Investizo: the broker the system runs through

Investizo LTD is registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, registration number 25432 BC 2019.

The company holds no financial regulator licence. The local regulator has not licensed forex firms since 2018, meaning one cannot be obtained in that jurisdiction at all.

Since 15 November 2021 the Bank of Russia has kept Investizo on its list of companies showing signs of illegal activity on the financial market.

The broker does not serve residents of the EU, the US, Australia, Israel, Japan or the UAE.

These are real risks, and they are not offset by awards, by how long the company has operated, or by the strategy's results.

A brand holding a licence does not mean your account is opened inside the licensed entity. International brokers usually run several structures: a European company for EU clients, an offshore one for everybody else, separate entities per region.

Someone says "my broker is licensed", and the paperwork for their account names a different company in the group.

Negative reviews exist, and competitors did not invent them. We will not claim otherwise: saying "all the negativity is paid for" is as much of a stretch as concluding "I found one bad review, so they are fraudsters".

By the company's account, one wave of complaints followed a conflict with a group of clients who, in its judgement, used the bonus system improperly. Results on those operations were voided, the clients kept their own funds, and a stream of reviews followed.

We label that as the broker's version: we do not hold the trade logs of those accounts and can neither confirm nor refute it.

Access restrictions on foreign financial companies' websites exist. That is a question of a foreign company being admitted to a particular national market, which is why international brokers end up with alternative domains.

It creates inconvenience for the client. But turning a website access restriction into proof of fraud is faulty logic: those are different procedures.

There are three models for handling client flow: A-book, where the broker passes client risk to an external counterparty; B-book, where the risk stays inside; and hybrid, where part of the flow nets internally and material residual risk goes to liquidity providers.

Per the company's management, Investizo uses the hybrid model. For a modern broker that is ordinary architecture: there is no sense sending every $50 position to an external provider when one client buys gold and another sells it.

A strategy can be sound, but if copying runs with a delay and the subscriber's prices diverge from the master account, the strategy's maths falls apart.

At Investizo the copy and trading infrastructure sit inside one broker, with no external bridge. High-speed execution is stated, to narrow the price gap. That same system has taken industry awards several years running.

The money is in your own account with the broker. You transfer it to no one, not to the manager, not to a partner.

The manager gets the right to place trades on funds attached to the PAMM account. He has no right of withdrawal: deposits and withdrawals are available to you alone, once verified.

That removes the risk of the manager taking your funds. It does not remove broker risk: the money sits with the broker, and the broker's status is described at the top of this page.

The last point weighs more with us than the rest. We do not send an investor to a broker we do not use ourselves.

No. If someone tells you a broker is completely safe, that is a reason to stop listening.

Broker risk exists everywhere: at a regulated broker, at an offshore one, at a bank. What differs is its size and what you can do if it materialises. With an unlicensed offshore entity, your options in that situation are limited.