2026 · Evidence audit

IMC Trading — institutional liquidity provider

IMC Trading is a proprietary trading firm founded in 1989 and headquartered in Amsterdam. It holds tier 1 licenses from the SEC and FCA. The firm claims to provide liquidity across more than 120 trading venues, with employee and infrastructure metrics self-published.

IMC Financial Markets (group; US entity IMC FINANCIAL MARKETS per BrokerCheck, CRD 104143; UK entity IMC London Limited) · Amsterdam, Netherlands · last re-checked 2026-09 · evidence score 89/100

Licence, read on the register

Regulator	Licence number	Jurisdiction	Tier	Source
SEC/FINRA (BrokerCheck, IMC Financial Markets)	8-52600	US	tier-1	open source ↗
FCA (IMC London Limited)	1007808	UK	tier-1	open source ↗

Tier classification follows the same scale as the retail register: tier-1 = FCA/ASIC/CFTC-class supervision, tier-2 = CySEC/FSC-Mauritius/MFSA-class, tier-3 = offshore registration. A tier-2 licence is genuine supervision without an investor compensation scheme — never misread it as tier-1 protection.

What the firm commits to

Claims specific enough to be falsified — and the ones that remain the venue's own measurement.

Testable claims

Own homepage states 'A stabilizing force in markets since 1989, IMC provides liquidity wherever markets trade', 'Providing liquidity since 1989 — AEX | 1989 - 2025', and 'We develop innovative technologies and algorithms to trade in all major asset classes on more than 120 venues globally', with metrics '+120 Trading venues', '10 Offices', '+2070 Employees', '9000+ servers across 9 countries', '36 Years of trading' (imc.com, checked 10 Sept 2026)
FINRA BrokerCheck search API returns IMC FINANCIAL MARKETS (CRD 104143), SEC number 8-52600, firm_scope ACTIVE (brokercheck.finra.org/firm/104143)
FCA register bulk-extract lists IMC London Limited, FRN 1007808, Authorised (authorised 2024-08-09)

Claims we cannot verify from outside

'Our ambition is to be the world's leading trading firm' — own marketing
Employee/venue/server counts are self-published homepage metrics

Perimeter and coverage

Asset classes	Venues	Connectivity	Clients accepted	Explicitly refused
Equities, ETFs, Options, Futures, Fixed income, Commodities, Digital assets	More than 120 trading venues globally (own figure)	Proprietary algorithms/electronic trading, Exchange memberships

A firm that publishes its own negative space — who it refuses, where it is not licensed — is materially easier to diligence than one that doesn't. The refusal list is treated here as a disclosure, not a defect.