IC Markets sells its cTrader account on a commission of $3.00 against $3.50 on MetaTrader, and on 10 September 2026 that discount was worth one cent. The cTrader charge is levied per US$100,000 of notional traded, not per lot, and a standard EUR/USD lot is €100,000, which at the ECB reference rate of 1.1652 is $116,520 of notional. Three dollars per hundred thousand on that base is $3.4956 a side, or $6.99 for the round turn. MetaTrader Raw Spread, on a dollar balance, charges a flat $3.50 a side: $7.00. The cheaper number on the account-comparison page is not cheaper. It is the same price expressed in a unit that makes it look smaller, and the broker's own worked example of the calculation, sitting live on the pricing page this morning, still uses a euro at $1.30.
That is the small version of a bigger problem. Reading every live pricing, product and legal page on ic.com the same morning produces six answers to how many instruments the firm offers: 2,250, 121, 79, 64, "over 90" and "over 200". The spread table gives the Standard account an average EUR/USD spread of 0.10 pips underneath a minimum of 0.80. And the domain the broker now trades under sits on the Financial Conduct Authority's warning list by name.
Key facts, verified 10 September 2026
- cTrader commission is $3.00 per US$100,000 traded per side, not per lot: $6.99 round turn on a EUR/USD lot against $7.00 on MetaTrader Raw Spread — ic.com/en/trading-pricing/spreads.
- The FCA warning list carries an entry naming "IC Markets Global" and the domains icmarkets.com/global and ic.com, added 1 October 2024 and updated 10 August 2026 — fca.org.uk warning list.
- CySEC fined IC Markets (EU) Ltd €200,000 under MiFIR and €50,000 under the Cypriot investment services law from one board decision of 1 July 2024, both under judicial review — CySEC decisions register.
- Two unreleased tiers, Raw Pro at $1.50 a side and Raw Pro + at $1.00, are gated behind deposits of $5,000 and $100,000 and appear only on the Seychelles entity — ic.com/en/trading-accounts/overview.
- The headline 1:5000 covers the first 25 lots and falls to 1:500 during Higher Margin Requirement windows spanning every weekend, daily roll and data release; the firm's 70-lot example moves margin from $3,333 to $27,500.
- The EU entity discloses that 72.52% of its retail accounts lose money — icmarkets.eu, CySEC 362/18.
- Minimum deposit is $0 offshore and $200 at the ASIC entity, where leverage is capped at 1:30 — icmarkets.com.au.
What the $3.00 commission actually costs
Per-lot and per-notional pricing agree only when a lot is worth exactly $100,000, which happens only on dollar-base pairs. That single fact drives the whole cTrader cost structure. The spreads page defines the charge as "$3 USD per 100,000 USD traded", converted to the account base currency at spot, so a round turn's cost depends on which currency you buy, not how much risk you take. The arithmetic on four majors, at European Central Bank reference rates for 9 September 2026:
| Pair | Notional per standard lot | cTrader round turn | MT4/MT5 Raw round turn | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AUD/USD | $72,247 | $4.33 | $7.00 | −38.1% |
| USD/JPY | $100,000 | $6.00 | $7.00 | −14.3% |
| EUR/USD | $116,520 | $6.99 | $7.00 | −0.1% |
| GBP/USD | $135,649 | $8.14 | $7.00 | +16.3% |
Commission from ic.com/en/trading-pricing/spreads, 10 September 2026; FX from api.frankfurter.dev, ECB set dated 9 September 2026.
The same account charges $4.33 and $8.14 for the identical operation, an 88% spread, and the deciding variable is the strength of the base currency. A sterling scalper on cTrader pays a sixth more than on MetaTrader; an Australian-dollar scalper pays a third less. The account comparison says none of this. It prints "$3.0" beside "$3.5" and lets the reader draw the obvious wrong conclusion. Currency-dependent commission is common here, and our FP Markets review found a 98% swing across base currencies at a competitor. IC Markets does publish a per-currency grid for MetaTrader; for cTrader it publishes one number and leaves the conversion to you.
The worked example makes the point against itself: a EUR/USD round turn of $3.90 plus $3.93, or $7.83, from an open of 1.3000 and a close of 1.3100. The last ECB fixing at or above 1.30 was 4 September 2014. Twelve years stale, on a page serving live spread data the same morning, and 12% above what a client pays today.
