IC Markets Pakistan: The SBP Circular on Offshore CFD Payments, Explained With Numbers

What can actually be checked, and what cannot

• The overnight cost on a Swap Free account is published symbol by symbol instead of being buried in a swap table, which makes it possible to price a multi-night position before opening it (read 2 September 2026)
• Nothing has to be deposited to open Raw Spread, cTrader Raw Spread or Standard, so the platform question can be settled on a demo before the harder payment question is even raised
• Four terminals, but only two clocks: MetaTrader 4 and 5 answer to Equinix NY4 in New York, cTrader and TradingView to London - nine to ten hours behind PKT and four to five respectively
• No deposit or withdrawal fee is charged by the broker itself, though bank, card and intermediary fees still apply and are not its responsibility

Explore the specifics

Also on this site: MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 setup and the Equinix NY4 server location against PKT, a free demo that sidesteps the SBP funding question entirely, sign-in help for the portal versus the trading terminals, and support channels with realistic waiting times.

IC Markets Pakistan - the verdict in one paragraph

A trader in Pakistan does not contract with an Australian or Cypriot company. The broker's own registration feed routes Pakistan to Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company (registration 8419879-1) holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. There is no Pakistani licence and no domestic retail forex/CFD regime at all - and State Bank of Pakistan's EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 states plainly that trading on offshore CFD platforms breaches section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, that no channel is permitted for remitting the funds, and that banks are to identify and block such payments. The published costs themselves are checkable: USD 3.50 per lot per side on Raw Spread, USD 0 commission with spreads from 0.8 pips on Standard, no minimum deposit on either, and a Swap Free option on both that replaces overnight interest with a flat per-lot holding fee - USD 62 a night on gold, for the largest published example. Every rupee would still convert into one of ten base currencies that does not include PKR, since IC Markets has no Pakistan-specific payment rail. CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money. Read what other users report on Trustpilot alongside this page, not instead of it.

Who actually holds a Pakistani trader's account

IC Markets is a trading brand used by several distinct legal entities. The one that matters for a reader in Pakistan is Raw Trading Ltd, a Seychelles company (registration 8419879-1) trading as IC and IC Markets Global, holding Securities Dealer's licence SD018 from the Seychelles Financial Services Authority. The same group also contains IC Markets (EU) Ltd in Cyprus (CySEC licence CIF 362/18), International Capital Markets Pty Ltd in Australia (ASIC) and IC Trading (Mauritius) Ltd, all named on the broker's own site, checked 2 September 2026. These are separate legal persons with separate regulators; checking the Australian or Cypriot licence and assuming it covers a Pakistani account is checking the wrong company entirely.

The broker's own registration feed marks Pakistan as an open, served market on the Raw Trading Ltd branch by default, checked 2 September 2026. That openness is a sign-up status, not a licence - the two are separate facts and this page keeps them separate throughout.

The SBP circular that changes the funding question, not the trading terms

State Bank of Pakistan's Exchange Policy Department issued Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022, stating that trading on offshore electronic trading platforms and CFD platforms amounts to a violation of section 4(1) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), 1947 - the provision that restricts dealing in foreign exchange outside authorised channels. The circular adds that there is no permissible channel for remitting funds for this purpose, and it directs banks and other regulated payment channels to identify and block such transactions.

None of that changes what IC Markets itself publishes about spreads, leverage or platforms - the circular is a Pakistani foreign-exchange control, aimed at the payment, not a comment on the broker. It is, however, the single most Pakistan-specific fact on this page, and it belongs here rather than in a footer. This site does not give legal advice; read the circular and ask your own bank in writing before assuming any transfer will go through as described.

No rupee account, and no local funding rail either

IC Markets publishes ten account base currencies and PKR is not one of them, checked 2 September 2026. Nor does the broker publish a Pakistan-specific funding rail: its own funding page names a Thailand rail (Thai Internet Banking) and a Vietnam rail (Vietnamese Internet Banking) explicitly, and lists no equivalent for Pakistan. A card, e-wallet or wire transfer from Pakistan would therefore need to convert rupees into one of the ten listed currencies before it reached the account - the same category of transfer the SBP circular already instructs banks to identify and block.

