What Does IQ Option Offer Now?
The Current Product Line
Forex, contracts for difference and digital options are the families the platform puts at the centre of its own materials. Which of them appears in your account is a separate question, settled by entity and country.
Before the detail, a distinction that this page will keep returning to: describing a product family is not the same as confirming that you can trade it. The first is stable and can be explained properly. The second changes by entity, by country and over time, and no static page is the right instrument for it.
Forex pairs
Currency-pair trading is the most conventional part of the range. You take a directional position on one currency against another, the position can be opened in either direction, and it is normally leveraged, meaning the exposure is larger than the money you commit to it. Costs arrive as the spread between the buy and sell price and, if the position stays open, as financing. No pair counts, spreads or financing rates appear on this site — those are live numbers that belong on the platform's own fee pages, where they are current.
CFDs on assets
Contracts for difference extend that same mechanism to other markets. The underlying can be a share, an index, a commodity or a crypto asset, and you never own the thing itself — the contract settles the difference between the price when you opened and the price when you closed. Described that way, a CFD is a wrapper rather than an asset class, which is why one account can carry positions across markets that would otherwise need several.
Digital options where they are offered
Digital options are the family closest in spirit to what people mean when they type "binary options", and also the one most often mistaken for it. The structure is different in a way that matters, and the section below sets it out. On availability, this page says only what it can support: we could not confirm in which countries or through which entities digital options are currently offered, so no availability list, whitelist or country table appears anywhere on this site. The official site's country selector answers that in about a minute, and answers it for you rather than in general.
What is not on this list, and why
- Binary options for EU retail clients. That instrument class sits outside the retail offer in the EU following the 2018 measures, which applied across the whole market rather than to any single firm.
- Anything with a number attached. No minimum deposit, no fee schedule, no leverage ratio, no payout figure appears here. Those are the details most likely to be out of date in an article and most easily read at source.
- A verdict. This page describes what the products are and how they behave. It does not tell you which to use or whether to use any.
Treat the family list as a description of the platform's shape and the country selector on the official site as the only current answer about your own account.
Forex and CFDs
A contract for difference settles the price change in an underlying market without you owning it, and forex applies that to currency pairs. Both are leveraged, and leverage cuts in both directions.
These two families are worth understanding properly even if you arrived asking about something else, because they are what a European retail account is built around after 2018, and because their mechanics are the reference point against which options-style products get compared.
How they work
Open a CFD and you enter an agreement whose value moves with the difference between the price at which you opened and the price at which you close. Go long and the position gains when the underlying rises; go short and it gains when the underlying falls. Nothing is delivered and nothing is owned — there are no shareholder rights on a share CFD, and no currency arrives in an account on a forex position. What you are managing is exposure, and you manage it by choosing size, direction and when to close.
- Position size determines how much each unit of price movement is worth to you.
- Direction is symmetrical: short positions are as available as long ones, which is the main practical reason people use this wrapper.
- Duration is open-ended. A position can be closed in seconds or held, subject to financing costs.
- Costs come from the spread on entry and exit and from financing on anything held open. The live figures sit on the platform's fee page.
Leverage and risk
Leverage lets a position be larger than the money set aside for it. The consequence is arithmetic rather than opinion: a given percentage move in the underlying produces a much larger percentage change in the money you committed, in whichever direction it goes. Positions can move against you faster than an unleveraged holding would suggest, and a leveraged position can lose more than the size of the price move implies relative to your stake.
Inside the EU, retail leverage is capped by regulation and the cap differs by instrument and by client classification, one of the two limbs of the 2018 measures. This site publishes no ratios, because they vary and are stated on the platform's own pages. Two rules that apply to regulated retail accounts in the EU are worth knowing about as rules rather than as guarantees: client money segregation and negative balance protection for retail clients. Neither is a promise that money cannot be lost, and neither has been audited by us for this firm.
Where these sit in the range
Forex and CFDs are the broadest part of the current range in the sense that they are the families that survived the European restructuring intact, subject to the leverage caps. Whether they are available to you specifically still depends on your entity and country — that is true of every product discussed on this site, without exception. Our longer explainers are at forex trading and CFD trading, and the European picture in particular is covered at what EU retail clients can trade.
What to read before committing money
The documents worth opening are the contract specification for the instrument, the fee page, and the terms of the entity your account is registered with. Between them they answer the questions that matter — what exactly is being traded, what it costs to hold, and who the counterparty is. If you would rather see the mechanics before reading anything, a practice account funded with virtual money shows you the order ticket and the position behaviour without money at risk.
Leverage is the single feature that most changes how a position behaves compared with owning an asset, and it is the one most consistently underweighted by people arriving from fixed-risk products.
Digital Options
Structurally, a digital option asks you to choose a strike as well as an expiry, so the potential return varies with that choice rather than being one fixed figure. Risk is still known before entry.
