IG

IG's pricing changed materially over the last eighteen months, and most comparison tables have not caught up. Two things matter.

Investing. On the standard GBP share dealing, ISA and SIPP accounts, UK and international share commission is now zero, and the GBP 24 quarterly custody fee was removed outright in January 2026 rather than merely waived for active traders. The old structure — GBP 8 per UK deal, falling to GBP 3 once you had traded three times in a month — is gone. What remains is the FX conversion charge on anything not denominated in sterling: 0.49% on the investing, ISA and SIPP accounts, a flat rate rather than the old tiered ladder, and one IG applies at its discretion and has committed to only until 4 September 2026. UK stamp duty of 0.5% on share purchases still applies, but that goes to HMRC.

Leveraged trading. Here the cost is the spread, plus overnight financing, plus a 0.8% currency conversion mark-up on any position denominated outside your account currency. That last number is the one people underestimate. EUR/USD sits around 0.9 pips in practice against a published minimum of 0.8; the FTSE 100 starts at 1 point during cash-market hours and Germany 40 at 1.2 points, both widening out of hours.

A worked example. Hold a USD 20,000 S&P 500 CFD on a GBP account for a week and you pay the spread twice, roughly a week of financing at the benchmark rate plus IG's admin margin, and 0.8% of the converted value on the realised result. The conversion charge alone comfortably exceeds the spread. If you trade US markets regularly, open a USD-denominated account and most of that problem disappears — this is the single highest-value optimisation available to an IG client.

The genuinely competitive lines are the non-trading ones. There is no inactivity fee at all — IG lists it as free on the investing, spread betting and CFD accounts, where rivals bite after three to twelve dormant months — no minimum deposit, and no deposit or withdrawal charge. The US options and futures schedule is competitive too: USD 1.00 per options contract to open with nothing to close, USD 1.00 per futures contract per side, USD 0.75 on micro futures and USD 1.25 on options on futures, with conversions in that account charged at 0.5%.

IG Group Holdings plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange under IGG, publishes audited annual accounts and has been operating since 1974, when Stuart Wheeler founded IG Index to let UK investors speculate on the gold price around exchange controls. Longevity of that order is itself a data point: the firm has traded through 1987, the dot-com collapse, 2008 and the 2015 Swiss franc de-pegging.

The licence set is unusually broad. IG Markets Limited is authorised by the FCA under firm reference 195355, with FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 per eligible claimant if the firm fails. IG Europe GmbH is licensed by BaFin and the Deutsche Bundesbank and passports across the EEA, though German statutory compensation is far thinner — 90% of a claim capped at EUR 20,000. IG Bank S.A. holds a full Swiss banking licence under FINMA, which puts Swiss client cash under esisuisse depositor protection up to CHF 100,000, a structural advantage almost no CFD competitor can match. Australia (ASIC, AFSL 515106), Singapore (MAS), Japan (JFSA) and Dubai (DFSA) complete the group.

Client money is held in segregated accounts, and retail clients across the UK and EEA have negative balance protection, so a gap through a stop cannot leave you owing more than your deposit. That protection is one of the things elected professional clients surrender in exchange for higher leverage — a trade far more people accept than should.

None of this makes trading safe. IG's own regulatory disclosure puts the share of retail accounts losing money on spread bets and CFDs around 70%. Regulation governs how your money is held and how the firm behaves. It does nothing about the risk in the positions you choose to take.

IG runs a tiered platform strategy rather than stretching one product over every use case, and it works.

• IG web platform is the default. Fast deal ticket, deep watchlists, price alerts, integrated Reuters news and the full order-type set including guaranteed stops. It is dense but coherent, and layouts survive being customised.
• IG Trading app covers iOS and Android with close to full parity — open, edit and close positions, set alerts, run charts and fund the account. The gap to desktop is narrower than at most rivals.
• ProRealTime is the serious charting layer: hundreds of indicators, a strategy backtester and automated execution. IG waives the monthly subscription once you place four trades in a month, which effectively makes professional charting free for active clients.
• L2 Dealer is a Windows application offering direct market access with full order-book depth on shares. This is the tool that separates IG from retail-only CFD shops — you interact with the actual book rather than a market-maker quote.
• MetaTrader 4 exists for Expert Advisor users but covers only a subset of instruments and feels like a compatibility layer rather than a first-class product.
• TradingView integration lets you trade IG prices from TradingView charts, and IG publishes documented REST and Lightstreamer streaming APIs for anyone building their own execution stack.

The honest criticism is fragmentation. Getting the best out of IG means learning three interfaces and knowing which one to use for what — a cost beginners pay in confusion and experienced traders pay in setup time. A single unified platform of ProRealTime's calibre would be a better product than five good ones stitched together.

