Deriv is not a conventional CFD broker, and reviewing it as one misses the point. Alongside forex and commodities it sells synthetic indices, multipliers and digital options — products it generates and prices itself. We opened accounts on Deriv Trader and Deriv MT5, funded them, placed more than 40 orders, ran a withdrawal and contacted support three times across February and March 2026. The trading environment is competent and the costs are fair. The problem is structural: the entity that onboards most of Deriv’s retail clients holds no financial services licence at all.
Disclosure: we may earn a commission if you open an account through links on this page. It does not change our scores, our rankings, or anything we found in testing. Read how we make money.
| Overall rating | 6.4/10 |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1999 (as Binary.com; renamed Deriv in 2020) |
| Headquarters | Birkirkara, Malta |
| Main licences | MFSA C 70156 (Malta), Labuan FSA MB/18/0024, VFSC 14556 (Vanuatu), BVI FSC SIBA/L/18/1114, Mauritius FSC, CIMA (Cayman), UAE Category 1 broker licence |
| Minimum deposit | $5 |
| Spreads from | 0.5 pips (Standard account, no commission) |
| Maximum leverage | 1:1000 (offshore entities) / 1:30 retail (MFSA entity) |
| Instruments | 300+ |
| Swap-free available | Yes, on Deriv MT5, with administration fees after a grace period |
| Retail loss rate | 70.78% of retail accounts lose money trading CFDs with Deriv |
Pros and cons
Everything below comes from our own testing across February and March 2026 unless stated otherwise, with the regulatory and pricing facts re-checked on 27 July 2026 before publication. Our weights and protocol are in how we rate brokers.
What works
- Twenty-seven years of continuous operation. Deriv started as Binary.com in 1999 and has traded through two regulatory eras that closed most of its early competitors.
- A $5 minimum deposit on every Deriv MT5 account type, which is close to the floor for the sector.
- Competitive spot pricing. Our February 2026 Standard-account EUR/USD spread ran 0.6 to 1.2 pips with no commission, better than XM’s Standard account across the same sessions.
- No broker-side deposit or withdrawal fees on any method we used.
- A genuine EU licence. Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited holds MFSA authorisation C 70156, and EEA clients booked to it get MiFID II protections and Malta’s investor compensation scheme.
- Product range nobody else matches. Synthetic indices, multipliers and accumulators are not available at conventional brokers, and for a trader who specifically wants them, Deriv is close to the only option.
What does not
- Most retail clients outside the EU and Malaysia are onboarded to Deriv (SVG) LLC, which holds no financial services licence. There is no compensation scheme behind that entity and no regulator to escalate a complaint to.
- No FCA authorisation and no ASIC licence, so no FSCS cover and no AFCA recourse for UK or Australian readers.
- Synthetic index prices are generated by Deriv. You cannot verify the feed against any outside market, because there is no outside market.
- No individual shares at all, and roughly 30 forex pairs against 55-plus at XM.
- No telephone support on any channel, and our Friday-evening live chat attempt never reached a specialist.
- A persistent third-party complaint pattern about frozen accounts and delayed withdrawals, concentrated on the unregulated SVG entity.
Company information
Jean-Yves Sireau launched the business in 1999 as one of the first online fixed-odds trading services. It operated as Binary.com for most of two decades and rebranded to Deriv in 2020, when the product mix widened from binaries into CFDs, multipliers and synthetic instruments. The head office is in Birkirkara, Malta.
Leadership changed in May 2025. Rakshit Choudhary, previously chief operating officer and then co-CEO, became sole chief executive after sixteen years inside the company. Sireau remains founder and majority shareholder and stepped back to a strategic role. We re-checked ownership in July 2026: the group has not been acquired and Sireau still controls it, which matters because a quiet change of control is one of the more common ways a broker’s character shifts without its marketing changing at all.
