also: restricted country, prohibited jurisdiction, excluded region
A restricted jurisdiction is a country or territory whose residents a broker will not onboard, because serving them would need a licence the broker's entity does not hold. Each entity publishes its own list, and the list decides which account an EA can run on.
Brokers hold licences for particular places. Where they hold none and local rules demand one, they turn the applicant away on address alone, before anything about the trader or the strategy gets a look.
Residence picks the broker before spread, execution or EA policy get a say. For an EA it goes further: the entity that onboards you fixes the leverage, the symbol names and the protections the strategy will actually run under.
One trader profile, three residences, one EA. Nothing about the strategy changes; the account it lands on does.
A backtest describes the account it ran on. If your residence cannot open that account, the report describes someone else's deployment.
Calculation one strategy × three residences = three account conditions
Result Residence sets the conditions before the strategy is chosen
Settle availability first, against the entity that will actually onboard you, and only then compare cost and execution.
| Range | What it means |
|---|---|
| Accepted by a well-regulated entity in your country | The best case. Compare spread, execution and EA policy from here. |
| Accepted by an offshore entity, lawful where you live | Workable. Confirm the negative balance rule and the dispute route, which are usually thinner. |
| Accepted only under passive solicitation | The broker's position, not permission. Check the local rules yourself. |
| Listed as restricted, or unclear for your address | Do not deposit. A refusal at verification with funds on account is the expensive version. |
The regulator, excluded regions, execution model and leverage are worth recording as fields for each broker, which is what lets two entities of one brand sit side by side.
A group can hold a strong licence in one region and onboard you through an entity that excludes that same region. Two of the six broker records here show exactly that pair. The licence that protects you is the one on the agreement you sign.
It means the broker does not market into a place but accepts applicants who find it unprompted. That describes the broker's compliance posture and confers nothing on the client. Whether a resident may lawfully trade is a separate question with a separate answer.
The Strategy Tester runs at the leverage typed into its settings. A report at 1:500 can contain trades a 1:30 entity would have refused for margin, which changes the equity curve rather than scaling it. Read the live login's leverage first.
Each of the six brokers below is recorded on excluded regions as a field, beside the licences and the headline leverage of the entity it reviews. Laid side by side, the six lists look like this.
| Broker record | Excluded entries | Licences recorded | Headline leverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| TitanFX | 8 | 1 | 1:500 |
| HFM | 6 | 6 | 1:2000 (Cent) / 1:1000 (Premium) |
| AXIORY | 6 | 2 | 1:1000 (Nano) / 1:777 (Standard) / 1:500 (Tera) |
| Exness | 5 | 4 | Unlimited (Pro / Raw / Zero) |
| FXGT | 5 | 2 | 1:1000 |
| XM | 4 | 3 | 1:1000 |
Three things fall out of the table. First, length does not track oversight: the longest list sits on the record with one licence and the shortest on a record with three, while the record with six licences lists six. The common assumption that the most lightly regulated entity accepts the widest range of residents does not survive this catalogue. Second, the lists agree on very little. One place appears on all six, three more on five, and the 34 entries as a whole come to 12 spellings for 9 places. Third, the same region arrives spelled three ways — European Union, EEA, EEA retail — and only two entries in the whole catalogue carry a retail qualifier. A qualifier changes who the exclusion reaches without changing the address.
A broker’s own marketing shows the brand. The terminal shows the
entity. Once an account exists, AccountInfoString(ACCOUNT_COMPANY) returns
the legal entity behind the login and ACCOUNT_SERVER the server it trades on;
AccountInfoInteger(ACCOUNT_LEVERAGE) returns the cap that entity granted.
Those three values, not the brochure, are the conditions the EA runs under.
They matter because the Strategy Tester runs at whatever leverage you type into
its settings. The six records here quote headline caps from 1:500 to
unlimited, so the margin one lot needs already differs four-fold between the
1:500 and the 1:2000 entities on this catalogue before a regulated 1:30 cap
enters the picture. A report produced at 1:500 and deployed at a 1:30 entity
can contain trades the live account would refuse for margin, and the equity
curve changes shape rather than scale — see leverage
for the arithmetic. Symbol names travel with the entity too: a set file tuned on
EURUSD can meet EURUSD.m at the entity you were routed to, and the EA
simply finds no chart. Read the login first, then rerun the test at the
leverage and symbol it reports.
An EA buyer clears two lists, and they are not the same list. The broker entity’s list decides whether the account exists. The software vendor’s list decides whether the licence may be sold and used; this site keeps its own on the restricted jurisdictions page under a passive-solicitation model, and it is written for software, not for trading services. A clean answer from one says nothing about the other, and neither says whether a resident may lawfully trade — that stays with local rules. The IB programme that referred you clears neither; a referral link routes to a brand, and the brand routes by residence.
Read the entity’s list, open the account, and only then compare negative balance protection, the execution model and the cost fields recorded for each broker. Every expert advisor in the catalogue states the broker and account conditions behind its figures, which is the comparison to make against the account your residence can actually open.
