Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Plus500 (LON:PLUS), one of the major forex and CFD brokers, announced it has obtained a derivatives issuer license from New Zealand’s financial regulator, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA). The license is granted to the brokerage’s Australian subsidiary Plus500AU and allows it to operate an online trading platform for retail customers to trade CFDs in New Zealand.
The license is effective immediately and is renewable every five years.
According to the company statement, the Plus500 Board believes that the awarding of the license reflects the Group’s robust trading platform and best practice regulatory compliance. “We are delighted to be awarded a license in New Zealand following on from the issue of the license in Israel announced last week,” said Asaf Elimelech, Chief Executive of Plus500. “The New Zealand license complements our existing Australian license where we have successfully operated for a number of years.”
This is the second national license Plus500 gets in the past several days. Last week it became one of the first forex and CFD brokers, along with FXCM, AvaTrade and several others, to be granted a trading arena license from the Israel Securities Authority (ISA).
Also last week, the founders of Plus500 – Alon Gonen, Gal Haber, Elad Ben-Izhak, Omer Elazari and Shlomi Weizmann, have sold a combined 13% (15 500 000 shares) of the existing ordinary shares of the company and pocketed £100.75 million.
Plus500 offers trading in forex, options, contracts for difference (CFDs), commodities, indices, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). It operates its own online trading platform for CFDs available in over 31 languages on desktop and Android, Windows and iOS mobile operating systems. According to Investment Trends report from July 2015, it is the second largest CFD provider in the UK.
Plus500 is licensed by three other regulators – the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
The broker operates in the European Economic Area (EU member states, plus Norway, Lichtenstein and Iceland), Gibraltar, Australia and certain other jurisdictions across Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Its subsidiaries include Plus500UK, Plus500AU, Plus500CY and Plus500IL.