RoboForex vs RoboMarkets: which company actually opens your account — and what changes because of it

RoboForex and RoboMarkets are not two competing brokers, and they are not two names for the same thing either. They are four separate companies, with four different licences, four different product ranges and four different lists of countries they are allowed to serve. Which one opens your account is decided by your country of residence — and that single fact determines your maximum leverage, whether you can trade CFDs at all, and how much of your money is protected if something goes wrong.

Below is the current structure as of July 2026, taken from the companies' own legal footers and imprints — not from broker-comparison sites, which mostly still describe conditions that stopped being valid on 30 December 2024.

The four companies behind one brand

Company	Regulator and licence	Who it serves	What it offers
RoboForex Ltd Belize City, Belize	FSC Belize, licence No. 9759600, reg. 000001272, registered under the Securities Industry Act 2021	Global, excluding the EU/EEA and the UK and roughly twenty named countries	CFDs and FX, leverage up to 1:2000, MT4/MT5, R StocksTrader, Copy Trading
RoboMarkets Deutschland GmbH Bleidenstraße 1, Frankfurt am Main	BaFin, register No. 10154068	Residents of 27 EU/EEA countries	Stocks and ETFs only. No CFDs, no FX, no leverage beyond 1:2 margin
RoboMarkets Ltd Limassol, Cyprus	CySEC, licence No. 191/13	Institutional clients; also the platform operator behind the Prime and Prime Stocks account models	Liquidity provision; holds the segregated client accounts
RoboMarkets MENA Dubai, UAE	SCA Dubai, Category 1 licence (since 2024)	Middle East and North Africa	CFDs, leverage up to 1:500, stocks and ETFs

The relationship is a corporate one, not a marketing one. RoboMarkets Deutschland states plainly in its own footer that it "does not operate its own trading platform, but only provides access to liquidity providers. The individual trading accounts are provided by the respective platform operator. The platform operator in connection with the account models Prime and Prime Stocks is RoboMarkets Ltd." In other words: your contract is with a German BaFin-supervised firm, but your money sits in segregated accounts of the Cypriot company in Limassol.

What changed on 30 December 2024

This is the part most comparison articles have not caught up with. On 9 September 2024 RoboMarkets announced it would stop offering CFDs to retail clients in the European Union. The Cyprus entity moved to being a liquidity provider for other firms; the German entity took over retail and narrowed its range to stocks, bonds and ETFs.

You can verify the date yourself. The RoboMarkets page that still describes the old Prime and Pro accounts — 36 currency pairs, CFDs on stocks, indices, oil, metals and futures — now carries this notice at the top:

"This page describes the archived conditions for RoboMarkets Deutschland GmbH services and is for informational purposes only. Starting 30 December 2024 these conditions are no longer valid or relevant."

In March 2026 the main European website robomarkets.com/eu was reduced to a logo and a "coming soon" message. European retail traffic now goes to the German domain. The company's director, Vanyo Walter, framed the pivot at the time as a bet on equities: "We believe the market for self-investing and trading in stocks will grow significantly in Europe, and we are committed to becoming one of the leading stockbrokers in the region."

Practical consequence: if you are an EU resident who came looking for a forex broker with 1:500 leverage, that product no longer exists anywhere in the group for you. What exists is a commission-light stock and ETF broker. These are two entirely different businesses that happen to share a logo.

Which company will take you, by country

RoboMarkets Deutschland lists its permitted countries verbatim in its imprint. The list has 27 entries:

Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain.

France and Belgium are not on it. Neither is the UK, which left the EEA. If you live in one of those three, no company in the group is currently set up to serve you as a retail client.

RoboForex works the other way round — it lists exclusions:

"RoboForex Ltd and its partners do not target EU/EEA/UK clients. […] RoboForex Ltd and its partners don't work on the territory of the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Bonaire, Brazil, Curaçao, East Timor, Indonesia, Iran, Liberia, Saipan, Russia, Sint Eustatius, Tahiti, Turkey, Guinea-Bissau, Micronesia, Northern Mariana Islands, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, South Sudan, Ukraine, Belarus, and other restricted countries."

Open roboforex.com from an EU address and the site itself stops you with an interstitial: "This website is not directed at EU residents and falls outside the European and MiFID II regulatory framework. Please click below if you wish to continue to RoboForex anyway." The button says CONTINUE ANYWAY. That wording is not decorative — it means that if you click through, you are contracting on your own exclusive initiative, outside MiFID II, and the EU protections described further down this page do not apply to you.