Deriv reports more than 3 million registered clients across over 150 countries — up from the 2.5 million and 100 countries it was publishing when we first tested. Growth is concentrated in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the product design reflects that: very low minimums, heavy mobile emphasis, and peer-to-peer funding for markets where card and bank rails are awkward. Few of the brokers we cover build for those markets so deliberately.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Brand | Deriv (formerly Binary.com) |
| EU legal entity | Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Rebranded | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Birkirkara, Malta |
| Founder | Jean-Yves Sireau (majority shareholder) |
| Chief executive | Rakshit Choudhary (since May 2025) |
| Registered clients | 3 million+ |
| Countries served | 150+ |
| Operating entities | Malta, Labuan, Vanuatu, BVI, Mauritius, Cayman Islands, UAE, St Vincent and the Grenadines |
Who this broker suits (and who it does not)
Deriv suits an experienced trader who specifically wants synthetic indices or multipliers and understands what they are. Nothing else on the market offers a 24/7 instrument with a stable, published volatility profile, and traders who build systems around that behaviour have a real reason to be here. It also suits someone testing a strategy on a very small balance, because $5 opens a live account and a demo carries $10,000 in virtual funds.
It does not suit a beginner looking for a straightforward, well-protected place to learn forex. The product menu is genuinely complicated — digital options, turbos, accumulators, multipliers and CFDs each behave differently — and the account most new clients land on has no regulator behind it. It does not suit anyone who wants to own shares, because Deriv offers no individual equities in any form. And it does not suit a trader who treats compensation cover as non-negotiable: unless you are an EEA resident booked to the Malta entity, there is no statutory scheme protecting your balance.
Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of losing money rapidly. Deriv itself discloses that 70.78% of its retail accounts lose money on CFDs, and its synthetic and options products are not less risky than that figure — they are differently risky.
Licensing and regulation
This is the section that decided the rating, and it needs stating plainly: Deriv’s licensing looks impressive as a list and thin as a protection.
The strongest authorisation is MFSA licence C 70156, held by Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited, incorporated in Malta in April 2015. Malta is an EU member state, so this entity operates under MiFID II: retail leverage capped at 1:30 on major pairs, mandatory negative balance protection, appropriateness testing, and no binary options — retail binaries are banned across the EEA. We confirmed the licence was live on the MFSA register in July 2026.
Then it drops away. Deriv (FX) Ltd holds Labuan FSA money-broking licence MB/18/0024. Deriv (V) Ltd holds VFSC licence 14556 in Vanuatu. Deriv (BVI) Ltd holds BVI FSC certificate SIBA/L/18/1114. Since the original testing, the group has added Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd under the Mauritius FSC, Deriv Investments (Cayman) Limited under CIMA, and Deriv Capital Contracts & Currencies L.L.C, which received a Category 1 broker licence from the UAE regulator on 2 October 2025.
And then there is Deriv (SVG) LLC, registered in St Vincent and the Grenadines. It holds no financial services licence, because St Vincent’s authority does not license forex or CFD brokers. Per Deriv’s own entity disclosures, this is where most retail clients outside the EU and Malaysia are booked. That is a materially different picture from the one we published in March 2026, when we described non-EU clients as routing to Vanuatu or BVI, and it is the single change that moved this review’s score.
Deriv holds no FCA authorisation and no ASIC licence. A UK or Australian resident trading here has no FSCS cover, no Financial Ombudsman Service, and no AFCA. We were not able to establish with confidence which entity onboards UK or Australian residents specifically, and we are not going to guess — check the entity named in your own client agreement before funding, because that document, not the marketing site, determines what you are protected by.
| Regulator | Licence | Entity | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| MFSA (Malta) | C 70156 | Deriv Investments (Europe) Ltd | Tier 1 (EU/MiFID II) |
| UAE regulator | Category 1 broker (Oct 2025) | Deriv Capital Contracts & Currencies L.L.C | Tier 2 |
| Labuan FSA (Malaysia) | MB/18/0024 | Deriv (FX) Ltd | Tier 2 |
| Mauritius FSC | Investment Dealer | Deriv (Mauritius) Ltd | Tier 2 |
| CIMA (Cayman Islands) | Registered 406695 | Deriv Investments (Cayman) Ltd | Tier 3 |
| VFSC (Vanuatu) | 14556 | Deriv (V) Ltd | Tier 3 |
| BVI FSC | SIBA/L/18/1114 | Deriv (BVI) Ltd | Tier 3 |
| None | No licence held | Deriv (SVG) LLC | Unregulated |
Regulator warnings we found
Three items surfaced when we checked the registers on 27 July 2026. None is an enforcement action against the operating broker, and we are disclosing all three because a reader searching “Deriv regulator warning” will find them and deserves the context.