Six product counts and an impossible average
Ask ic.com how many instruments it offers and the answer depends on the page. The account table says 2,250 on the MetaTrader tiers and 121 on cTrader. The cTrader product page, on that same account, says "64 currency pairs plus 15 major equity indices", which is 79. Trading conditions says "60 different currency pairs and 4 metals". The swap-free page says "over 90 instruments", legal documents "over 200 markets". The spreads page itself publishes exactly 122 unique symbols across every asset class: close to the cTrader figure, nowhere near 2,250.
The 2,250-against-121 gap is the one a client discovers after funding. Choosing cTrader for its depth-of-market ladder and C# environment means giving up roughly 95% of the product range, dropping from 1:5000 leverage to 1:1000 and moving execution from New York NY4 to London LD5. A real trade-off, presented as a platform preference.
Then there is the spread table, served identically on the Seychelles and ASIC-regulated Australian sites. The Standard row for EUR/USD reads: minimum 0.80 pips, average 0.10. An average below a minimum is a broken column, and the same inversion appears on GBP/USD (0.80 / 0.12), USD/JPY (0.80 / 0.11) and AUD/USD (0.80 / 0.10). The Raw Spread column errs the other way, reporting a 0.01-pip EUR/USD average while the headline above it claims "our average EUR/USD spread is 0.1 pips". A third defect sits in the micro-lot grid, where New Zealand dollar accounts are billed "NZD 6.0 (NZD 0.12 round turn)" on a 0.01 lot.
Where $7.00 sits in the raw-spread market
A commission is only expensive relative to something. Five competitors run a raw or ECN tier aimed at the same client, and each page below was read live on 10 September 2026, not lifted from a comparison site.
| Broker and tier | Entity behind the page | Per side | Round turn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fusion Markets, Zero | FMGP Trading Group Pty Ltd, AFSL 385620 | $2.25 | $4.50 |
| Eightcap, Raw, AUD account | Eightcap Pty Ltd, AFSL 391441 | AUD 3.50 | $5.06 |
| Tickmill, Raw | Global site; terms point to Tickmill Ltd, SC | $3.00 | $6.00 |
| FP Markets, Raw | First Prudential Markets Ltd, CySEC 371/18 | $3.00 | $6.00 |
| Pepperstone, Razor on cTrader | Pepperstone Group Limited, AFSL 414530 | fixed per unit | $6.00 |
| IC Markets, Raw Spread on cTrader | Raw Trading Ltd, Seychelles | $3.4956 | $6.99 |
| IC Markets, Raw Spread on MT4/MT5 | Raw Trading Ltd; same rate at ASIC entity | $3.50 | $7.00 |
| Pepperstone, Razor on MT4/MT5 | Pepperstone Group Limited, AFSL 414530 | USD 3.50 | $7.00 |
All figures from each broker's own pricing page on 10 September 2026; AUD and EUR converted at ECB rates for 9 September (AUD/USD 0.72247, EUR/USD 1.1652). Vantage is absent: every Vantage domain served a Cloudflare challenge instead of a page, and fpmarkets.com returned 403 to every request, so only FP Markets' European entity appears.
Two things follow. The $3.50 headline is the market's upper bound, not its floor: Fusion Markets charges $2.25 a side and Tickmill $3.00, and over a hundred round turns a month $4.50 against $7.00 is $250. The platform matters as much as the broker: Pepperstone's cTrader route costs $6.00 against $7.00 on its own MetaTrader route, a real 14% saving, because its charge is fixed per unit rather than scaled by notional. IC Markets' cTrader route saves a cent.
Spread is the other half, and there the picture reverses. Whatever the table's state, an EUR/USD raw spread averaging between 0.01 and 0.10 pips is tight, and the infrastructure behind it (MetaTrader in Equinix NY4, cTrader in Equinix LD5, quoted average fill under 40 milliseconds) is the part nobody disputes. The tiers sit side by side on our broker comparison hub.
One brand, four companies, four rulebooks
The domain that now receives icmarkets.com traffic is ic.com, and ic.com is Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company whose regulation page names the Seychelles Financial Services Authority and no one else. The two tier-one arms sit on separate domains with materially different terms. icmarkets.com.au is International Capital Markets Pty Ltd, ACN 123 289 109, AFSL 335692, capped at 1:30 with a $200 minimum and client money in segregated trust accounts at National Australia Bank. icmarkets.eu is IC Markets (EU) Ltd, CySEC 362/18, also 1:30, disclosing a 72.52% retail loss rate. The plumbing is common to all of them: 50% stop-out, ten base currencies plus crypto, fifteen-plus funding routes with cards, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill and UnionPay all instant.
