates, approved domains, authorised services, filed accounts, headcount, ownership and a decade-old enforcement decision all sit on public registers, and every one of them was pulled from the register itself for this piece rather than from a comparison table. Readers who want the same treatment applied to a broker whose group structure is easier to see can compare this with Fusion Markets, where one legal entity carries two retail brands, or with Capital.com, whose UK company books revenue as a rebate from its own group.
RelatedSwissquote Review 2026: 1.7 Pips Buys a Swiss Bank Licence
Where the rating lands: 3.0 out of 5
Three points of the five are earned on the register record, and it is a decent one. A CySEC licence held continuously since 2012. An Active ESMA entry with six services. A UK company that is profitable, audited without qualification, growing its turnover and recapitalised twice by its parent. One enforcement action, now a decade old, mitigated by documented corrective action and not repeated.
The two points come off for structure and for opacity. A UK-facing entity with one employee and no client-facing revenue line does far less work than the phrase "FCA-regulated" implies to a retail reader. No declared person with significant control since March 2023 removes a disclosure every peer in the table above provides. The brand's main domain is absent from the list its European regulator holds. And a review that cannot open the broker's own price page cannot confirm the cost of trading there, which is, for most readers, the whole question.
What holds up
- Continuous CySEC authorisation since 20 November 2012, licence 183/12, Active on ESMA today.
- Six MiFID services on the EU licence, including safekeeping and administration.
- UK company profitable in both of the last two filed years, with an unqualified audit opinion from Azets.
- The 2016 fine was followed by documented remediation and no repeat sanction in the CySEC archive.
What does not
- The UK entity employs one person and books only intercompany management fees.
- No person with significant control declared at Companies House since 2 March 2023.
- hfm.com and hfmarkets.com are absent from the CySEC approved-domain list for the EU entity.
- Pricing, platforms, minimum deposit and the retail loss-rate disclosure were unreadable from outside.
- Dealing on own account is not among the services listed for the EU entity on ESMA.
Questions readers ask
Is HFM regulated by the FCA?
HF Markets (UK) Limited states in its own audited directors' report for FY2025 that it "is registered with the Financial Conduct Authority under the registration number 801701". That is a signed statement in a filed document, which is why it is quoted rather than paraphrased. The FCA register itself could not be read programmatically for this review, so the scope of that firm's permissions is not verified here.
Which HFM entity would hold a European client's money?
For a client onboarded through the CySEC-approved domain, hfeu.com, the counterparty is HF Markets (Europe) Ltd, CIF licence 183/12, supervised by CySEC and listed on ESMA. For clients elsewhere the answer depends on which regional site they signed with, and that could not be established from outside the Cloudflare block.
What was the €105,000 CySEC fine for?
Six separate compliance failures found in a board decision published on 19 August 2016, all connected to an outsourced service provider: missing agreements and records, inadequate supervision of the outsourcing, unfair treatment of clients, misleading information from the provider's staff, inadequate website disclosure, and missing client-agreement documents. The largest single component, €30,000, concerned staff who understated the risk of loss.
Does the size of the UK entity affect a UK client's protection?
It bears on what the FCA authorisation covers and who the contractual counterparty is, which are separate questions from investor-compensation eligibility. Both turn on the specific permissions and on the client agreement, neither of which could be read for this review. The filed accounts establish the size of the company. They do not by themselves establish the terms on which any client deals.
How does HFM compare with the other brokers reviewed here?
On register transparency it sits behind the group rather than in front of it. On cost it cannot be compared at all yet, because the price page was unreadable. The four UK entities in the table above run from nine employees to a hundred and fifty. HFM's has one.
Methodology and disclosure
Everything above was read from a primary register or a filed document on 2 September 2026: Companies House for HF Markets (UK) Limited and for the four peer entities, the CySEC register of Cypriot Investment Firms, the CySEC List of Approved Domains, the CySEC board-decision archive, and the ESMA registers. Financial figures come from the audited statements filed at Companies House rather than from summaries of them. Peer employee counts are the average monthly number of persons employed, including directors, taken from each company's own accounts note; ActivTrades' figure is the company column, not the consolidated group. Fusion Markets and FP Markets are absent from the chart because no UK statutory accounts for them were located. Nothing in this article is sourced to the broker's own website, which was unreachable throughout.
This article is analysis and information, not financial advice, and no part of it is a recommendation to trade with or to avoid any firm. Contracts for difference are leveraged products and capital is at risk. Register entries and filed accounts change; verify anything material against the register itself before relying on it. The Traders Spread has no commercial relationship with HFM, and this review contains no affiliate or referral links.