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A couple of weeks ago we used our ramshackle in-house methodology to figure out who has the most MetaTrader servers.
Whether the numbers were correct, they reflected who tends to be seen as the biggest companies in the sector outside of the non-MetaTrader mainstream, which is basically IG, XTB, eToro, Plus500, and CMC Markets.
In no particular order, those firms are:
- Exness
- XM
- IC Markets
- Vantage
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Vantage is a company that I don’t think we have ever looked at in this newsletter, which is actually slightly weird because, on a group level, they are potentially the biggest broker in the world.
This is because you don’t just have Vantage, but also a seemingly endless supply of other brands, like Startrader, PU Prime, and Moneta Markets.
But recently strange things have been afoot at Vantage.
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Their UK entity lost its compliance officer and CEO, with a number of other executives leaving the firm.
Legend has it that this was related to trade reporting but we don’t know what is really going on.
Around the same time that was happening, the company completely shut down an entity in Vanuatu and removed it from MetaTrader. This was the broker’s largest entity in terms of MetaTrader servers. The company’s total server count across MT4 and MT5 seems to have roughly halved after that entity was removed.
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The broker also has an entity in the Cayman Islands, which was previously listed on MetaTrader 5. That is now gone as well.
Both of those entities are still live, so access was not removed because of their licenses being revoked. It’s also worth noting that Vantage appears to operate Chinese walls between its entities using the same brand, something that’s very common in the industry, so all of these changes may be driven by different factors.
Several industry executives have also noted that the broker’s partners have been coming to them over the last couple of months, looking for an alternative provider.
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“I don’t know what it is, but something is happening there,” a master IB, who works with over 2,000 partners, told me last week. “We have been speaking to so many people who work with them because they aren’t getting paid.”
Separately, a co-owner of another broker told me last month that they had onboarded two big affiliates from Vantage and another brand operated by the group. The two affiliates wanted to switch because they had not been paid.
So what’s going on exactly?
In the UK market, Vantage is fairly unique in being perhaps the only large provider to actively push clients offshore.
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Until comparatively recently, if I scrolled through the Facebook or Instagram homepages, I would – without exaggeration – only get ads from trading affiliates. I would say that 90% of these people would be from Vantage or Startrader, with the remainder typically partnering with IronFX.
Some of these were not exactly subtle either.
For example, Vantage was using Tommy Robinson’s son as an IB. It was also the broker that ‘influencer’ and marker of impending civilisational collapse HS Tikky Tokky seems to have been using in the ‘manosphere’ documentary that Louis Theroux released earlier this year.
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My understanding is that the broker was active across most European markets in the same way. For example, the Dutch regulator went after Vantage’s Vanuatu entity very strongly at the end of 2024 and into 2025.
Maybe the social media algorithms changed but this is now no longer the case – I haven’t seen people promoting any Vantage brand over the last few months.
Was this aggressive marketing the reason behind the strange things happening at the firm? I don’t know but there would be something quite funny about a Louis Theroux documentary and Tommy Robinson’s causing the downfall of the broker.
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More seriously, and to use some hackneyed trading analogies, doing this is kind of like going short volatility or picking up pennies (or in vantage’s case millions of dollars) in front of a steamroller. You will pick up business and pick up business, until a certain point at which the whole thing blows up.
Of course, this is all hearsay and we can’t figure out what’s going on for real. Plus, Vantage has other brands it can use.
If you believe SimilarWeb, then last month Moneta got 10% of its traffic from the UK. PU Prime is even ‘better’, with its top 3 geos being Italy, the UK, and Germany.
As for Vantage, it’s definitely not game over. The broker is still running hundreds of Google ads targeting LATAM, MENA, and ASEAN. And I guess they’ll return to Europe at some point. Like the Tusken Raiders, Vantage will soon be back – and in greater numbers.