The split is recent enough that the seams show. IC moved its main site to ic.com over the weekend of 11 July 2026, completing a rebrand from "IC Markets" to "IC" that began with the Haas Formula One sponsorship, as FX News Group reported on 7 July. Founder Andrew Budzinski still controls the group, which has been rebuilding its Australian bench. "IC Markets has always been recognised for its strength in innovation and customer experience," said Peter Tardent, General Manager, Australia at IC Markets, in comments to FX News Group on 27 October 2025, having joined from ViewTrade and IG Group.
One smaller detail says a lot about how carefully the offshore site is maintained. The ic.com homepage carries four Australian hreflang alternates (en-AU, zh-hans-AU, es-AU, zh-hant-AU) and all four point at www.ic.com.au. That domain is not the broker. Following the English one on 10 September lands, after two redirects, on the environmental-services page of an Australian engineering consultancy; the Chinese, Spanish and Taiwanese paths return 404. Search engines have been told, in machine-readable form, that a civil-engineering firm is the Australian edition of a CFD broker, and told it for two months.
What the registers say that the website does not
Checking each licence at the regulator rather than the broker produces a mixed record. AFSL 335692 sits in ASIC's current AFS Licensee dataset for September 2026 under International Capital Markets Pty. Ltd., ABN 12 123 289 109, licensed since 2 July 2009 and authorised to advise, deal and make a market in derivatives, FX contracts and securities. A full-text sweep of 6,909 ASIC newsroom items back to August 2014 returns no release, banning or alert naming the firm, which is also absent from the banned-and-disqualified register. The Australian record is clean.
Cyprus is not. CIF 362/18 is live and unchanged, issued 25 June 2018, but a page-by-page sweep of 1,170 CySEC board decisions turns up two against IC Markets (EU) Ltd from a single decision of 1 July 2024: a €200,000 fine under MiFIR, announced 19 July 2024, and a €50,000 fine under the Investment Services and Activities and Regulated Markets Law, announced 4 September 2024. Both are marked under judicial review with no published ruling, so the €250,000 is contested rather than settled. Neither figure appears anywhere on icmarkets.eu.
The Seychelles licence cannot be checked the way the marketing implies. The FSA's register lists Raw Trading Ltd at Eden House, Eden Island, with trade names "IC Markets Global" and "IC MARKETS (SC)", but publishes no licence numbers or issue dates for any of its 231 dealers. The SD018 in the footer is the firm's own disclosure, not a regulator-confirmed fact. The Bahamian registrant list as at 31 August 2026 does carry IC Markets Ltd. of Nassau, cleared to deal in capital market instruments and trade CFDs, with the CFD Supervisory Officer post recorded as vacant.
The sharpest entry is British. The FCA's warning list contains "IC Markets Global", identified by the URLs icmarkets.com/global and ic.com, added 1 October 2024 and updated 10 August 2026, with the note that the firm "is not authorised by us and may be targeting people in the UK". Not a clone alert: the number the FCA lists matches the one the Seychelles FSA publishes for Raw Trading Ltd, putting the warning on the genuine offshore entity. A separate 2022 clone warning covers five copycat domains and names IC Markets (EU) Ltd, FRN 827935, as the firm impersonated. Ownership is opaque. The global LEI database records a parent for the Bahamian company only, a British Virgin Islands entity called Bytdem Financial Inc. whose own LEI has lapsed, and none at all for the Australian, Cypriot or Seychelles companies, where Raw Trading Ltd's previous legal name is logged as True ECN Trading Ltd. It is a heavier structural record than ThinkMarkets, where ten licences sat behind one Seychelles contract.
RelatedXTB Review 2026: €106 Per CFD Lot, No Published Spread
Leverage that leaves when volatility arrives
1:5000 is the marketing number. Underneath sits a tiered ladder: on FX majors and minors the first 25 lots are margined at 1:5000, the next 25 at 1:3000, the next 50 at 1:1000 and everything above 100 lots at 1:500, each slice at its own rate. Metals top out at 1:2000, energies and crypto at 1:500, indices and bonds at 1:200, single stocks at 1:20. The larger qualifier is the Higher Margin Requirement regime, which resets the ladder to 1:500 and then 1:200. Those windows run 30 minutes before each daily close and 15 after each open, from an hour before Friday's close until 30 minutes after Monday's open, and from 15 minutes before until one minute after every high-impact release. Payrolls, CPI and central-bank decisions all sit inside the fence. The firm's own illustration is candid: a 70-lot USD/CHF position needs $3,333.33 of margin normally and $27,500.00 under HMR, 8.25 times as much for the same position.