The MFSA published a clone warning about an entity calling itself “Deriv Investment” at derivinvestment.com, which was misusing the genuine licensee’s registration details. That is a warning about criminals impersonating Deriv, not about Deriv. The FCA Warning List carries an entry for “Deriv-Trades / deriv-trades.ltd”, an unauthorised firm with a confusingly similar name and no connection to this broker; the FCA has published nothing against Deriv itself. The Bank of Russia lists seven Deriv and legacy Binary entities under “signs of illegal professional securities market participant”, a territorial listing meaning the group holds no Russian licence — the same list names dozens of established offshore brokers, the Malta entity is unaffected, and Deriv does not market to Russia.
We found no licence revocation, no suspension, no client-money finding and no current advisory that Deriv is soliciting clients without authorisation in a market it serves. The regulatory weakness in this review is the unlicensed SVG entity, and we have scored it rather than treated it as a warning.
Opening an account and verification
Registration took about three minutes when we tested it in February 2026. Email, Google, Facebook or Apple sign-in all work; we used email and the confirmation link arrived in under a minute. After confirming, the form asked for full name, date of birth, country of residence and account currency, and a demo account with $10,000 in virtual funds opened immediately.
Deriv lets you trade the demo before any identity check, which is less common than it sounds — plenty of brokers gate the demo behind full KYC. To fund a live account we had to verify: passport or national ID, plus proof of address no older than three months. We uploaded on a Tuesday and approval came through on the Wednesday, one business day, against a sector norm closer to two or three.
One structural quirk: each platform needs its own sub-account. A Deriv Trader account, a Deriv MT5 account and a cTrader account are opened separately inside the same dashboard. Each took a couple of minutes, but a new client can easily end up with four balances and lose track of where the money sits. Note also the recurring third-party reports of accounts being frozen for additional verification after a first sizeable deposit. We did not hit this, and we cannot verify individual cases, but it appears often enough that completing KYC fully before depositing is the sensible order of operations.
Account types
Account structure follows platform and market rather than deposit size, which is unusual and takes some getting used to. All Deriv MT5 account types open from $5.
The Standard account is the default: spreads from 0.5 pips, no commission, and access to forex, commodities, crypto and synthetic indices from one login. In our testing the real EUR/USD spread sat between 0.6 and 1.2 pips during main sessions. Zero Spread starts at 0.0 pips and charges commission instead, from around $0.50 per standard lot on major pairs; on our sizing it worked out cheaper than Standard once trade frequency rose. The Financial account covers conventional markets only — forex, commodities, crypto and stock indices, no synthetics — for traders who want the real-market book and nothing else.
Swap-free is available as an option on Deriv MT5 and, usefully, activates from account settings without contacting support. It removes overnight interest, but it is not free: an administration fee replaces the swap after a grace period, currently five days on derived (synthetic) indices and 15 days on financial instruments. That is a change from the one-to-14-day window Deriv published when we first tested. The fee is a fixed USD amount per lot per day, varying by instrument, so a swap-free position held for weeks is not costless — it is differently costed, and on some instruments it costs more.
| Account | Minimum | Spread from | Commission | Max leverage | Markets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $5 | 0.5 pips | None | 1:1000 | Forex, commodities, crypto, synthetics |
| Zero Spread | $5 | 0.0 pips | From $0.50/lot | 1:1000 | Forex, commodities, indices |
| Financial | $5 | 0.5 pips | None | 1:1000 | Forex, commodities, crypto, stock indices |
| Swap-free | $5 | 0.5 pips | None (admin fee applies) | 1:1000 | Most instruments |
The 1:1000 figure applies only to the offshore entities. Clients booked to the Malta entity are capped at 1:30 on major forex under MiFID II. In other words, the leverage Deriv advertises most prominently is available only to the clients with the least regulatory protection — that trade-off is the deal, and it should be made knowingly.