IG advertises over 17,000 markets, and unlike many such claims the number is not padded with duplicate FX crosses. The universe covers:

• Shares — thousands of UK, US, European, Australian and Asian listings, tradable as CFDs, spread bets or, on the investing account, as real shares held in a GIA, ISA or SIPP.
• Indices — every major benchmark with 24-hour dealing on the big cash indices, plus IG's own weekend markets on the FTSE 100 and Wall Street, which very few competitors quote at all.
• Forex — the full major, minor and exotic set.
• Commodities — energies, metals and softs, both spot-style and futures-dated.
• Bonds and rates — Bund, Gilt, T-Note and short-rate markets, an area most retail brokers skip entirely.
• Options and futures — options and futures on indices and FX as spread bets and CFDs, plus a genuinely separate US Options & Futures account giving European clients access to US-listed contracts at USD 1.00 per options contract and USD 1.00 per futures contract per side.
• ETFs and funds — commission-free on the investing account, with IG's managed Smart Portfolios for hands-off investors.
• Turbo warrants — offered to EU clients through Spectrum Markets, IG's own multilateral trading facility.
• Crypto CFDs — available in several jurisdictions but not to UK retail clients, who fall under the FCA's ban on crypto derivatives.

What IG does not have is copy trading or a social feed. If mirroring other traders is the point of the exercise, this is the wrong broker and eToro is the obvious alternative.

Applications are fully online and, for most UK and EEA residents, approved the same day. You complete identity and address details, answer an appropriateness questionnaire covering trading experience and knowledge of leverage, and are verified electronically against public registers. Where the electronic check fails you upload a passport or ID card plus proof of address, pushing approval out to one to three business days.

The appropriateness test is a real filter, not a formality. Applicants who declare no derivatives experience are routinely restricted or declined for CFD and spread betting accounts and steered toward the investing account instead. That is the regulator working as intended, but it surprises people who expect a two-minute signup.

Funding carries no barrier at all. There is no minimum deposit. Bank transfers have neither a minimum nor a maximum; card payments start at GBP 1 and are capped at GBP 99,999 per debit card deposit and GBP 30,000 per credit card deposit. Card and PayPal deposits credit instantly; bank transfers take one to three business days. IG charges nothing on either side — no deposit fee, no withdrawal fee — though your own bank may apply a correspondent charge on international transfers.

Base currencies include GBP, EUR, USD, CHF, AUD, SGD and JPY. Choosing correctly matters more than it looks. Because the 0.8% conversion mark-up applies to every trade denominated outside your account currency, a European client who mostly trades US indices is materially better off on a USD account than a EUR one — over a year of active trading the difference runs into hundreds.

Withdrawals return to the original funding source and typically settle in one to five business days depending on method and entity.

IG invests more in content than almost any competitor, and it shows in two directions.

Research. The platform carries integrated Reuters news, IG's in-house market analysis, an economic calendar, earnings calendars and client sentiment data showing the long/short split of IG's own book on each market. That last item is one of the few genuinely differentiated data points in retail trading, because it tells you where the crowd is actually positioned rather than what a commentator thinks. IG also owns DailyFX, acquired from FXCM in 2016, which remains one of the better free FX analysis sites. Chart-level research runs through ProRealTime, where you get institutional-grade indicators and a strategy backtester rather than a token studies list.

Education. IG Academy structures learning into graded courses with progress tracking and quizzes, covering the mechanics of leverage, margin, order types and risk management before it reaches anything resembling strategy. The webinar programme runs regularly and the archive is searchable. The demo account carries GBP 10,000 of virtual funds, mirrors live pricing and — importantly — works with ProRealTime and MT4 as well as the main platform, so you can rehearse on the tool you actually intend to use rather than a simplified stand-in.

The fair criticism is tone. Much of IG's educational output funnels toward placing trades, and the risk material, while present and compliant, is less prominent than the opportunity material. Treat IG Academy as a good technical primer and build your risk discipline from an independent source.

IG runs telephone, email and live chat support across its regional entities, generally 24 hours a day from Sunday evening through Friday night, plus limited weekend staffing for the weekend index and crypto markets IG uniquely quotes.

Coverage is genuinely multilingual because IG operates local entities rather than a single offshore hub. German clients reach IG Europe staff, Swiss clients reach IG Bank, Australian clients reach the Sydney office. In practice that means support understands the local tax wrapper, the local funding rails and the local regulatory quirks — a real advantage over brokers routing all of Europe through one Cyprus call centre.

Response quality is solid rather than exceptional. Phone pickup during London hours is quick; live chat can queue during volatile market opens. Email responses on account and tax questions can take a day or more, and complex ISA or SIPP transfer queries frequently need escalation to a specialist team.

The pattern in public feedback is worth reading carefully. IG's Trustpilot average sits around 3.8 from more than nine thousand reviews, notably below both CMC Markets and Plus500. The complaints cluster around account verification friction, withdrawal timing and slippage disputes in fast markets — not around the platform or the pricing. That is roughly the profile you would expect from a large, heavily regulated broker that declines more applicants and asks more questions than its lighter-touch competitors, and it is not the same signal as a broker rated poorly for execution or fund access.