The Biggest Brokers You’ve Never Heard of is a series where we look at the very small number of brokers that are offshore, anonymous, large, and have an interesting product.
Last time we looked at PrimeXBT.
This time we’re looking at Olymp Trade.
What is Olymp Trade?
Olymp Trade is a broker that offers CFDs and products that it calls ‘fixed time’ assets, which are actually binary options.
The company has an entity that’s regulated in Vanuatu and another entity in St Vincent and the Grenadines. The latter provides services for accounts denominated in crypto and, they claim, crypto trading, although they don’t appear to actually offer physical crypto.
On their website, Olymp Trade claims to have almost 90m customers in over 130 countries. You cannot register in the UK, EU, Canada, US, and all the other regions that you’d expect a company like this to block.
However, it is exceptionally easy to sign up. For example, if I use a VPN and go to a region you can sign up from, I can put in an email and password, then immediately get taken to the platform and make a deposit. Nothing else is needed. I don’t even need to verify my email.
I did this via India and interestingly you can deposit using UPI. This is an instant payments system in India that was introduced in 2016 by the country’s central bank, so you get instant transfer and settlement.
Who owns Olymp Trade?
Figuring out who owns Olymp Trade is difficult because the broker only has offshore entities.
One former employee says that the company is wholly or partially owned by a Cypriot VC company called Embria Ventures. Embria didn’t reply to messages I sent them and so I cannot confirm if this is the case, nor am I making the claim that Embria does own them.
Another firm they appear to have a relationship with is called Data Duck. This is a software development and marketing company that is based in Cyprus.
If you want the ‘proofs’ of this relationship, a few years ago, Data Duck posted a ‘behind the scenes’ screenshot of a video they were making…
With some smart searching you can see this is an Indian YouTuber called Elvish Yadav.
Annoyingly the best ‘real’ shot of the ad I can find is this:
But here is the same guy advertising Olymp Trade in another picture. You can also find plenty of pictures and videos of him elsewhere doing affiliate work for Olymp Trade.
So I think we can say for sure that Data Duck works with Olymp Trade and all the signs indicate that they have done this for a long time. You can see more on this later on in the article. Whether that means they are the direct owner of the company is another matter and I am not making the claim that they do.
Another company that appears to have ties to both Data Duck and Olymp Trade is called Space 307. This is also based in Limassol. They are a software company and claim to make a B2B trading platform that looks an awful lot like the one that Olymp Trade uses.
Where is Olymp Trade active
The 90m client figure listed above may seem high and obviously there is no way to verify it. However, there is no doubt that Olymp Trade are exceptionally good at getting people to download their app.
Based on data from App Figures, Olymp Trade has been downloaded more than 1m times in the last month on Android.
If you look at Android app store downloads across several large jurisdictions, Olymp Trade is regularly in the top 50. For example, in Saudi Arabia they are currently 26th, India 33rd, and Egypt 13th. Remember that India’s population is north of 1.4bn and Egypt’s is >110m. So if you are ranking highly here, you are likely getting a lot of downloads. They also rank well in the ASEAN countries brokers are targeting today.
That should give you a sense of where the company does business. It’s worth noting that the main market they appear to be going after is India, which makes up 44% of their traffic according to SimilarWeb. Also if you look at comments on their posts or where their affiliates are, it is overwhelmingly in India.
The Product
Olymp Trade’s app is simple and easy to use.
The obvious caveat is that they’re offering (1) a product brokers can’t offer now in many jurisdictions and (2) there is simply no way that a regulated broker could offer the KYC standard that Olymp Trade does. Undoubtedly this makes the sign up process much, much smoother.
That being said, one of the features that’s quite interesting is the ease with which you can access your account on mobile. Olymp Trade is not (surprise) available on the Apple Store. So it seems like their solution to this was to make the mobile web version equivalent to it. And it actually works well, this is a screenshot of me punting with a demo INR account on an Apple stock binary option via the Chrome browser on my phone.
They even make it very simple for you – up and down. High IQ stuff.
Anyway, the other part that’s also very smooth is the payments. The little wallet in the top right makes it easy to see where to deposit. And then your options are very cleanly labeled and easy to access when you hit that tab.
The point I’m trying to make is not that Olymp Trade is a highly reputable, amazing company. It’s that they have built a trading application (or web browser) that is as simple and intuitive to use as many leading providers in this industry.
Marketing
One of the other things that Olymp Trade appears to do well is social, particularly YouTube.
On YouTube they have 520k subs. Now it’s entirely plausible a lot of those are fake to build hype and then get real subs. But it seems like a weird strategy to fake your own traffic as a broker long-term – you aren’t getting anything from doing that.
Having said that, what’s kind of funny is that their presenters clearly can’t say anything about themselves, where they are, or what their background in the industry is. There’s even one vid where they have pulled all the blinds down so you can’t see outside (lol). I reckon they’re in St Petersburg or Tbilisi but that’s just my guess.
Anyway, the videos – for the most part – look professional and are engaging. They also get a lot of views and, even if they occasionally feel a bit stunted to a native English speaker, they probably don’t care given that isn’t their target market.
Facebook is another platform they’re big on but for sure here they are doing fake likes and engagement. Some comments are real though…
They’ve also done a few high profile partnerships. For example, with the Brazilian footballer Ronaldinho and the Indian cricketer Shikhar Dawan. These are high profile people. Dawan, for example, has almost 20m followers on Instagram and over 7m on X.
How do they get so many downloads?
I’m gonna be real – I don’t know. The app downloads are so huge that I even wonder if they are faked and designed to push them up the rankings, so that more people see it, and then download the app.
The other option is that Olymp Trade doesn’t care about regulation so can just market incredibly aggressively. It could be a combination of the two. Or I could be totally wrong and they’re just smashing it.
As noted when looking at PrimeXBT, there are also lots of factors that go into getting more traffic and so it’s hard to pinpoint one defining factor that drives app downloads.
Olymp Trade do a lot of paid ads (Google, Propeller) and then have all the regular affiliate people all over the internet. They seem to actively encourage affiliates to do paid ads themselves on Google and TikTok, then take that traffic from them. They are also 100% using ad cloaking tools.
YouTube also seems to be a big source of traffic from them, both from paid ads but also from their affiliates, particularly in India.
Interestingly Data Duck actually has a bunch of articles on how they do marketing on a Russian website for start ups. Here is one on product localisation, for example (note the screenshots of the Olymp Trade app) and then another on how they use Video 360 to manage campaigns. This one on review sites is also telling. I found most of them handy and have downloaded them just in case they get taken offline – spasiba druzya!
Final thoughts
To reiterate, my point with these articles is not to express great admiration for low KYC thresholds and offshore business.
It’s that most companies who operate like this are very average – they have an off the shelf platform and don’t do anything very interesting product / marketing wise.
Whether or not you like them, Olymp Trade gets lots of traffic, has built decent technology, and makes marketing content / creative stuff that is to a good standard. You shouldn’t dismiss them as a result.