Fees and trading costs
We sampled spreads across several instruments during main sessions (10:00 to 16:00 GMT) in February 2026 on Standard accounts. Deriv came out competitive on forex — clearly cheaper than the Standard account in our XM review, roughly level with eToro and Plus500.
| Instrument | Deriv (Standard) | XM (Standard) | eToro | Plus500 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EUR/USD | 0.6–1.2 pips | 1.6–1.8 pips | 1.0 pips | 0.8–1.2 pips |
| GBP/USD | 1.0–1.8 pips | 2.1–2.4 pips | 2.0 pips | 1.5–2.0 pips |
| USD/JPY | 0.8–1.5 pips | 1.6–1.8 pips | 1.0 pips | 1.0–1.5 pips |
| AUD/USD | 0.9–1.6 pips | 1.8–2.0 pips | 1.5 pips | 1.0–1.5 pips |
| USD/CHF | 1.0–1.8 pips | 2.0–2.4 pips | 1.5 pips | 1.5–2.0 pips |
| Gold (XAU/USD) | 25–40 cents | 35–45 cents | 45 cents | 40–60 cents |
| Oil (WTI) | 3.0–5.0 cents | 4.0–5.0 cents | 5.0 cents | 4.0–6.0 cents |
Those are normal-conditions numbers. Spreads widened noticeably in the thin window between 22:00 and 02:00 GMT and around scheduled economic releases, which is ordinary behaviour but worth planning around if you trade those hours.
Standard and Financial accounts charge no commission; the spread is the whole cost. Overnight financing on EUR/USD measured roughly -$7.50 on the long side and +$3.20 on the short side per standard lot per night in February 2026, which moves with prevailing rates. Deriv charged us nothing on deposits or withdrawals on any method we used, though card issuers and banks apply their own charges. The dormancy fee is up to $25 after 12 months of no activity, then repeating every six months — better than brokers that start charging after 60 days, worse than the sector’s most patient.
The real cost problem is elsewhere. Digital options and multipliers carry no separate commission because the cost is built into the contract price. That is not hidden, but it is unverifiable from outside: you cannot decompose the quoted price into fair value plus margin the way you can with a spread. Comparing Deriv’s all-in cost on those products against a conventional broker is not something a retail trader can do accurately, and we could not do it either.
Desktop platforms
Deriv runs more platforms than almost anyone, which is a strength for a trader who knows what they want and a source of confusion for everyone else. The lineup changed since our original testing: Deriv withdrew the Deriv X platform in August 2025, so our findings on it are no longer applicable and we have dropped them.
Deriv Trader (formerly DTrader) is the in-house browser platform and the only route to digital options, multipliers and accumulators. It is clean and quick and needs no download. It is also thin on technical analysis compared with MT5 — adequate for entering a directional view, not for building one.
Deriv Bot builds automated strategies through a drag-and-drop block interface. We assembled a working moving-average strategy in about 20 minutes with no code. It is a real tool, not a toy, but it is not a substitute for Expert Advisors — the logic you can express is much simpler.
Deriv MT5 is standard MetaTrader 5 with Deriv’s instrument set attached, including synthetic indices, which is genuinely unusual. Charting, indicators and EA support behave exactly as they do at any other MT5 broker. Deriv cTrader was added to the lineup and brings copy trading and cTrader’s order book depth, and SmartTrader remains for legacy options traders. The cTrader addition is what puts Deriv on our list of the best copy trading platforms.
The downside of this breadth is fragmentation. Instruments, order types and even account balances differ between platforms, and a new client has no obvious way to work out which one they should be using. A single well-built platform would serve most people better than five partial ones.
Mobile apps
We tested on Android in February 2026. Deriv GO carried a 4.3/5 Google Play rating from more than 4,200 reviews with over a million downloads; the separate Deriv P2P app sat at 4.0/5 with over 100,000 downloads. Deriv MT5 runs through the standard MetaTrader mobile app.
Deriv GO opens fast and the interface is clean. We placed forex and synthetic index trades without difficulty, and multipliers are tradeable directly from the phone — a feature most brokers’ apps have no equivalent for. Price alerts fired reliably throughout our testing period.
