Fidelity Investments vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• USD 0 online US stock and ETF commissions, and Fidelity does not accept payment for order flow on equity orders
• Zero-expense-ratio index mutual funds (the FZROX family) — no other major US broker matches this on fund cost
• Options exercise and assignment cost USD 0, and buy-to-close orders at USD 0.65 or less are free
• No outgoing account transfer fee, no domestic wire fee and no inactivity or maintenance fee
• Idle cash defaults into the SPAXX money market fund rather than a near-zero bank sweep, so uninvested balances earn a market-linked yield without manual intervention
• International trading in 25 markets with settlement in 16 currencies, at GBP 9 for the UK and EUR 19 for euro-zone markets
• Best-in-class research: roughly seven third-party report providers plus the proprietary Equity Summary Score, and consistently rated first for research and education
• Fractional share investing from USD 1 across a broad US universe, not just large-cap index constituents

Cons

• No futures, no futures options and no retail forex — a hard stop for macro and commodity traders
• No paper trading or simulator, so there is no way to rehearse a strategy inside the platform
• Crypto is limited to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin with a spread of up to 1% built into the price, and is not SIPC-protected
• New accounts are effectively US residents only; Fidelity states it does not open accounts for customers residing outside the United States and restricts existing accounts when clients move abroad
• Charting and drawing tools in Trader+ are weaker than thinkorswim's, and there is no backtesting engine
• The FX markup on international trades settled in USD starts at a full 100 basis points below USD 100,000 — expensive for small foreign orders

Pros

• Around 17,000 tradable markets in a single account — shares, indices, FX, commodities, bonds, ETFs, turbo warrants and crypto CFDs, subject to regional restrictions
• Six top-tier licences — FCA (FRN 195355), BaFin, FINMA, ASIC (AFSL 515106), MAS and JFSA — plus a mid-tier DFSA licence in Dubai; the FINMA licence among those six is a full Swiss banking licence at IG Bank S.A., which puts Swiss cash under esisuisse protection
• Zero commission on UK and international shares, and the GBP 24 quarterly custody fee was scrapped outright in January 2026 rather than merely waived for active traders
• Platform stack that scales with the trader: web and mobile for most, ProRealTime for charting and backtesting, L2 Dealer for full order-book DMA, plus MT4, TradingView and documented REST/streaming APIs
• US-listed options from USD 1.00 per contract to open with nothing to close, and futures at USD 1.00 per contract per side (USD 0.75 on micros) — rare for a European retail broker
• No inactivity fee at all, where most rivals start charging after three to twelve dormant months, and no minimum deposit on any account
• Weekend dealing on the FTSE 100 and Wall Street, plus published client-sentiment data showing how IG's own book is positioned

Cons

• The 0.8% currency conversion mark-up on foreign-currency CFD and spread bet trades is where much of the real cost hides — on a USD position round-trip it comfortably exceeds the spread
• EUR/USD at roughly 0.9 pips is mid-table; raw-spread brokers quote 0.1–0.3 pips plus a small commission and work out cheaper for anyone trading FX frequently
• The 0.49% share dealing conversion rate is a discretionary discount rather than a contractual one — IG has committed to it only until 4 September 2026 and can raise it afterwards
• No fractional shares on IG's own platform, which creates real cash drag when drip-feeding small sums into high-priced US stocks
• Pricing genuinely differs by entity and account type — UK GBP share dealing, multi-currency share dealing, IG Europe and IG Bank all run separate schedules, and the published tables are hard to reconcile
• Crypto CFDs are unavailable to UK retail clients under the FCA ban, so the headline market count overstates what a UK resident can actually trade