Best Forex brokers in Canada

The Canadian Forex industry is one of the most tightly regulated in the world. The federal oversight body, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) regulates all locally registered Forex brokers and is in turn supervised by the Financial Institutions Supervisory Committee (FISC), a political body which provides policy direction and strategic leadership for all financial regulators in the country.

In addition, each of the thirteen provinces has its own powerful financial regulatory bodies, the largest and most active being the Ontario Securities Commission, based in Toronto.

A Tiered Leverage System

IIROC regulated brokers are subject to strict limits on the amount of leverage they can offer. Maximum leverage available is dependent on where a currency pair sits in a tiered system of currency groups. These currency groups are set by the regulator and are pairs are generally assigned to a group based on market volatility for that pair. As volatility for individual currency pairs is always fluctuating, the minimum margin required for trading also changes frequently and the IIROC regularly updates the system with the new requirements. Leverage can vary from 1:4 to 1:100, though the maximum generally available to retail traders is 50:1.

IIROC also enforces a strict Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which requires brokers to confirm not only your address, identity and social insurance number but also to complete a full background check to verify age, marital status, occupation, net worth, dependents, financial knowledge, and financial experience. You will also need to disclose any professional relationships with foreign governments and the source of all your trading funds must be independently verified.

Stricter Regulations for 2020

The IIROC recently indicated their desire to follow in Europe’s footsteps by imposing stricter regulations on the Forex market, and on the CFD market in general. A two-stage process has been started; stage one requires the pre-approval of any leveraged CFD products (including Forex) by the IIORC before it can be sold to Canadian consumers. This is more of a symbolic gesture at this point, as Quebec has required preapproval for some time and the IIROC already has the ability to ban any leveraged product it doesn’t feel meets regulatory criteria. While not a massive change for the industry, stage one has already been published for public comment.

Stage two has yet to be discussed in detail but we do expect it to contain restrictions on leverage and possibly some of the other regulatory changes made by ESMA in Europe in 2018/19. These restrictions will be published by February 2020 and we will update this page when they are announced.