Against that, the app carries fewer analysis tools than the browser platforms, and switching between instruments was noticeably sluggish. Battery drain was significant when we left it running in the background to monitor open positions — enough that we would not rely on it as an all-day monitoring tool without a charger. None of this is disqualifying, but the app is better for execution than for decision-making.
Trading tools
Deriv lists over 300 instruments. That is fewer than XM’s 1,000-plus or eToro’s 3,000-plus, and the gap is concentrated in equities — Deriv offers no individual shares in any form, only stock index CFDs. Around 30 forex pairs is a thin book by sector standards. What Deriv has instead is a product class nobody else sells.
What synthetic indices actually are
This is the part readers most often get wrong, so it is worth being blunt. A synthetic index is not a market. It is a price series Deriv generates itself from a cryptographically secure random number generator, engineered to hold a defined volatility profile. Volatility 75, for example, behaves like an instrument with 75% annualised volatility — permanently, by construction. Crash and Boom indices are built to produce a sharp move at a defined average frequency. Step indices move in fixed increments.
Because there is no underlying market, these instruments trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including weekends and holidays. When we tested on a Friday in February 2026 we opened a Volatility 75 position at 03:00 and it filled instantly. No news event moves them. No central bank affects them. Nothing you read in the financial press has any bearing on their price.
The trade-off is that Deriv is simultaneously the price source, the counterparty and the venue. Deriv publishes the generation method and states the feed is independently audited, and we have no evidence of anything improper. But there is no external reference price, so a client cannot independently verify a quote the way they can check EUR/USD against any other broker on earth. Anyone trading these should understand that they are trading against a mechanism the broker designed, and size accordingly.
Multipliers, options and the rest
Multipliers sit between CFDs and options: amplified exposure to a price move, with maximum loss capped at the stake. We tested a x100 multiplier on EUR/USD with a $10 stake and the worst case was $10, regardless of how far the price moved against us — and separately a x50 position, which behaved the same way. The cap is real and it is the product’s best feature, but the leverage implied by a x100 multiplier is severe and most of these positions close at a loss.
Digital options run from seconds to days. These are the descendants of binary options, a product class ESMA banned for EEA retail clients in 2018 on the grounds of investor detriment. They remain available to Deriv’s non-EU clients. Accumulators, turbos and vanilla options round out the menu. Commodities cover gold, silver, oil and a handful of metals; crypto covers around ten majors; stock indices cover the usual global benchmarks.
| Category | Deriv | XM | eToro | Plus500 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forex pairs | ~30 | 55+ | 49 | 60+ |
| Synthetic indices | 30+ | None | None | None |
| Commodities | 10+ | 15+ | 30+ | 20+ |
| Cryptocurrencies | 10+ | 30+ | 80+ | 20+ |
| Stock indices | 15+ | 20+ | 20+ | 25+ |
| Individual shares | None | 1300+ | 3000+ | 2000+ |
| Approximate total | 300+ | 1000+ | 3000+ | 2000+ |
Order execution
We placed more than 40 orders on a funded live account across February 2026, split between Deriv Trader and Deriv MT5, at different times of day.
On Deriv MT5, average execution on major forex pairs came in under 100 milliseconds, which is a normal-to-good result for a retail MT5 environment. Slippage was negligible on most fills. The exception was the US employment release, where we recorded 1 to 2 pips of slippage on orders placed into the print — expected behaviour, and not a mark against the broker, but worth knowing if your strategy trades data.
On Deriv Trader, multiplier and digital option fills were effectively instant in almost every case. We saw no meaningful slippage on EUR/USD or GBP/USD during main sessions. The one soft spot was synthetic indices at peak load, where fills occasionally lagged by under a second — small, but a scalper working on a synthetic index will notice it.
Order types cover market, the four pending types, stop loss and take profit. Deriv Trader adds product-specific controls, including deal cancellation, which lets you unwind a multiplier position within a set window for an extra charge. Overall execution is solid for position and swing trading. It is adequate rather than exceptional for high-frequency scalping.
Deposits
We deposited $100 by Visa in February 2026. It took under a minute from clicking through to the balance appearing, with no fee from Deriv.
