How to Check Any Copy Trading Offer Before You Deposit

1. Identify the legal entity, not the brand

The brand name on the website is rarely the company you contract with. Find the legal entity in the footer or client agreement — the name, the company number, and the country. Everything else you check depends on getting this right, because a licence belongs to an entity, not to a website.

2. Verify the licence on the regulator's own register

Go to the regulator's official site directly — type the address, never follow a link from the broker or a promoter. Search the entity name. Check the licence category, the date, and above all the status, plus any annotations. Confirm the entity on the register is the same one named in the agreement you are being asked to sign.

Then search separately for warnings: most regulators publish alert lists, and a firm can hold a licence in one country while being warned about in another. Both facts can be true, and you want to know both.

3. Audit the track record where the broker cannot edit it

A screenshot proves nothing. Ask for a link to a third-party tracking platform that reads the account directly. Then, on that page: confirm it is a real account and not a demo, check when tracking actually began (history uploaded before that date is not independently observed), read the worst month rather than the average, and look at the trade log for position sizes.

4. Read the two documents nobody reads

The client agreement: who holds your money, what happens on insolvency, negative balance protection, liquidation levels, and the withdrawal terms. The insurance certificate, if one is offered: the named insured, whether the limit is per claimant or aggregate, what triggers it, and the policy period. An expired certificate or an aggregate limit described as per-client is worth knowing before you deposit, not after.

5. Test the withdrawal

Deposit the minimum. Let it trade. Then withdraw — including profit, not just your principal — and time how long it takes. Do this before any meaningful deposit.

This is the only test that checks the thing that actually matters, and blocked withdrawals are the defining symptom of a broker in trouble. Everything else on this list is paperwork; this one is evidence.

A worked example

If you want to see this checklist applied end to end to a real broker — the register entry pulled, the insurance certificate quoted line by line, the track record audited and the criticisms addressed rather than dodged — there is a full worked example on tagmarkets.review, including the parts that did not check out.