Tickmill

Tickmill sells two MetaTrader accounts and the choice is straightforward.

Classic carries no commission and spreads from 1.6 pips. Raw charges USD 3 per lot per side — USD 6 per round turn — on FX and precious metals only, with spreads from 0.0 pips. Independent testing in July 2026 measured Tickmill's typical EUR/USD spread at 0.1 pips, so a standard-lot EUR/USD round turn on Raw costs roughly USD 6 in commission plus about USD 1 of spread. The same trade on Classic costs around USD 16 in spread alone. Raw wins for anyone trading meaningful size; Classic only makes sense on very small or very infrequent positions.

Indices, commodities, shares and crypto carry no separate commission on either account — the cost is entirely in the spread. Benchmarks measured in the same test: S&P 500 CFD 0.3 points, Nasdaq 100 0.78, GBP/USD 0.3 pips, Apple CFD 0.0.

The exchange-traded side is priced separately and priced well. The Futures & Options account charges USD 1.30 per standard contract and USD 0.85 per micro contract per side, with routing and clearing already bundled and a USD 0.00 minimum ticket fee; exchange and NFA fees are added for the all-in figure. Options are published on the same basis at USD 1.30 per micro options contract, commission only; independent testing measured a US index option at USD 1.52 all-in once exchange and NFA fees were included. That account opens from USD 1,000.

Non-trading costs are where Tickmill is unusually clean:

• Deposits: free, with bank wire fees reimbursed up to USD 100 on single transfers of USD 5,000 or more
• Withdrawals: free, minimum 25 in the wallet currency
• Custody and platform fees: none
• Currency conversion: liquidity-provider rate plus a mark-up, measured at roughly 0.01%
• Inactivity: 10 USD/EUR/GBP/CHF or 40 PLN per quarter, but only after 12 months dormant and only on balances at or below 50

Tickmill also pays 1.8% on idle USD and GBP cash above USD 100, provided the account traded in the last 30 days or holds an open position — a small but real offset most CFD brokers do not bother with.

Tickmill is a group of separately licensed companies, and the licence that matters is the one on your statement, not the one in the marketing.

• Tickmill UK Ltd — FCA register number 717270, company number 09592225, registered at 9A Devonshire Square, London. This entity carries FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 per person — the FSCS investment limit, left untouched by the December 2025 rise in the separate deposit limit to GBP 120,000. Its own entity table shows this company booking clients from the UK, parts of the EU, South America and the Middle East.
• Tickmill Europe Ltd — CySEC licence 278/15, Limassol. Covered by the Cypriot Investor Compensation Fund, which pays 90% of an eligible claim up to EUR 20,000. This is the entity that books most German and Austrian clients, so EUR 20,000 at 90% is the realistic number for a DACH reader.
• Tickmill Ltd — Seychelles FSA Securities Dealer licence SD008. No investor compensation scheme exists in the Seychelles. This entity carries much of the non-EEA client base.
• Tickmill South Africa (Pty) Ltd — FSCA FSP 49464.
• Tickmill UK Ltd (DIFC) — DFSA reference F007663, a representative office licence only: it permits marketing and introduction, not the holding of client money.

Structurally, client funds are held segregated from company money at tier-1 banks, and retail negative balance protection applies under FCA and CySEC rules. No audited group accounts are published, which is what this record's safety fields say. Tickmill UK's own risk warning discloses that 69% of its retail investor accounts lose money trading CFDs.

What is absent matters too. Tickmill is privately held with no stock exchange listing and no banking licence, so there is no quarterly public balance sheet to inspect and no bank-grade capital behind the group. The company was founded in 2014, giving it a twelve-year track record — respectable for the sector, short next to the sixty- and eighty-year-old names it now competes with on the multi-asset side. None of this makes Tickmill unsafe. It means the safety case rests on regulatory supervision rather than public transparency, and that you should confirm your entity before assuming you are covered.

Tickmill runs a split platform strategy, and the two halves are of very different quality.

For CFDs it is MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, plus a browser WebTrader and Tickmill's own mobile app. MetaTrader is the most widely understood retail platform in the world, and Tickmill leans into what makes it useful: every strategy is permitted, Expert Advisors run without restriction, hedging and scalping are allowed, and a hosted VPS is available for latency-sensitive systems. Tickmill also ships an Advanced Trading Toolkit that adds the correlation matrices, sentiment gauges, alarm manager and mini terminal that MT4 has never had natively.

But MetaTrader is MetaTrader. Reviews of both clients return the same criticisms every time: an interface that has barely moved in a decade, a poorly structured news feed, no price alerts on mobile, and — the one that should genuinely be fixed — no two-step or biometric login. In 2026 a single-factor password login on a funded trading app is a security weakness, not a stylistic complaint.

The exchange-traded side is a different product entirely. The Futures & Options account runs on CQG and Trading Technologies, professional order-routing platforms with depth of market, spread matrices, iceberg, bracket and OCO order types and exchange-native execution on CME, NYMEX, COMEX, CBOT and EUREX. Anyone who has traded futures institutionally will recognise both immediately.

