Is forex trading legal in Australia?

Retail CFD trading is allowed in Australia but is tightly regulated. ASIC’s intervention order applies to retail clients and requires licensed issuers to follow leverage caps, margin close-out protections, negative balance protection, and bans on certain inducements.

For retail CFD clients, ASIC’s current leverage caps are 30:1 for major forex pairs, 20:1 for minor forex pairs/gold/major indices, 10:1 for other commodities and minor indices, 5:1 for shares or other underlying assets, and 2:1 for crypto-assets.

Of the 20 brokers we measure for Australia, 18 hold a local licence and the rest onboard residents through a foreign entity. That is not the same as being unregulated — it is a different question, and the broker pages name the entity in each case.

0 of them carry a warning from a regulator somewhere. A warning does not change a computed score here, but it removes the firm from beginner selections.

ASIC requires standardized risk warnings and has prohibited inducements such as trading credits, rebates, and free gifts for retail CFD clients. CFDs are high-risk products, and the rules are designed to reduce losses, but they do not eliminate the possibility of rapid account depletion.