The NorthLedger masthead

NorthLedger is an independent Canadian publication covering offshore fixed-time and digital options platforms from the point of view of someone who lives here. This edition is given over to a single brand — Pocket Option — because it is the brand Canadians search for most often, and because the honest answer to most of those searches is more complicated, and more Canadian, than the marketing lets on.

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

How we work

Every page starts from something documented: the operator’s own public pages, and public Canadian regulatory sources. Where a figure cannot be confirmed from one of those, we publish a range or leave it out rather than repeat a number from a review blog. That is why you will find no dollar amounts here for the minimum deposit, the minimum withdrawal or the practice balance — none of those numbers is published in a form we can check.

One point about eligibility needs stating carefully, because most sites in this category get it wrong in one direction or the other. The notice the operator publishes says the service is not provided to residents of the EEA countries, the USA, Israel, the UK, the Philippines, Japan and Brazil. Canada is not named in that list. So we do not write that the operator turns Canadians away, because it does not say so. Nor do we write that a Canadian resident can open an account, fund it, pass verification and be paid out, because absence from a list is not a guarantee of eligibility: registration, funding and payout all remain the operator’s own decisions, they can change without notice, and no page here has tested any of them. What we can do is point you at the operator’s current terms, which is the only place that answer lives.

The Canadian part, which is the part most people get wrong

Securities regulation in Canada is provincial and territorial. There is no national securities commission — no Canadian equivalent of the SEC or the FCA. The Canadian Securities Administrators is an umbrella that coordinates the provincial and territorial regulators: the Ontario Securities Commission, the British Columbia Securities Commission, the Alberta Securities Commission, Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers and the rest. A firm is registered in a province, and your protections follow where you live. “Registered” means little until you know registered where.

Two things follow, and we keep them apart on every page. The first is a rule about the product: CSA members prohibit the sale to retail investors of binary options with a term shorter than 30 days, across the provinces and territories. That is stable public regulation, it binds firms rather than readers, and it is the most useful thing a Canadian can learn from a site like this one. The second is the status of this particular operator: no registration with any Canadian provincial or territorial regulator is published for it. Whether any Canadian regulator has warned about, listed, sanctioned or acted against the brand is something we could not verify — and we make no claim in the opposite direction either.

A related habit is worth building, because it is easy to get backwards. A hit in the CSA registration search is strong positive evidence: a supervised dealer with know-your-client and suitability duties, a complaints route through the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, CIRO oversight, and Canadian Investor Protection Fund coverage if the dealer became insolvent. Absence from an investor-alerts list proves nothing at all — a firm gets listed when a regulator reaches it, not when a problem starts. Look for registration, not for the absence of a warning. And note what CIPF actually is: it covers property held by a member dealer that becomes insolvent. It does not cover trading losses, at any dealer, ever.

We have not opened, funded or traded a live account with this broker, and we never claim to have done so. What you get instead is a framework: what to check, what the published record actually says, and where the gaps sit. Terms, payout percentages, minimums and country restrictions change without notice, so confirm anything volatile on the operator’s own pages before you act on it. Our reading of the regulatory position was checked on 30 July 2026.

Who edits this site

Editorial responsibility sits with Colin Beauchemin, Markets and Brokers Editor. Corrections are welcome and handled quickly. If a page here is out of date or wrong, we would rather hear it from a reader than leave it standing.

Five languages, one country

We publish in English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Punjabi. All five editions describe the same market — Canada — and the same Canadian regulatory frame. They are not machine translations of one another; each is written in its own language for people who live here.

Two consequences of that are worth spelling out. The French edition is written for Quebec and francophone Canada, which means “l’AMF” on this site is Quebec’s Autorité des marchés financiers, not the French regulator that shares its name. Much of the French-language material a Quebec reader finds on this product was written for France and does not describe their position at all. The same applies to our Spanish, Chinese and Punjabi editions: material in those languages is usually written for Latin America, for mainland China or for India, and none of it describes the rules that apply to someone living in Brampton, Surrey or Montreal. The regulator that matters is the securities commission of the province you live in. Reading in a given language does not change that, and an interface offered in your language is not a local office and not a Canadian registration.

How we are funded

Our funding model is affiliate partnerships. As things stand, no partner programme is connected to this site: there are no sign-up buttons, no referral or redirect links, and nothing you click here earns us a commission or anything else. 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.