If you live in…	Your entity	What you can trade
Poland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Slovenia, Norway and 15 other EU/EEA countries	RoboMarkets Deutschland GmbH (BaFin)	Stocks and ETFs on Xetra, NYSE, NASDAQ and other EU exchanges. Cash account or 1:2 margin
France, Belgium, United Kingdom	None	Not served as a retail client
Most of Asia, Africa, Latin America (except Brazil), the Balkans outside the EU	RoboForex Ltd (FSC Belize)	CFDs, FX, metals, indices, crypto CFDs, real US stocks. Leverage to 1:2000
USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus, Indonesia, Iran and others	None	Explicitly excluded
UAE and MENA region	RoboMarkets MENA (SCA Dubai)	CFDs to 1:500, stocks, ETFs

What actually differs once you are inside

	RoboForex Ltd (Belize)	RoboMarkets Deutschland (BaFin)
Minimum deposit	10 USD/EUR (100 USD for R StocksTrader and Copy Trading)	100 EUR
Maximum leverage	1:2000 on Pro and ProCent, 1:500 on ECN, 1:300 on Prime	1:2 margin on stocks — no CFD leverage at all
Cost model	Spread from 0 pips on Prime/ECN plus commission; from 1.3 pips with no commission on Pro/ProCent	"Zero commission" — the cost is a mark-up on the market price from 0.075% per order
Short selling	Yes, inherent to CFDs	Only on margin accounts
Platforms	MT4, MT5, R StocksTrader, R WebTrader, Copy Trading	R StocksTrader, TradingView, API
Account currencies	USD, EUR	EUR, USD, CHF, CZK, SEK
Bonuses and promotions	30 USD welcome bonus, cashback, up to 10% on balance, free VPS	None — EU rules bar them
Withdrawal by card	up to 2.6% + 1.3 USD, up to 10 days	2% + 1 EUR, 1–10 banking days
Withdrawal by bank transfer	up to 4% on local transfers	0%, from 50 EUR

The bonus line is worth pausing on. It is not that the EU entity chose to be less generous — retail bonuses and non-monetary inducements are restricted under EU rules. In March 2023 CySEC ordered RoboMarkets Ltd to stop giving retail clients non-monetary rewards such as race tickets and branded merchandise, finding this incompatible with Article 42 of Regulation (EU) 600/2014. The offshore entity has no such constraint, which is exactly why its promotions page is long and the EU one does not exist.

Protection of your money: three different systems, routinely confused

All three entities advertise "up to 20,000 EUR". The three schemes behind that number are not equivalent.

	RoboForex Ltd	RoboMarkets Deutschland	RoboMarkets Ltd (Cyprus)
Scheme	Compensation Fund of The Financial Commission	EdW — German statutory investor compensation	ICF — Cyprus Investor Compensation Fund
Amount	up to 20,000 EUR per case	90% of value, max 20,000 EUR per creditor	up to 20,000 EUR per client
Nature of the body	Private industry dispute-resolution body. RoboForex is an "A" category member	Statutory, under the German Investor Compensation Act (AnlEntG)	Statutory, under CySEC
When it pays	Only if the member refuses to comply with a Commission ruling	If the firm cannot meet liabilities from securities transactions	If the firm cannot meet its obligations

Two details that almost never appear in reviews:

• The Financial Commission is not a regulator. It is a private arbitration organisation funded by its broker members. Its compensation fund is a backstop against a member ignoring an arbitration award — not a deposit guarantee, and not a state scheme. RoboForex also carries a civil liability insurance programme with a limit of 2,500,000 EUR and offers negative balance protection, both of which are real, but again contractual rather than statutory.
• The German EdW protection has a currency condition. The imprint says it directly: liabilities from securities transactions are protected "up to 90% of their value, but not more than €20,000 per creditor", and "the claim for compensation does not exist if funds are not denominated in the currency of an EU member state or in euros". Hold your balance in USD to trade US stocks, and the compensation claim you were counting on may not exist. Holding EUR and converting per trade has its own cost, so this is a trade-off to make deliberately, not by accident.

The number in the footer nobody reads

Both companies are required to publish the share of retail accounts that lose money. As of July 2026:

• RoboForex Ltd — 75.85% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.
• RoboMarkets Ltd (Cyprus) — 65.68% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.

These figures describe CFD trading, not stock investing, and the ten-point gap between them is largely a leverage story: 1:2000 destroys accounts faster than 1:30. The German stock entity publishes no such number because it does not offer leveraged products; instead its risk warning is about capital loss and currency risk.