This is the family that carries most of the confusion, because the popular shorthand treats every options-style product with a short expiry as the same thing. It is not, and the difference is exactly the sort of thing rules get written about.
How they differ from binary options
A binary option is a contract on a yes/no condition — typically whether an asset's price is above or below a level at a fixed expiry. The return is a single figure, fixed and known before entry, and the outcome is all-or-nothing. A digital option keeps the known-risk property but changes the payoff structure: you select a strike price as well as an expiry, and how far that strike sits from the current price changes the potential return. There is no single payout figure attached to the product, because the trade you construct determines it.
Two consequences follow from that, and they are the practical reasons to care:
- Strike selection becomes part of the decision. With a binary you are only choosing direction and expiry; with a digital you are also choosing how far you are willing to be right by.
- The products are related but not interchangeable. Regulators write rules against product definitions, not against marketing names — and this page makes no claim that the structural difference places digital options inside or outside any particular rule in any particular country.
The full side-by-side treatment is at binary versus digital options, and the mechanics in more depth at how digital options work.
Where they remain available
This is the point at which an honest page has to stop: we could not verify where digital options are currently offered, so this site names no country in which they are available and none in which they are not. What can be said is the rule that governs the answer — availability is a function of the entity your account is registered with and of local requirements, both of which change without any article being updated. The country selector on the official site resolves it for your own situation, and does so with today's data rather than the day this page was written.
Regional limits and what they mean in practice
The one region where the position is settled is the EU, and it is settled by the 2018 measures rather than by anything specific to this platform: binary options are outside the retail offer there. Beyond that, beyond the 2018 EU measure this review cannot cite what any individual regulator has done, and scope, wording and current status differ by jurisdiction and change over time — check the register or policy pages of your own regulator rather than a summary written elsewhere. Readers in the UK should look at the FCA's pages, readers in the US at the CFTC's, readers in Australia at ASIC's, and so on.
Reading the contract rather than the name
Whatever a product is called on a given platform, the questions that identify it are the same: is there a strike to choose, or only a direction? Is the return a single fixed figure or does it vary? When does the contract expire and how is settlement determined? Is the maximum loss fixed at entry? Answer those four and you know what you are looking at, regardless of whether the tab says binary, digital, fixed-time or something else entirely.
Strike choice is the tell — if the interface asks you where, not just which direction, you are looking at a digital option rather than a classic binary.
What Replaced Binary Options
Nothing was swapped in as a one-for-one substitute. After the 2018 EU measures the emphasis in the retail range moved toward forex, CFDs and digital options, while the older vocabulary stayed alive in search.
"Replaced" is a convenient word that hides a more accurate description. A market-wide restriction on an instrument class does not hand platforms a replacement product; it removes one option from the menu and leaves the rest to carry the weight.
The post-2018 shift
The 2018 EU product-intervention measures prohibited the marketing, distribution and sale of binary options to retail clients across the EU and restricted retail CFD leverage, with national regulators later adopting equivalent measures permanently in their own jurisdictions. Because the restriction attached to a contract structure and applied to every firm serving EU retail clients, the reorganisation that followed was market-wide rather than firm-specific. Nothing in that sequence was an enforcement action against this operator or any other named one, and no page here presents it as such. The timeline page takes that sequence apart in more detail.
Where the emphasis moved
What remained available to EU retail clients were the families outside the restricted category, under the leverage caps that arrived alongside. In practice that means forex and CFDs became the backbone of the European retail range, with digital options occupying the space closest to what people previously searched for — a known-risk, expiry-based contract, but with strike selection and a variable potential return rather than a single fixed payout.
| Property | Classic binary structure | Digital option structure | CFD |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you choose | Direction and expiry | Direction, strike and expiry | Direction, size and when to close |
| Return profile | Single fixed figure, all-or-nothing | Varies with the strike you pick | Moves continuously with the underlying |
| Maximum loss | Known at entry | Known at entry | Depends on position size, leverage and stops |
| Position management | Minimal — the contract runs to expiry | Expiry-based | Open-ended, with financing on held positions |
| EU retail status | Outside the retail offer after the 2018 measures | Depends on entity and country | Available subject to the retail leverage caps |
Legacy terms that are still circulating
Names like turbo and classic belong to the vocabulary of the earlier retail options market and are still typed into search boxes regularly. They are broadly associated with very short expiries and with longer ones respectively. We hold no source for their exact specifications on this platform, or for when any product carrying those names was introduced or withdrawn, so this site publishes no dates, expiry lengths or payout figures for them. They are best treated as search terms that point at a period rather than as a description of anything on a current screen, and the legacy-names page here covers what can responsibly be said about them.
Why the old vocabulary outlives the product
Terminology decays slowly because it is transmitted socially — through tutorials, translations, forum answers and reprints — rather than updated centrally. That is a general property of niche markets rather than anything specific to this brand, and a separate page here takes it apart.
No product was substituted in one-for-one; a category was removed from the EU retail menu and the remaining families absorbed the demand, which is why the vocabulary and the reality drifted apart.
