The baseline for UK retail forex has not moved in 2026, and this desk regards that as the most useful sentence it will publish this week. A firm offering forex trading to UK retail customers — whether packaged as spread bets or as CFDs — requires authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority, with the relevant permissions attached. That is the floor. Everything else a broker says about itself sits above that floor, and none of it substitutes for it.
The public record of the floor is the Financial Services Register, which this publication quotes the way other publications quote analysts. The Register lists the firm’s reference number, its permissions, its registered trading names, and its recorded contact details, and it flags warnings where the regulator has issued them. The reader’s procedure has not changed and will not: search the firm, confirm the FRN matches the one the firm claims, confirm the permissions cover the product being offered, and — the step most often skipped — contact the firm through the details the Register records, not the details an email supplied. Clone firms, which borrow the name and FRN of an authorised firm while operating from somewhere else entirely, remain a persistent feature of the landscape, and the regulator’s published warning list grows accordingly. The Register is not a decoration; it is the document.
Authorisation carries a second consequence worth stating precisely. Customers of an authorised firm may have recourse to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme if the firm fails owing them money — eligible claims are covered up to £85,000 per person, per firm, per the scheme’s published limit as of this writing. The precision matters because the misreading is common: the FSCS covers the failure of the firm, never the failure of the trade. A losing position is not a claim. No scheme, fund, or register reimburses the ordinary operation of a leveraged market.
The 2026 landscape, then, is institutional rather than eventful: the same authorisation gate, the same Register, the same £85,000 backstop for firm failure, and the same population of unauthorised and cloned operations testing the fence from outside. Firms based offshore and soliciting UK residents without authorisation sit beyond the FSCS, beyond the Financial Ombudsman Service, and largely beyond practical remedy. The desk’s guidance is unchanged because the rulebook is: check the Register first, and let the brokers compete for whatever attention remains.
The standing reminder: trading involves substantial risk of loss, and authorisation is a floor, not a forecast.