The method list is broad: Visa, Mastercard and Maestro; Skrill, Neteller, Jeton and SticPay; Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and USDT; bank transfer; and Deriv P2P. That last one deserves a mention — it matches clients directly with each other to move money in and out, with a counterparty rating system, and it works around the clock. For clients in markets where international card and bank rails are slow or expensive, it is a genuine advantage rather than a gimmick, and it worked when we tested it.
Accepted currencies include USD, EUR, GBP and AUD alongside crypto. Deposits in an unsupported currency incur your own bank’s conversion cost, which is outside Deriv’s control but lands on your statement all the same.
| Method | Minimum | Processing | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa / Mastercard | $10 | Instant | None |
| Skrill | $5 | Instant | None |
| Neteller | $5 | Instant | None |
| Bank transfer | $500 | 1–3 business days | None (bank fees apply) |
| Cryptocurrency | $10 | Network dependent | None (network fees apply) |
| Deriv P2P | Variable | Counterparty dependent | None |
Withdrawals
We requested $150 to Skrill at 10:00 on a Wednesday in February 2026. It landed at 15:00 on the Thursday — about 29 hours. That is within a reasonable band and it cost nothing, but it is not fast; brokers that clear e-wallet withdrawals the same day exist, and several of them are better regulated.
Withdrawal methods mirror deposit methods, and Deriv applies the standard anti-money-laundering rule that funds return by the route they arrived on first, with surplus withdrawable elsewhere. One practical constraint: Deriv does not process withdrawals over the weekend. A request submitted Saturday sits until Monday. Deriv P2P is the exception and runs 24/7.
We withdrew our full balance without obstruction. That is our finding and we stand behind it. It also needs qualifying: there is a durable volume of third-party complaints about frozen accounts and delayed withdrawals, and the pattern reported across review platforms concentrates on clients booked to the unregulated SVG entity, often triggered by extended KYC requests or “unusual trading activity” flags. We cannot verify individual complaints, and a broker with three million clients will always generate some. But the structural point stands: if a withdrawal dispute goes badly on the SVG entity, there is no regulator to appeal to. That is not a small thing, and it is priced into this review’s withdrawal score.
| Method | Minimum | Processing | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visa / Mastercard | $10 | 1–3 business days | None |
| Skrill | $5 | 1 business day | None |
| Neteller | $5 | 1 business day | None |
| Bank transfer | $500 | 3–5 business days | None (bank fees apply) |
| Cryptocurrency | $10 | Network dependent | None (network fees apply) |
| Deriv P2P | Variable | 24/7 | None |
Customer support
Support runs through live chat, email and a help centre. There is no telephone line at all, on any tier, which puts Deriv behind XM and eToro and matters more than it sounds when something urgent goes wrong with a funded account.
We contacted live chat three times in February 2026. On a Tuesday at 11:00 we reached a human in four minutes and got a clear, accurate answer about account types. On a Wednesday at 21:00 we hit a bot first and waited 12 minutes for handoff to a person. On a Friday at 18:00 we never reached a specialist at all. The pattern is straightforward: good coverage in core hours, thinning to unreliable at the edges.
Email replies came back within one business day. The help centre is genuinely well organised — account, funding, platform and product sections are easy to navigate and the product explanations are better than most brokers manage. Deriv also runs an active community forum where experienced users answer each other, useful for platform questions but no substitute for official support when a balance is involved.
| Channel | Availability | Response time (our tests) |
|---|---|---|
| Live chat | 24/7 (staffing varies) | 4–15 minutes to a human |
| 24/7 | Within one business day | |
| Help centre | Always | Immediate (self-service) |
| Community forum | Always | Variable |
| Telephone | Not offered | — |
Research and education
Deriv Academy organises courses by level — beginner, intermediate, advanced — across trading basics, risk management, technical analysis and strategy. The blog publishes regularly. Both are solid without being distinguished.
Where Deriv is genuinely strong is documentation of its own products. The material explaining how synthetic indices are generated, how multipliers price, and how accumulators compound is detailed and honest, and no competitor can provide it because no competitor sells these instruments. If you are going to trade them, read it first.