Reading Availability
Two variables decide what you see: the entity your account is registered with, and the country you are in. Everything else on this page describes products in general, not your account in particular.
This section exists because it is where most articles on this subject go wrong. They publish a table of countries, it is right for a few months, and it stays online for years. Here is the framework instead, so you can produce a current answer yourself whenever you need one.
By region and entity
A platform of this kind is not one company. The EU-facing business runs through the Cypriot investment firm listed on the CySEC public register as IQBroker Europe Ltd (ex IQOption Europe Ltd), holding CIF licence 247/14 dated 30 July 2014, company registration number 327751, with status Authorised as of the check date. Arrangements outside the EEA are different and are disclosed in the terms of the entity your account is registered with. This site names no non-EEA entity, licence or jurisdiction, because none was verified against a document we can point at. The practical implication is that "what does this platform offer" has no single answer — it has one answer per entity.
EU versus non-EU
| Question | EU retail client | Everywhere else |
|---|---|---|
| Binary options | Outside the retail offer following the 2018 EU measures | Not stated here — depends on entity and country, check at source |
| CFD leverage | Capped by regulation, varying by instrument and client classification | Set by the entity and its own regime; no figures published here |
| Digital options | Availability depends on entity and country | Availability depends on entity and country |
| Who to ask | Your national regulator and the CySEC register | The regulator named for your jurisdiction, and the entity's own terms |
The one-minute check
- Open the official site directly, by typing or bookmarking the address rather than following a link from a search result or a message.
- Select your country in its own selector, and let the site show you the product list it has for that country.
- Read which entity the terms name for your registration, then look that entity up on the register of the authority named in those terms.
- Open the contract specification for whichever product you are interested in, and read expiry, settlement and maximum loss before anything else.
- If a product name is unfamiliar, ignore the name and read the mechanics — that is the only reliable way to know what you are being offered.
Those five steps take about a minute and give you a current, personal answer that no article can match. When you are ready to run them, check the official site with your country selected.
Honest status framing, and what this page will not claim
To be explicit about the boundaries: this page states that binary options are outside the retail offer for EU clients, because that follows from a market-wide EU measure. It does not state that they are, or are not, offered anywhere else. It does not characterise the instrument class as permitted or prohibited in any named country. It publishes no payout, no fee, no leverage ratio and no availability table. Where a heading elsewhere on this site promises a country-by-country picture, the page under it explains what to check and with which authority, rather than presenting a status list it cannot support. If that reads as cautious, the alternative is worse: a confident answer that quietly expires. For the short version of everything above, the main explainer is the place to go.
Learn the check rather than the answer — entity plus country, read at source, takes a minute and stays correct long after any published table has drifted.
Common questions
What does IQ Option offer now?
The families its own materials centre on are forex, contracts for difference and digital options, with CFD underlyings spanning currency pairs, shares, indices, commodities and crypto. That describes the shape of the range rather than the contents of any particular account. Which of those families you can reach is decided by the entity your account is registered with and by local rules, and the official site shows that list once you select your country.
Can I still trade binary options there?
Not as a retail client in the EU — that instrument class sits outside the retail offer following the 2018 EU product-intervention measures, which applied across the market rather than to one firm. For anywhere else, this page makes no claim in either direction, because no verified source was available. Check the official site with your country selected, and read the terms of the entity named there.
Are digital options just binary options with a new name?
No. A binary option pays a single fixed amount on a yes/no condition at a set expiry. A digital option asks you to choose a strike as well as an expiry, and the potential return varies with how far that strike sits from the current price. Risk is known before entry in both cases, but the payoff structure differs, and rules are written against product definitions rather than marketing names.
What happened to turbo and classic options?
Those are legacy names from the earlier retail options market, broadly associated with very short and longer expiries. No source for their exact specifications on this platform, or for when anything carrying those names appeared or was withdrawn, was available for this guide, so no dates or figures for them are published here. Treat them as search terms pointing at a period rather than as descriptions of a current screen.
How do I find out what is available in my country?
Open the official site by typing or bookmarking the address, use its own country selector, and read the product list and terms it returns. Then check which entity those terms name and look it up on the register of the authority they cite. The whole check takes about a minute and produces an answer specific to you, which no published table can do.
Does the platform still show fixed-time options?
Fixed-time is an interface and marketing label rather than a category with a settled definition, and its meaning depends on the platform using it. This guide will not tell you what appears on your screen. Read the contract mechanics behind whatever label you see — whether a strike is chosen, whether the return is a single fixed figure, when it expires — and you will know what the product actually is.
Is a practice account a reliable way to see the current product list?
It is a good way to see the interface and how orders behave without money at risk, and it usually reflects what your registration can reach. It is not a substitute for reading the terms and contract specifications, which is where expiry, settlement, costs and the identity of the entity you are dealing with are actually set out. Use both, in that order.