IC Markets India: The RBI Alert List Entry, Explained With Numbers

What is genuinely checkable about IC Markets

• Costs are published in a checkable form: USD 3.50 per lot per side on Raw Spread, USD 0 commission with spreads from 0.8 pips on Standard (checked 2 September 2026)
• No minimum deposit on Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread or Standard, so an account can be opened small and tested
• Wide platform choice - MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, cTrader and TradingView - with MetaTrader servers in Equinix NY4, New York
• The broker charges no deposit or withdrawal fee of its own; third-party bank or card fees can still apply

Explore the specifics

Also on this site: MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 setup and the Equinix NY4 server location, a free demo that sidesteps the FEMA funding question entirely, sign-in help for the portal versus the trading terminals, and support channels with realistic waiting times.

IC Markets India — the verdict in one paragraph

A trader in India does not contract with an Australian or Cypriot company. The broker's own registration feed routes India to Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company (registration 8419879-1) holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. There is no Indian licence, and the Reserve Bank of India lists the brand as entry 22 on its Alert List, revised 19 November 2025 — a caution about unauthorised forex trading platforms, not a court order, but reason enough to read the RBI's own page before funding anything. Separately, the RBI has stated that remittances for margin trading with an overseas counterparty are not a permitted purpose under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, which is the practical barrier an Indian resident meets before the broker's own terms even apply. The published costs themselves are checkable: USD 3.50 per lot per side on Raw Spread, USD 0 commission with spreads from 0.8 pips on Standard, no minimum deposit on either — but every rupee still converts into one of ten base currencies that does not include INR, since IC Markets has no India-specific payment rail. CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money. Read what other users report on Trustpilot alongside this page, not instead of it.

Who IC Markets is, and which company actually serves India

IC Markets is a trading brand used by several distinct legal entities. The one that matters for a reader in India is Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company (registration 8419879-1) trading as IC and IC Markets Global, holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. The same group also contains IC Markets (EU) Ltd in Cyprus (CySEC licence CIF 362/18), International Capital Markets Pty Ltd in Australia (ASIC) and IC Trading (Mauritius) Ltd, all named on the broker's own site, checked 2 September 2026. These are different legal persons with different regulators; a reader who checks the Australian or Cypriot licence and assumes it covers an Indian account is checking the wrong company entirely.

The broker's own registration feed answers the residency question directly rather than by omission: India is returned as an open, served market by default on branch 3, the Raw Trading Ltd branch, with the Introducing Broker route also marked open, checked 2 September 2026. That openness is a sign-up status, not a licence — the two are separate facts and this page keeps them separate throughout.

The RBI Alert List entry, and what it does and does not mean

The Reserve Bank of India maintains a public Alert List of entities it considers to be offering forex trading facilities to residents without the domestic authorisation Indian law requires. IC Markets appears as entry 22 on the version revised 19 November 2025, published at rbi.org.in. Being on that list is an official caution, not a criminal conviction or an asset freeze — but it is the single most India-specific fact about this broker, and it belongs at the top of this page rather than buried in a footer.

It also has a practical consequence beyond the label. No Indian regulator — not SEBI, not the RBI itself as a trading-conduct supervisor — licenses or supervises the relationship between an Indian resident and Raw Trading Ltd. If a dispute arises, the contract you signed names Raw Trading Ltd of Seychelles as the counterparty, and Indian investor-protection law, including SEBI's investor grievance mechanisms, does not extend to that agreement. Read the current Alert List yourself at rbi.org.in before treating anything on this affiliate site, or any other, as a substitute for that check.

FEMA and the Liberalised Remittance Scheme: the barrier that comes before the broker's own terms

Separately from the Alert List, the RBI has stated that remittances for margin trading with an overseas counterparty are not a permitted purpose under the Foreign Exchange Management Act's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), the framework that lets resident individuals send money abroad up to an annual limit. That is not a comment on IC Markets specifically; it applies to funding any overseas trading account from India in this manner. In practice it means an authorised dealer bank can, and often does, decline or query a transfer once it is described as margin for an overseas trading platform.

This site does not give legal or tax advice, and the exact treatment of a specific transfer depends on facts this page cannot know. What we can state plainly is that the FEMA/LRS question is the real gatekeeping step for an Indian resident, ahead of anything the broker itself publishes about minimum deposit or account currency. Read the RBI's own LRS materials at rbi.org.in, and ask your bank in writing, before assuming a transfer will go through as described.

No rupee account, so every deposit converts at least once

IC Markets publishes ten account base currencies — USD, AUD, EUR, GBP, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF, HKD and CAD — and INR is not among them, checked 2 September 2026. Nor does the broker publish an India-specific funding rail: its own funding page names a Thailand rail (Thai Internet Banking) and a Vietnam rail (Vietnamese Internet Banking) explicitly, and lists no equivalent for India. A card, PayPal, Neteller, Skrill or wire transfer from India therefore converts rupees into one of those ten currencies before it reaches the account, and the exact markup applied to that conversion is not published by IC Markets — it sits with your card network, bank or payment provider, and is worth checking on your own statement rather than assuming.

The broker itself charges no deposit or withdrawal fee, which is a genuine, checkable point in its favour. It simply does not remove the currency-conversion step that a rupee-funded account in India runs into twice — once on the way in, and again on any withdrawal back to a rupee bank account.

Trading hours in IST, against servers in New York and London

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 run on servers in the Equinix NY4 data centre in New York; cTrader runs from London, checked 2 September 2026. India Standard Time (IST) is a fixed UTC+5:30 with no daylight-saving shift, while New York alternates between UTC-5 and UTC-4 and London between UTC+0 and UTC+1, so the gap to IST moves twice a year even though your own clock does not. In practice, the New York trading day runs through the Indian evening and into the small hours, and the London session sits across the Indian afternoon and early evening — worth mapping against your own MT4/MT5 or cTrader terminal clock rather than assumed, since the exact offset depends on which side of the US and UK daylight-saving changeovers you are trading in.

The same arithmetic applies to published cut-off times. IC Markets' withdrawal request cut-off is stated as 12:00 AEST/AEDT (Australian time), which lands at roughly 06:30 to 07:30 IST depending on the Australian daylight-saving calendar — a request made in the Indian morning can land on either side of that line.

What this page is, and what it is not

This is an independent, affiliate-supported review of IC Markets for readers in India. It is not the broker's own site, it does not accept deposits, and it does not offer trading, legal or tax advice. Every figure above is dated and sourced to the broker's own published pages or to the Reserve Bank of India, and the parts we could not verify — a founding year, a specific document list for verification — are stated as unverified rather than filled with a plausible-sounding guess.

CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money, and leverage magnifies losses as readily as gains. Read the RBI's Alert List and LRS guidance at rbi.org.in, read the broker's own client agreement for the entity named in it, and treat this page as one input among several rather than the final word.