Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Cyprus-regulated Opteck has ceased offering binary options and has concentrated on contracts for difference (CFDs) instruments. The broker has not come up with an official statement on the matter and has not provided an explanation for its decision.
Opteck is a brand of Centralspot Trading, which is based and regulated in Cyprus. The company used to present itself as a binary options broker, but it has removed such instruments from its offering. Now, it markets itself as a CFDs brokerage. Its offering includes instruments such as currencies, commodities, stocks and indices.
CySEC is one of a few European authorities to not consider the ban or limitation on trading in binary options. However, in the past months it has tightened control over entities that offer such instruments.
As a result of this, recently many CySEC-licensed binary options brokers have cut their operations or exited Israel, a hub for binary option call centers. Those include 24Option, anyoption, OptionRally and OptionBit. The reason for this is that the Cypriot regulator requires licensees to limit their operations to the country, or within the EU at most.
Throughout the rest of Europe, however, binary options are limited or are about to get banned. Belgium has banned the distribution via online channels of over-the-counter (OTC) binary options, spot forex, and CFDs with leverage. The Netherlands and Germany have also announced they consider the ban on the advertising of such instruments, while Spain is to address the issue some time later in 2017.