Overnight financing never appears at all. The swap-rates page explains what a swap is, calls IC's rates "amongst the most competitive in the world", then tells the reader to right-click an instrument inside MetaTrader. The only overnight figures published anywhere sit on the swap-free page: a flat US$10 per lot per night on EUR/USD, $7 on GBP/USD and AUD/USD, $11 on USD/JPY, $25 on GBP/CHF. One night of EUR/USD carry costs 1.4 times the whole round-turn commission, and whether the interest-bearing alternative beats it is unknowable before you fund, a gap that also turned up in our Eightcap review.
The verdict: 3.5 out of 5
The execution case is intact. Raw EUR/USD spreads are among the tightest published anywhere, the New York and London colocation is real, and an Australian licence held since 2009 with no enforcement history is a genuine asset in a sector where that is unusual. The unreleased Raw Pro tiers, at $1.50 and $1.00 a side, would put the firm at the cheap end of the peer table if they open at those rates.
Three things hold the score down. Price: $7.00 round turn is the top of the range measured today, and the cTrader alternative that appears to undercut it saves a cent on EUR/USD and costs 16% more on GBP/USD. The published record: six instrument counts, an average spread quoted below its own minimum, a worked example priced at a 2014 exchange rate and four hreflang tags pointing at an unrelated company, none individually fatal, together describing a site nobody is reading. And the gap between shopfront and register, where €250,000 of contested CySEC fines and an FCA warning naming the firm's own domains appear nowhere on the firm's own pages.
Who it suits: high-volume traders on dollar-base pairs who value fill over fee and who deal with the Australian or Cypriot entity rather than the offshore one. Who it does not: anyone whose cost model runs on sterling lots, anyone who needs a swap schedule before funding, and anyone in the United Kingdom, where the FCA's own list calls the offshore brand unauthorised. What would lift the score: a corrected spread table, a published swap schedule, a judicial-review outcome clearing the 2024 fines. What would lower it: a third CySEC decision, or the Raw Pro tiers quietly never opening.
Frequently asked questions
Is IC Markets regulated?
Four companies are licensed somewhere, and the one behind the main website is the weakest. International Capital Markets Pty Ltd holds ASIC licence 335692, confirmed in the September 2026 AFS Licensee dataset and clean of enforcement. IC Markets (EU) Ltd holds CySEC 362/18, current but fined €250,000 across two 2024 decisions now under appeal. Raw Trading Ltd is listed in Seychelles, on a register publishing no licence numbers. The FCA calls the offshore brand unauthorised in the UK.
Which IC Markets entity would I be trading with?
It depends on the domain you sign up through, and the differences are large. Raw Trading Ltd in Seychelles offers 1:5000 and no minimum deposit but excludes the United States, Canada and New Zealand. International Capital Markets Pty Ltd in Sydney offers 1:30 and a $200 minimum. IC Markets (EU) Ltd in Limassol offers 1:30 and discloses a 72.52% retail loss rate.
How much does IC Markets cost per lot, and is cTrader cheaper?
MetaTrader Raw Spread is $3.50 a side on a dollar balance, $7.00 round turn, over a raw spread the firm's table put at 0.01 pips on EUR/USD. cTrader bills per notional instead, so it wins on dollar-base pairs and loses on stronger ones: at 9 September ECB rates, $4.33 round turn on AUD/USD, $6.00 on USD/JPY, $6.99 on EUR/USD, $8.14 on GBP/USD. It also carries 121 instruments, not 2,250. Standard charges no commission and quotes from 0.8 pips.
How does IC Markets compare with other raw-spread brokers?
At the expensive end on commission. From each broker's own page on 10 September 2026, a standard EUR/USD lot costs $4.50 round turn at Fusion Markets, $5.06 at Eightcap on an AUD account, $6.00 at Tickmill, FP Markets' CySEC entity and Pepperstone on cTrader, $7.00 at IC Markets.
This review is analysis and information, not financial advice, and nothing in it recommends opening, funding or closing an account with any firm named. Every figure was retrieved on 10 September 2026 and is subject to change. CFDs are leveraged products; IC Markets (EU) Ltd discloses that 72.52% of its retail investor accounts lose money. Capital is at risk.