About this publication

WhitepostDesk is an independent publisher covering offshore fixed-time and digital options platforms from the point of view of a reader in the United Kingdom. This edition is built around one brand — Pocket Option — because that is the brand people here search for most, and because the honest answer to most of those searches is a good deal more complicated than the marketing suggests.

We are not Pocket Option. We are not affiliated with whoever operates the platform, we take no deposits, we hold no client money and we place no trades. Nothing on this site is a personal recommendation to invest.

How we work

Every page starts from a documented source: the operator's own public pages, and public UK regulatory material. Where a figure cannot be confirmed from one of those, we publish a range or leave it out rather than repeat a number found on a review blog. That is why you will not find amounts in pounds or dollars here for the minimum deposit, the minimum withdrawal or the practice balance — none of those figures is published in a form we can verify. It is also why we print no founding year for the brand: the operator publishes none, and a decade band is still a founding-date claim.

One point recurs across the pages where it matters, because it changes how everything else reads. The notice published by the operator itself states that the service is not provided to residents of the EEA countries, the USA, Israel, the UK, the Philippines, Japan and Brazil. The UK is named there explicitly, and separately from the EEA — which is correct, since the UK is no longer an EEA member state. We therefore do not assert that a resident of the UK can open an account, fund it, pass verification or withdraw from it, and we give no guidance whatsoever on getting around a geographic restriction.

What we can say about the rules, and what we cannot

Two things get blurred together constantly, so we keep them apart. The first is the UK regime: the Financial Conduct Authority prohibited the sale, marketing and distribution of binary options to retail consumers in and from the UK, and that prohibition is permanent rather than a temporary measure. That is settled public regulation about a product category, and it is probably the most useful thing a reader can take from this site.

The second is what any regulator has done about this particular brand. We could not verify an FCA or PRA warning, a Warning List entry, a supervisory notice or an enforcement action naming it — and we do not claim the opposite either. Unverifiable in both directions means exactly that: we will not tell you the brand has been warned about, and we will not tell you it has been cleared.

A related point about post-Brexit geography, because a lot of English-language material still gets it wrong: the European Securities and Markets Authority does not govern a reader here. EU product-intervention measures are not the operative rule in the UK, and an authorisation held somewhere in the EEA does not by itself permit a firm to serve UK retail clients. The rule that binds in Britain is the FCA's own.

Registers, and the trap inside them

The FCA publishes two different things and readers routinely confuse them. The Financial Services Register lists authorised firms and individuals; a hit there is strong positive evidence, because it means a supervised firm with statutory duties, the Consumer Duty, a free complaints route to the Financial Ombudsman Service, and FSCS protection if the firm fails. The Warning List names firms the regulator believes are operating without authorisation.

The asymmetry is the whole point. Absence from the Warning List proves nothing at all — a firm is listed when the regulator reaches it, not when a problem starts. Check for authorisation on the Register, rather than reading comfort into an empty warning search. And while we are on the FSCS: it covers the failure of an authorised firm. It does not compensate trading losses, and it does not reach an unauthorised firm in the first place.

What we have not done

We have not opened, funded or traded a live account with this broker, and we never claim to have. What you get instead is an evaluation framework: what to check, what the published record actually says, and where the gaps are. Terms, payout percentages, minimums and country restrictions change without notice — confirm the live terms on the operator's own pages before acting on anything you read here.

Who edits this site

Editorial responsibility sits with Miriam Ashworth, Retail Markets Editor. Corrections are welcome and handled quickly; if a page here is out of date or wrong, we would much rather hear it from a reader than leave it standing.

Four languages, one market

We publish in English, Polish, Urdu and Arabic. All four editions describe the same market — the United Kingdom — and the same regulatory frame. They are not translations of one another: each is written in its own language, for people who live here. Searching in Polish, Urdu or Arabic from Slough, Bradford or east London does not change which rules apply. The criterion that matters is residence, not nationality: the competent authority is the FCA, not the KNF, the SECP, the State Bank of Pakistan or any Gulf or North African regulator.

That also explains why we bother. Most material about this product in those languages is written for other markets and other regulators, and it does not describe the position of someone living in Britain. Promotional copy gets translated because translation pays; regulator warnings, consumer journalism and ombudsman guidance mostly publish in English. Research in one language only, and you are reading a filtered sample.

How we are funded

Our funding model is affiliate partnerships, and we say so plainly. But no partner programme is connected to this site. There are no referral links on any page, no sign-up buttons, and nothing you click here earns us a commission from anyone. If that changes, the funding page will be rewritten before a single commercial link goes live.

A word on risk

Fixed-time and digital options are high-risk, short-horizon speculation. Losing the full amount staked is an ordinary outcome, not an edge case, and no strategy, signal service or bot changes the structure of the product. Most retail accounts in this category lose money. Treat anything you put in as money you can afford to lose entirely.