Reputation: the two brands score very differently

Public review scores split along the same line as the licences. Trustpilot shows roboforex.com at roughly 2.5–2.6 out of 5 across some 732 reviews in 2026, with withdrawal handling and platform complaints dominating the negative side. robomarkets.de sits far higher, in the 4.0–4.5 range, though on a much smaller number of reviews — a stock brokerage with no leverage simply generates fewer disputes than a 1:2000 CFD operation.

Complaint threads on Forex Peace Army during 2025 and 2026 cluster on one theme at RoboForex: withdrawals held during compliance review, AML checks running past a week, repeated requests for documents already supplied, and no stated deadline. RoboForex tightened its withdrawal verification in 2026 in line with global AML and KYC requirements. Those are user reports rather than findings of fact, but the pattern is consistent enough to plan around — which is the subject of a separate article on the mistakes that trigger exactly this.

So which one should you use?

• You live in the EU and specifically want leveraged FX. Nothing in this group serves you. Do not treat the "CONTINUE ANYWAY" button as a workaround: you would be dealing with a Belize company outside MiFID II, with no ICF, no EdW and no ESMA leverage caps or margin close-out protection.
• You live outside the EU/EEA and are not on the excluded list. RoboForex is a genuine multi-asset offering — 12,000+ instruments, 10 USD entry, swap-free, MT4/MT5 — and the honest counterweight is the 75.85% figure, offshore regulation and the withdrawal complaints above.
• You live in France, Belgium or the UK. Look elsewhere; you are not in scope for any entity in the group.
• You live in the EU or EEA and want to build a stock or ETF portfolio. RoboMarkets Deutschland is a reasonable candidate: BaFin supervision, 100 EUR entry, free custody, free market data, 0% bank withdrawals, TradingView integration. Compare its 0.075% mark-up against a domestic broker's flat commission on your typical order size before deciding — on very small orders a percentage model wins, on large ones it usually does not.

How to check any broker's entity yourself in 60 seconds

This group is an unusually clear example, but the method works anywhere and is worth learning once. Before depositing at any broker:

1. Scroll to the footer of the exact page you are on — not the "About us" page, the footer. Regulated firms are required to state the legal entity, the supervisor and the licence number there. Here it reads either "RoboForex Ltd … regulated by the FSC, license No. 9759600" or "RoboMarkets Deutschland GmbH … supervised by the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority under the number 10154068". Two different footers, two different sets of rights.
2. Look for the loss percentage. Any firm offering CFDs to retail clients under EU or comparable rules must publish the share of accounts that lose money. If the number is missing, either the product is not leveraged or the firm is not covered by those rules.
3. Open the imprint or legal notice and find the country list. That list, not the marketing copy, tells you whether you can legally be a client. Here it is 27 named countries — and finding that France is absent takes five seconds once you know to look.
4. Verify the licence number in the regulator's own public register, not on the broker's site. BaFin, CySEC and the FSC all publish searchable registers. A number that does not resolve is the end of the conversation.
5. Check whether the entity in the footer matches the entity that will hold your money. That is the step almost everyone skips, and in this case the two genuinely differ: the German firm is your broker, the Cypriot firm holds the cash.

Frequently asked questions

Is RoboMarkets the same company as RoboForex?

They belong to the same group but are separate legal entities with separate licences. RoboForex Ltd is licensed by the FSC in Belize; RoboMarkets Deutschland GmbH is supervised by BaFin in Germany; RoboMarkets Ltd holds a CySEC licence in Cyprus. Your rights depend on which one signed your contract, not on the shared brand.

Can I still trade forex with RoboMarkets in the EU?

No. Leveraged FX and CFDs stopped being available to EU retail clients on 30 December 2024. The EU offering is stocks and ETFs only.

I am in the EU — can I just click "CONTINUE ANYWAY" on RoboForex?

Technically the site lets you through, but you would be contracting with a Belize entity that states it does not target EU/EEA/UK clients, outside MiFID II. No ICF or EdW cover, no ESMA leverage caps, no statutory margin close-out protection, and disputes go to a private arbitration body rather than a regulator.

Which entity holds my money at RoboMarkets EU?

Deposits go to segregated bank accounts of RoboMarkets Ltd in Limassol, Cyprus, as the platform provider, even though your broker relationship is with the German BaFin-supervised company. Both facts are stated in the company's own footer.

Is 20,000 EUR of my money guaranteed?

Not in the sense of a bank deposit guarantee. In Germany EdW covers 90% of the value up to 20,000 EUR, and not at all for balances held in a non-EU currency. In Cyprus the ICF covers up to 20,000 EUR for retail clients only — professional clients lose it. At RoboForex the 20,000 EUR figure is a private compensation fund that pays only when a member refuses to honour an arbitration ruling.