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At the start of this year we looked at the fact that Exness had an estimated 50m visits from India in December of last. This was more than the Financial Times got globally for the same period.
This is obviously an insane statistic and a sign of how much business they were doing in the country. It’s also probably an indication of how cheaply you can buy traffic there.
Just under two weeks ago Exness stopped accepting new clients in India. Existing clients have also been switched from a Seychelles entity to another in Vanuatu. Funnily, India saw a spike in searches for ‘Vanuatu’ and ‘Vanuatu Financial Services Commission’ after that happened…
Payments in particular may be something that ends up causing problems. For example, OctaFX blew up in India and one of the things authorities went after them for was taking local payments and then using ‘interesting’ methods of getting that money out of the country, which has capital controls.
The basic problem is that if you are accepting local payments via UPI in India, you will have Indian rupees. Somehow you have to get those rupees out of India. And to quote the Canadian Indian comedian Russell Peters, when you try to get rupees out of India, somebody gonna get a hurt real bad.
It may be the case that whatever happened with Exness started happening in April or May. From April to May, web traffic for the company’s website dropped from just over 60m to around 40m. Probably that is them pulling the plug on paid ads.
Octa is also interesting because the authorities have said they believe the company made close to $100m from Indian customers in under 12 months. Exness will not want to leave that kind of money on the table. They’ll be back – Octa already is.
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The (forex broker) scramble for India
Until that happens though, what you may see is a huge land grab for customers in India.
To paraphrase one reader who I spoke to a few months ago, when you are in a market where XM and Exness are predominant, you can end up feeling like they are leaving you nothing but scraps.
Exness does seem to be holding on to a lot of big IBs but it’s hard to see that lasting if they can’t accept clients.
YaMarkets has already posted a video targeting Exness IBs and potential customers. JustMarkets looks like it’s doing the same.
🚨 Indian traders — is your broker no longer accepting clients from India? Don’t panic. Just switch. J 👉 Register now and trade smarter with YaMarkets. #SwitchToYaMarkets #ForexIndia #IndianTraders #ForexBonus #ForexBroker #YaMarkets #ForexLife #TradingBonus pic.twitter.com/hZYE0AA74W
— YaMarkets (@markets_ya) July 15, 2025
We’ll have to see what happens but one point to keep in mind is that Exness has not been dragged through the mud in the Indian press like Octa was.
Although they have recovered – Octa is getting about 1m site visits per month from India – they are not in the same position. Bouncing back will be easier for Exness if things stay as they are and they can start onboarding again.
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Are there whales in India?
The targeting of Indian clients is one of those things where I sometimes wonder how anyone is actually making the kind of money that Octa did.
Nominal per capita income in India is around $2,900. The nominal figure obviously matters for brokers because at the end of they day they are getting paid in USD. You can’t PPP adjust your client deposits sadly.
But then research published earlier this month by the Securities and Exchange Board of India, a financial regulator in the country, found that the average trader in India lost just shy of $1,300 from options trading in the 12 months to the end of May. So the average Indian options trader lost equivalent to almost 50% of the country’s average per capita income.
When you then think that India has a working age population of about a billion people, this starts to make more sense.
One study I’ve seen says earning over $61,400 will put you in the top 1% in India. The thing is, that’s still about 10m people making that amount of money or more.
That means that the target market of people making that salary in India is actually greater in India than it is in the UK. It’s also worth noting that to get in the top 10%, you have to make more than $15,000 annually.
The bottom line – there are a loooot of low value clients in India today. But there are probably some whales out there in the ether too, as well as people who can afford to deposit the same amount as a good European market.
Is Polymarket just an unregulated binary options broker?
Last week we looked briefly at Polymarket. And this got me interested in taking a deeper look at them.
Two points stand out. Firstly, they get a lot of traffic. SimilarWeb shows them at over 13m visits in June. This shows (1) event contracts are popular and (2) the power of marketing / product. Binaries are not new but Polymarket and Kalshi took the product, reworked it, simplified it, and gave it a new name.
The other interesting thing is that Polymarket is operated by Adventure One QSS and Blockratize, both of which are registered in Delaware. And that’s it. There is no other entity, no license, or anything else.
And yet here they are doing loads of business globally, all with crypto deposits.
One of the things we’ve looked at here before is that many CFD people believe the US is super moral and ethical. It’s not really that way.
It’s more the US likes to operate monopolies. When you offer a CFD, you are preventing some of their monopolies from doing that. Because Peter Thiel and other deep pocketed investors are backing event contracts, the US will become predominant in that industry and so the authorities will let them do what they want. C’est la vie.