The broker itself charges no deposit or withdrawal fee, which is a genuine, checkable point in its favour. It does not remove the currency-conversion step, and it does not change the domestic banking restriction described above.

Swap Free, priced: what the flat overnight charge actually costs

Swap Free is the reason most Pakistani searches reach this broker at all, and it is the one product feature worth reading twice. It runs on Raw Spread and Standard, through MT4, MT5 and cTrader, over 90-plus instruments, read on 2 September 2026 - and the registration feed marks the branch opened for Pakistan as eligible for it. The name is the whole claim: the brand writes Swap Free and nothing else, declares no Shariah board and publishes no certification, so this page uses the brand term and makes no religious claim on its behalf.

What replaces the swap line

A flat per-lot charge for every night a position stays open, published symbol by symbol rather than folded into a spread. Gold is the expensive end at USD 62 per lot per night; below it sit USD 26 on GBPCHF, USD 25 on the US30 index, USD 16 on GBPJPY, USD 15 on EURCHF, USD 11 on EURUSD and USD 9 on both silver and AUDCAD.

The arithmetic nobody prints

One gold lot is 100 ounces. At an illustrative USD 4,300 an ounce it carries USD 430,000 of notional and, in the top leverage band, locks USD 86 of margin. Ten nights of holding it costs USD 620 - more than seven times that margin, and roughly nine Raw Spread round turns per night at USD 7.00 each. Swap free is not cost free, and on the metal Pakistani traders search for most it is the largest single cost on the ticket. The same USD 62 drives a page of its own - what one XAU/USD lot costs to carry from Pakistan - which works the charge back through the tiered margin band that opened the position, the hour it is stamped against a New York server, and the currency step a rupee budget meets first.

Two conditions sit under the offer. The status can be withdrawn, in the broker's own words, without being obliged to provide any explanation or justification - so it is a facility rather than an entitlement. And the commission line survives it: a Raw Spread account still pays USD 3.50 a side with Swap Free switched on, because only the swap line is replaced, not the pricing model.

Trading day in PKT, against servers in New York and London

MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 run on servers in the Equinix NY4 data centre in New York; cTrader runs from London, checked 2 September 2026. Pakistan Standard Time (PKT) is a fixed UTC+5 with no daylight-saving shift, while New York alternates between UTC-5 and UTC-4 and London between UTC+0 and UTC+1 - so the gap to PKT is 10 hours in EST months and 9 hours in EDT months for MT4/MT5, and 5 hours in GMT months and 4 hours in BST months for cTrader. In practice, the most active New York hours fall in the Pakistani evening and night, while the London session sits across the Pakistani afternoon and early evening. Which of those hours matters on any given day depends on what is actually moving, and the day’s market movers read in PKT sets each story against the local clock and against the overnight charge the position carries while it waits.

The same arithmetic applies to Higher Margin Requirement windows, which the broker times relative to market close and to the weekend and major-news releases rather than to a fixed PKT hour - worth checking against your own terminal clock, particularly around the twice-a-year US and UK clock changes that PKT does not follow.

What this page is, and what it is not

This is an independent, affiliate-supported review of IC Markets for readers in Pakistan. It is not the broker's own site, it does not accept deposits, and it does not offer trading, legal or tax advice. Every figure above is dated and sourced to the broker's own published pages or to the State Bank of Pakistan, and the parts we could not verify - a founding year, a specific verification document list - are stated as unverified rather than filled with a plausible-sounding guess.

CFD trading carries a high risk of losing money, and leverage magnifies losses as readily as gains. Read SBP EPD Circular Letter No. 08 of 2022 yourself, read the broker's own client agreement for the entity named in it, and treat this page as one input among several rather than the final word.