The newest addition is the IBKR Multi-Asset Account, delivered through an Interactive Brokers partnership announced in July 2026. It puts shares, ETFs, options, futures, spot currencies, bonds and mutual funds behind a Tickmill login with fractional share support and no fixed minimum deposit — effectively borrowing IBKR's execution stack for the investing half of the business. It is the single biggest change to Tickmill's proposition in years, and also the newest, which is reason enough to check the detail before consolidating a portfolio there.

Tickmill's CFD range is deliberately mid-sized rather than sprawling: over 600 CFDs in total. Measured instrument by instrument in July 2026:

That is competitive on FX and thin on shares next to brokers listing thousands of names. Leverage under FCA and ESMA rules is capped at 1:30 on major FX, 1:20 on indices and commodities and 1:5 on share CFDs; the Seychelles entity applies materially higher caps.

Crypto carries two conditions worth knowing. There is a 10% per year swap charge on long positions, with a five-day swap-free window on new MT4/MT5 positions. And because the FCA banned crypto derivatives for UK retail clients in January 2021, crypto is not reachable through the UK entity at all. Tickmill has also set the Turkish lira pairs (USDTRY, EURTRY, GBPTRY) to close-only.

Where Tickmill separates itself from the CFD pack is the non-CFD business. The Futures & Options account gives real exchange-traded derivatives — E-mini and micro contracts on index, rate, energy and metal underlyings across five exchanges — rather than a synthetic wrapper, with a published tariff and no monthly minimums. The IBKR Multi-Asset Account adds genuine share, ETF, bond and mutual fund ownership with fractional trading, priced at USD 0.35 for a US order and GBP 1 for a UK order.

The practical read: Tickmill is no longer only a CFD shop. But the multi-asset piece is weeks old at the time of writing and Tickmill has not published a full per-exchange tariff for it, so treat the two headline commissions as headline commissions and verify anything outside US and UK equities before committing capital.

Onboarding is one of Tickmill's genuinely strong points. The application is fully digital and takes ten to fifteen minutes: identity, address, tax residence, employment, financial position and a trading-experience questionnaire, followed by a short CFD appropriateness quiz. Passport, national ID or driving licence work for identity; a utility bill or bank statement for address. Verification typically clears within one business day, and the minimum deposit is 100 in any of the five base currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, PLN and CHF.

Funding is broad by the standards of a regulated broker: bank wire, Visa and Mastercard, Skrill, Neteller, PayPal, Przelewy24, Sofort and Rapid Transfer, depending on residence. Cards and wallets credit instantly; wires are processed within a working day and arrive in two to seven. Neither deposits nor withdrawals carry a Tickmill fee, the minimum withdrawal is 25, and single wire deposits of USD 5,000 or more get bank fees reimbursed up to USD 100. Third-party payments are refused and withdrawals return only to a method in your own name.

Five base currencies is fewer than several competitors offer, which matters if your bank account is in SEK, NOK or CZK — you will pay a conversion each way, albeit at a very small mark-up.

The DACH tax question is where this account gets awkward. Tickmill does not act as a German Abgeltungsteuer or Austrian KESt withholding agent. There is no automatic 25% deduction, no Solidaritätszuschlag handled at source, no Freistellungsauftrag and no Jahressteuerbescheinigung of the kind a domestic depot issues. Every gain, loss and swap credit has to be reported by you through the Anlage KAP, using statements you export yourself. On top of that, German law caps the annual offset of losses from Termingeschäfte — the category CFDs and futures fall into — which can leave a trader taxed on gross profits while carrying real losses forward into later years. Austrian clients face the parallel problem: no automatic KESt means self-assessment.

If tax simplicity is what you are optimising for, this is not the account. If you already file Anlage KAP and are choosing on execution cost, it is a manageable annual chore rather than a reason to walk away.

Tickmill's research is assembled, not authored, and that is the fairest description of it.

The stack is licensed: Acuity Trading for AI-driven sentiment and news overlays on MetaTrader charts, Signal Centre for third-party trade ideas, the Advanced Trading Toolkit for correlation and sentiment tools MT4 lacks, plus an economic calendar, an earnings calendar and a set of forex calculators. It is competent plumbing. What it is not is a house view — there is no Tickmill analyst whose morning note you would read for its own sake, and independent testing specifically criticised the basic, poorly structured news feed inside MetaTrader.

Education is stronger and clearly funded. Webinars and in-person seminars run regularly, there is a video tutorial library, an ebook series, a forex glossary, a podcast (Bright Minds) and a video series (The T-Show). The most credible item is a set of London Stock Exchange-associated courses, and there is a dedicated Futures & Options education hub for the exchange-traded side. The material teaches instrument mechanics rather than selling trading as a lifestyle, which is more than can be said for much of the sector.

Support runs 24 hours a day, five days a week across phone, email, live chat and a ticket system, in thirteen or more languages including German, Polish, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. The Futures & Options business has its own professional client services desk with a direct UK line.

The honest caveat is what public sentiment says. Aggregated reviews and forum discussion covering May to August 2026 consistently praise the spreads and execution — and consistently complain about the same three things: withdrawal delays, additional verification requests, and opacity when accounts are restricted or closed. Those complaints are common across the leveraged-CFD sector and are not on their own evidence of wrongdoing, but they recur often enough at Tickmill to belong in an honest assessment. Keep your verification documents current, avoid depositing from a method you cannot withdraw to, and expect friction on the first large withdrawal.