Research is the weak side. There is a basic economic calendar and the charting built into each platform, and that is close to it — no in-house analyst reports, no screeners, no integrated trade signals. A trader who wants serious technical analysis will run TradingView alongside Deriv rather than inside it. Deriv is transparent about the things that are easy to be transparent about, and structurally opaque about the one thing that matters most: how its own synthetic prices are formed.
Fund safety and protections
Client money segregation applies group-wide according to Deriv’s published legal documentation, and we found nothing contradicting that. But the enforceability differs enormously by entity. Under MFSA rules, segregation is a supervised legal obligation with an auditor and a regulator behind it. Under Deriv (SVG) LLC there is no licensing authority, so segregation rests on the company’s own policy and its willingness to keep it.
Negative balance protection is offered to all clients, so losses should not exceed your balance. For EEA clients on the Malta entity this is a statutory right. Everywhere else it is a commercial policy — real in practice, but not something you could enforce.
On compensation, EEA clients booked to Malta fall under the Investor Compensation Scheme, covering 90% of a claim up to €20,000 if the firm fails. Deriv is also a member of the Financial Commission, an industry dispute-resolution body offering up to €20,000 per case. That membership is worth something and it is better than nothing, but it is not a statutory compensation scheme: the Financial Commission is funded by its member brokers, not by a regulator.
Put next to the alternatives, the gap is wide. An FCA-regulated broker carries FSCS cover to £85,000 and access to the Financial Ombudsman Service. A CySEC-regulated broker carries the EU scheme. Deriv delivers comparable protection only to EEA clients on one of its eight entities. For everyone else, fund safety rests on the company’s own conduct and its 27-year record — which is a real record, and still not the same thing as a regulator.
| Protection | Deriv (MFSA) | Deriv (SVG / offshore) | XM (CySEC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Segregated client funds | Yes (statutory) | Yes (company policy) | Yes (statutory) |
| Negative balance protection | Yes (statutory) | Yes (company policy) | Yes (statutory) |
| Compensation scheme | ICF, 90% up to €20,000 | None statutory; Financial Commission up to €20,000 | ICF up to €20,000 |
| External audit | Yes (MFSA requirement) | Limited | Yes (CySEC requirement) |
| Regulator to escalate to | MFSA | None (SVG entity) | CySEC |
Verdict
6.4/10 on the six-category framework behind all our broker reviews. A genuinely distinctive broker with a long record, fair pricing and real technology, wrapped around a regulatory structure that leaves most of its clients unprotected.
What we found in testing was mostly good. Spreads beat XM’s Standard account. Execution on MT5 averaged under 100 milliseconds. Verification cleared in one business day. Our withdrawal arrived in 29 hours with no fee. Deriv Bot let us build an automated strategy in 20 minutes without code. And the synthetic indices are a real product with a real audience — 24/7, engineered volatility, and no news risk.
What holds the score down is not the testing, it is the structure. Deriv has one tier-one licence and it covers EEA clients only. Most retail clients elsewhere are onboarded to an entity with no licence at all. There is no FCA authorisation and no ASIC licence, so UK and Australian readers get no FSCS and no AFCA. Regulation and licensing carries 25% of our score and it is the category that moved: we scored it 5.0, against stronger marks on cost (7.5), platforms and execution (7.5), withdrawals (6.5), support (6.0) and research and transparency (6.0).
Our Arabic edition published 3.6/5 in March 2026. That figure used a seven-category rubric including an Arabic-trader dimension weighted at 15%, which does not apply here, and it predated our finding on the SVG entity. Re-derived on the six weights we use on this site, the score lands at 6.4 rather than 7.2. The arithmetic moved because the regulatory picture got worse when we looked harder, not because our view of the platform changed.
Consider Deriv if you want synthetic indices or multipliers specifically, understand how they are constructed, and accept that the protection behind your account may be a company policy rather than a statute. Look elsewhere if you are starting out, if you want to own shares, or if a statutory compensation scheme is a requirement rather than a preference. Trading leveraged products carries a high risk of rapid loss: 70.78% of Deriv’s retail CFD accounts lose money, and most retail traders lose money on these products generally. Do not fund an account with money you cannot afford to lose.
