How do You Know Whether IQ Option is a Scam?

A very common and basic question will come to the new trader’s mind before starting trading which is “Is this trading platform genuine or a scam?” This question is very obvious as many digital platforms in the market are out to take your money. Some of them are so temporary that they will make money from their customers for a few months and then close the shop. Legal digital options platform will provide you excellent services and share their information freely to the third-party website.

While doing an investigation on these third-party sites will help you find the answers to the questions like “Is IQ Option going to shut down?” and many more.

In this guide, you will find the investigation done on IQ Option like is it a scam platform or a legal scam proof platform. In short, is IQ Option trustable or not?

How do you do a background check on an options trading platform like IQ Option?

The first thing to look at is its domain name. It is important to consider the site for an options trading platform. And their website’s name should include their brand name or company name like IQ Option hosted on the iqoption.com domain.

After getting the website, read on their about us, terms and conditions, privacy policies, their history. By reading this you will have an idea about the company and what the platform owners claim about it.

Using third party websites to do a background check on IQ Option

After reading all that owners claim about IQ Option, you don’t know if they are 100% true or not, you can not completely rely on them unless you do your own research to know if these claims are true or not. And this is a point where a third-party website comes in. So, here are some checkpoints to remember while searching about them.

Here are some checkpoints.

• How many visitors does the platform receive per day? That is, how many unique visitors (with unique IP addresses) visit the site each day? If the site attracts high traffic, you can assume that it’s quite popular.
• How is the site ranked by third party sites such as Alexa.com? Sites that rank high in third party websites not only attract huge traffic, but are considered trustworthy.
• Where is the site hosted? The best options trading platforms are hosted in North America and Europe. It’s an indicator of investment in the latest technology to enure that the platforms are running smoothly.
• Look at where the platform’s traffic comes from. Are many people accessing the site directly or from third party sites? Those that access IQ Option directly are very likely to be account holders. This can be an indicator of just how many traders the platform has. Indirect traffic comes from other sites. They can be traders or not. For example, you might read one of my guides, find a strategy you like and go to your IQ Option account to trade with it.
• Finally, you should look at the distribution of the traffic. That is, from which countries are IQ Option visitors coming from? If the traffic is distributed over hundreds of countries, it’s an indicator of the platform’s popularity.

You can get all this information using hypestat.com. It is a free site analysis website that allows you to get information from top sites like Google and Alexa.com. You just have to type the domain name of the site that you are doing a background check on and you will get the details.

One amazing thing about this site is that you can even use it in the countries where Google is banned.

My analysis of IQ Option using hypestat

On IQ Option the number of unique visitors per day is 1,732,794. It also has 2,044,697-page views meaning each visitor checks out at least 1 page on the site. Note that the statistics are kept changing, they are not static and change each day.

The rank of IQ Option is 750 in the world. This is ranked by Alexa.com. This accounts for about 0.123% of global internet users.

Now, in order to know how IQ Option ranks against other financial trading and investments platforms, I used a different site which you can find here: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/category/finance/investing

Hosting servers of IQ Option are in Cyprus. It supports HTTPS which is a secure server and a technology that encrypts data sent to their servers.

There are 100 unique visitors which is 14.21% site visits are direct. 83.07% reach the platform through referral sites such as binary count. Less than 2.5% find the site directly through search engines.

After seeing the world map below, you can notice the majority of IQ Options trades come from South and Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In the below table you can know how IQ Option is ranked in specific countries and the actual percentage breakdown of users of the site.

It also helps to compare IQ Option with other platforms you’re thinking of joining. One popular platform we usually discourage traders from joining is GGBinary. Here’s a snapshot of what I found about the platform.

What’s the likelihood that IQ Option might collapse?

IQ Option is in the market since 2014 and the good thing about this platform is that is continued to evolve. They have done a very good job of making the platform trader friendly, transparent, and easy. They never compromise on introducing new features and assets and this shows that the platform intends to remain active for a long time.

However, due to emerging financial regulations, you might find the platform discontinuing their services in certain countries (or hopefully complying to the new regulations).

If options trading is banned in your country, can you still trade on IQ Option?

In the countries where the options are banned, traders may try to play the system by using VPNs to trade options. But instead of that, it is recommended that trading other financial instruments such as CFDs and forex will be a better option. There are hundreds of different assets that you can use to make money.

What would happen if all traders in a banned country withdrew their money at the same time?

When you will search for “IQ Option” in Google Trends you will get the results that show the interest of people from 40 different countries. These will be colored in blue. which shows that people from 40 different countries are using this platform within a single month. This leaves out a high number of countries (gray) where IQ Option is yet to get clients from.

The truth is, IQ Option has many clients from all over the world. The platform is making money by offering their trading service. So it makes no sense why they would opt to shut down their operations in the near future.

Let’s look at Google Trends for better insight into where searches for IQ Option come from.

What Google Trend says about IQ Option searches from different countries

After entering “iq option” in Google Trends, the result showed that interest in the platform comes from people in 40 different countries. These are colored in blue. That means traders from at least 40 countries are accessing IQ Option within a single month. This leaves out a high number of countries (gray) where IQ Option is yet to get clients from.

The truth is, IQ Option has many clients from all over the world. The platform is making money by offering their trading service. So it makes no sense why they would opt to shut down their operations in the near future.

Where does IQ Option get their quotes?

Online brokers cannot just guess some random prices and offer them to traders. This would be cheating. The prices must match what’s currently offered in the financial markets.

So where does IQ Option get their quotes?

The platform reports that all prices are provided by their quote provider (DevExperts). After receiving the quotes (real time Ask and Bid prices) IQ Option then calculates their prices using the formula Bid + Ask/2. This gives them the price to offer traders and eliminates the need for a spread.

This therefore means that the price you get isn’t the actual real time market price. However, it lies quite close to the real time Ask and Bid prices existing in the markets. IQ Option actually provides a way to verify the quotes you’re getting through their Historical Quotes tab.

Note that Historical Quotes is only available in real trading accounts.

Now what does this mean for trading?

Simply put, it puts 60 second traders at a slight disadvantage.

Since the price quoted on your chart isn’t what’s exactly what’s in the market, it means a slight change could mean a lot when trading 1 minute.

Let’s say IQ Option gives you a quote of 1.45782 but the real Ask is 1.45853 while the real bid is 1.45209. If you choose to go long on a 1 minute trade, it’s very unlikely that the prices will reach the real Ask price let alone get higher within 1 minute. The same goes if you decide to enter a short position.

But this is quite possible if you trade longer periods that last 5 minutes or more.

Can you make money on IQ Option?

According to the data and full analysis from various third-party websites, IQ Option is a popular options trading platform that traders use to make money which means that folks are actually making money here.

But what about you?

It takes time to truly understand how IQ Option works. This means reading all you can on their website. It also means you should take your time to learn how the platform really works.

Making money as an options trader carries is risks. Majority of traders on IQ Option end up losing money. This is due to many factors which include emotional trading and not understanding how the platform really works.

If you really want to make money on IQ Option, take time to learn first. Then use the IQ Option demo account to get a feel of how the real account works.

Good luck!