IQ Option Turbo and Classic Options History

The Legacy Products

Both words are vocabulary rather than specifications: names attached to fixed-return contracts in the retail options market of that era, one associated with very short windows and the other with longer ones.

People arrive at these two words from old tutorials, old screenshots and search suggestions that have outlived the products. This page explains what the names referred to in general terms, says clearly which parts cannot be confirmed, and points you at the only place where the current answer lives.

Turbo as a name

Turbo was used across the retail options market for fixed-return contracts with very short windows. The name is descriptive of speed rather than of any particular mechanism, and different platforms attached it to different specifications.

Classic binary options

Classic described the same contract shape over a longer horizon — the standard form of a binary option, where the trade settles on whether the price of an asset is above or below a stated level at a fixed expiry, with a return known before entry and an all-or-nothing outcome.

Their heyday, and what is not documented

Both names belong to the period before the 2018 European measures, when fixed-return contracts were among the most visible retail financial products sold online. This review could not confirm the expiry lengths, payouts, minimum stakes or availability dates that once attached to the turbo and classic names on this platform, so you will not find them stated here.

• No introduction or withdrawal date is published, for either name.
• No payout percentage, expiry figure or minimum stake appears anywhere on this site.
• The names described product shapes, and shapes varied between platforms using the same word.
• The only dates held here are the 2014 CIF licence date and the year 2018 for the EU measures.

These are marketing names rather than defined instrument categories, which is why two platforms could use the same word for meaningfully different contracts.

How Turbo Worked

What the turbo label signalled was compression: the same fixed-return, yes-or-no contract as its longer sibling, resolved in a very short window, with the whole decision taken inside that window.

Because no specification can be confirmed, this section describes the shape the name pointed at rather than any platform implementation of it.

Very short windows

The defining feature was the expiry: short enough that the trade opened and settled within a small slice of the trading session. That changes the character of the decision more than it changes the mechanics. There is less time to check anything, less room to reconsider, and the outcome arrives before most other kinds of position have moved at all.

A return fixed before entry

Like any binary contract, the return was known at the moment of entry rather than growing with the size of the price move. Risk was therefore visible in advance, in the narrow sense that the amount committed to the trade was the amount at stake. No return figure is published here, for this or any other product.

Repetition as the real risk

The short window made repetition easy, and repetition is where the risk in this instrument class concentrates. Each trade puts the full amount committed on a single condition resolving in a small span of time, and short-expiry, all-or-nothing contracts can lose the whole of that amount. Our page on the risks of binary and digital options covers the mechanics of that in more depth.

Compressing the expiry does not simplify the contract; it removes the time in which a trader could otherwise check anything.

How Classic Worked

Classic pointed at the standard form of the same contract over a longer horizon, which gave the trade more room to develop while leaving the all-or-nothing settlement completely unchanged.

The comparison people usually want is between the two names, so it is worth setting it out as the shapes they described rather than as specifications neither this review nor most sources can confirm.

A longer horizon

The longer window allowed a position to be taken on something other than an immediate move, and it left space to look at the market before the expiry arrived. The settlement rule did not change: at expiry the condition is either true or false, and the outcome is the full result or nothing.

The standard binary format

Classic is the form that matches the textbook definition most directly. The trader does not choose a strike; the contract settles on whether the price sits above or below a stated level at the expiry moment, and the return is fixed in advance. That absence of a strike choice is exactly what separates a binary option from a digital one, where the trader picks a strike as well as an expiry and the potential return varies with how far that strike sits from the current price.

Why the format found a retail audience

Both variants shared the property that made the category commercially powerful: they could be explained in a sentence and operated with two buttons. That is also what regulators pointed at, since ease of operation did nothing to make the underlying pricing question any easier. The binary against digital options comparison follows the structural difference further.

Turbo and classic differed in the length of the window and in nothing else that mattered to the settlement, which is why both fell inside the same product definition.

What Happened to Them

The documented change is the 2018 European measure rather than any product announcement: after it, binary options are not part of the retail offer to EU clients, whatever name they had previously been sold under.

This is the one part of the story with a date behind it, so it carries the weight that unsourced product timelines cannot.

The 2018 measures

In 2018 ESMA introduced EU-wide product-intervention measures that prohibited the marketing, distribution and sale of binary options to retail clients across the European Union and restricted leverage on contracts for difference; national regulators later put equivalent measures in place permanently in their own jurisdictions. Marketing names were not the subject of the measure — the product definition was, which is why a label like turbo or classic has no bearing on how the contract behind it was treated. The full sequence is on our page about the 2018 ESMA measures.

What that meant in the EU

For EU retail clients the position is settled and simple: binary options are not part of the retail offer. This review could not confirm any specific product-withdrawal date or announcement at IQ Option, so this page describes what the measure required of the market rather than what any one firm did in response.

Outside the EU and EEA

Here the honest answer is a different shape, and it is the answer this site gives consistently. What is available outside the EU and EEA depends on the entity the account is registered with and on local rules, and the current product list is shown on the official site once you select your country. This review could not confirm whether contracts under these legacy names are offered by any entity of this platform outside the EU or EEA, so this page asserts neither that they are nor that they are not. See the outside-the-EU page for how that question is handled.

The measure acted on the product definition rather than on any product name, so no rebranding of a contract would have changed its treatment.

The Terms Today

Both words now function mainly as search terms: they still pull up material describing the pre-2018 market, while the products a live account can actually see are listed only on the platform own site.

The gap between what people search and what exists is the practical problem this page is trying to solve, so it is worth ending on what to do rather than on what happened.

Legacy search interest

Names outlive products, particularly when a large volume of undated tutorials and screenshots keeps circulating them. Search demand for turbo and classic persists years after the market they belonged to changed, which is also why so many results on these terms describe something an EU retail account will not find. Search vocabulary outlasting the products it described is a general pattern, not a quirk of this brand.

What sits in that space now

Across this part of the market the current families are foreign exchange, contracts for difference on underlyings such as currency pairs, stocks, indices, commodities and crypto, and digital options, where the strike is chosen by the trader and the potential return varies rather than being one fixed figure. For the current picture see what the platform offers now.

Reading the current reality

The reliable method takes a few minutes and does not require trusting any review. Open the official site with your country selected, read the product list and the contract terms, and note which entity would hold the account. If you want to see how a contract is presented and settled rather than read about it, the practice account funded with virtual money shows that without committing money. Trading carries a risk of loss.

• Treat any product name in an old article as historical vocabulary, not as a current listing.
• Read the contract mechanics — condition, window, what sets the return — before reading the name.
• Check which entity serves your country, since the product list follows the entity.
• Take a screenshot as evidence of when it was taken, nothing more.

Searching an old product name is a reliable way to reach an old description of the market, which makes the platform own country-selected product list the only current source worth using.