Is Deriv trustworthy?
Is Deriv a scam?
No. Deriv has operated since 1999, holds a live EU investment services licence, and paid our withdrawal without obstruction. We found no fraud finding, no licence revocation and no regulator action against the operating broker. “High-risk products with weak regulatory backing” and “scam” are different things, and conflating them helps nobody. The honest criticism is that the protection behind most Deriv accounts is thinner than the licence list suggests.
Are there regulator warnings against Deriv?
Three items exist and none is an action against the broker. The MFSA published a clone alert about a fraudulent site misusing Deriv’s Maltese registration details. The FCA Warning List names “Deriv-Trades / deriv-trades.ltd”, an unauthorised firm with a similar name and no connection to Deriv. The Bank of Russia lists several Deriv entities as unlicensed in Russia — a territorial listing naming dozens of offshore brokers, with the Malta entity unaffected. We found nothing indicating enforcement against Deriv itself when we checked on 27 July 2026.
Can you actually withdraw money from Deriv?
We did, in full, in about 29 hours to Skrill, with no fee. Third-party complaints about delays and frozen accounts are real and persistent, and they cluster on clients booked to the unregulated SVG entity, typically after extra verification requests or activity flags. Complete KYC before you deposit and withdraw by the method you funded with; that removes the most common cause. Understand also that on the SVG entity, a dispute has no regulator to escalate to.
Are synthetic indices rigged?
We found no evidence of manipulation, and Deriv publishes its generation method and states the feed is independently audited. But the structural conflict is real and should not be dressed up: Deriv creates the price, sets the terms and takes the other side. There is no external market to check a quote against. That is not fraud, it is the design of the product — and it is a reason to size positions as though you cannot verify the price, because you cannot.
Frequently asked questions
Is Deriv regulated?
Partly. Deriv Investments (Europe) Limited holds MFSA licence C 70156 and serves EEA clients under MiFID II. Other entities hold licences in Labuan, Vanuatu, BVI, Mauritius, the Cayman Islands and the UAE. But most retail clients outside the EU and Malaysia are onboarded to Deriv (SVG) LLC, which holds no financial services licence. Check which entity your client agreement names before funding — that determines what protects you.
What is the minimum deposit at Deriv?
$5 through e-wallets such as Skrill and Neteller, $10 by card, and $500 by bank transfer. All Deriv MT5 account types open from $5, which is among the lowest thresholds in the sector.
What are synthetic indices?
Instruments Deriv generates itself using a cryptographically secure random number generator, engineered to hold a defined volatility profile. They are not linked to any real market, which is why they trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays. The family includes Volatility, Crash, Boom, Step and Range Break indices. Deriv is the price source and the counterparty, so there is no external reference to verify a quote against.
Does Deriv offer a swap-free account?
Yes, as an option on Deriv MT5, activated from account settings without contacting support. Overnight interest is removed and replaced by a fixed administration fee per lot per day after a grace period — currently five days on derived (synthetic) indices and 15 days on financial instruments. Held long enough, a swap-free position is not cheaper than a standard one, so compare the administration fee against the swap you would otherwise pay.
What is the maximum leverage at Deriv?
Up to 1:1000 on the offshore entities. Clients booked to the Malta entity are capped at 1:30 on major forex under MiFID II. The highest leverage is therefore available only to the clients with the least regulatory protection. Higher leverage magnifies losses as much as gains and is the main reason retail accounts fail quickly.
How does Deriv compare with XM and eToro?
Deriv wins on spot forex spreads, on minimum deposit, and on product uniqueness — synthetic indices and multipliers have no equivalent at either. It loses on instrument breadth (300+ against 1,000+ and 3,000+), on equities (none at all), and decisively on regulation: XM holds CySEC and ASIC licences, eToro holds FCA, CySEC and ASIC. For a trader who wants conventional markets with statutory protection, both are stronger choices. For synthetic indices, neither is a choice at all.
Does Deriv charge inactivity fees?
Yes, up to $25 after 12 months without activity, then repeating every six months while the account stays dormant. Deriv charges nothing on deposits or withdrawals from its own side, though banks, card issuers and crypto networks apply their own costs.
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