XM

It is the counterparty to your trade, and it says so

Most brokers are vague about whether they take the other side of your position. XM’s British subsidiary is not, because a filed account has to be. The 2024 strategic report of Trading.com Markets UK Limited says the company "enables retail customers to trade global over-the-counter CFDs" and then, flatly: "The Company acts as the counterparty to all trades entered into by its clients" 1. The FCA permission matches — it is authorised to deal in investments as principal 3.

That is worth understanding rather than being alarmed by. Somebody has to be on the other side of a CFD, and a broker doing it itself is normal and legal. It is simply a different arrangement from Pepperstone’s British company, whose accounts say its licence "does not allow it to take on any market risk", or Eightcap’s, which says it hedges "on a back-to-back basis with our liquidity provider". Three British companies, three filings, three different answers to the same question. None of them puts it on the marketing page.

What it means in practice is that the firm’s revenue and your losses are not unrelated. That does not make it dishonest and it does make it a thing to know, and it is the reason this section is first.

The British arm is small and had a bad year

Revenue rose to £1,843,567 from £1,448,366, which sounds like growth until you read what the directors attribute it to: "mainly ... the increase of payroll recharges to an affiliate entity" 1. The company also earns commission from the Cyprus entity based on its clients’ trading volume, so its income is substantially internal.

Net assets went the other way, down to £1,046,948 from £2,028,066, "due to the losses incurred during the year". The accounts then say that in January and March 2025 the directors agreed to issue 1,100,000 new £1 shares for cash, taken up by the sole shareholder, and that "Management remains vigilant on the cash position of the Company on a regular basis to ensure that it has the liquidity to operate" 1.

A parent recapitalising a subsidiary is ordinary corporate housekeeping and the company is above its regulatory capital. It is still a smaller and thinner balance sheet than the British arms of the brokers ranked above it, and the sentence about remaining vigilant on cash is not one you find in all of them.

Search XM in London and you will not find XM

The group runs two brands. XM is the Cyprus and Belize business — the one with the education programme, the lowest entry price here and most of the world’s clients. In Britain and Australia the same group trades as Trading.com, and the companies were renamed to match: Trading Point of Financial Instruments UK Limited became Trading.com Markets UK Limited on 7 January 2025 1, and the Australian licence holder went the same way.

So the FCA and ASIC licences in XM’s marketing are real, and a British or Australian reader who follows them arrives at a differently branded site. That is legitimate segmentation and it is also the kind of thing that makes a licence look more available than it is. The entity map on this page now carries all seven companies, including the four — UK, Dubai, South Africa and Mauritius — that were missing from it entirely.

The one number we could not confirm

Everyone outside Europe, Britain, Australia, the Emirates and South Africa is a client of XM Global Limited in Belize. That is the entity that matters most here, and its licence number is the one thing on this record nobody has been able to verify.

Four different numbers circulate. This record carries 000261/397; review sites publish 000261/106, 000261/309 and 000261/4 for the same company, and a separate registration number under the Securities Industry Act 2021 is quoted as 8557558. They cannot all be right, and the fact that four sites quote four numbers with equal confidence is a fair summary of how much checking went into any of them.

The register exists. Belize’s Financial Services Commission publishes one, and it is an application rather than a page: its form-definition endpoint answers and the endpoint that returns the rows is not documented. We have added it to the list of registers this site cannot read, next to the FCA, Mauritius and the NFA, so the verification panel on this page says "unchecked" rather than implying otherwise.

XM’s own site would settle it, and XM’s own site returns 403 to our infrastructure on every path we tried — the second broker in this directory to do that, after Exness.

What is not on the record against it

There is one old enforcement action and it is not in this page’s register of them. In 2013 CySEC fined Trading Point €5,000 over client-funds and anti-money-laundering compliance, noting that the firm had never been fined before; the company said it had cooperated and remediated 5. Thirteen years and one rebrand ago, at a sum that would not cover a week of the marketing budget.

It is mentioned here and deliberately kept out of the "on the record" block, which is for things that would change a reader’s mind. A directory that lists every historic infraction forever gives a reader no way to tell a €5,000 housekeeping fine in 2013 from a live prosecution in 2025, and the second of those is on another page in this directory.

Beyond that we found nothing: no current regulatory action, no litigation, no warning list entry. As always, "we found nothing" is weaker than "there is nothing", and it is what we are able to say.