IG vs Pepperstone — which broker is better?

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

Pros

• Razor all-in EUR/USD cost of about 0.8 pips - a 0.0 to 0.1 pip raw spread plus USD 3.50 per lot per side
• No inactivity fee, no account-keeping fee and no account closure fee, confirmed on Pepperstone's own costs page
• Five execution venues on one account: MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView and the in-house Pepperstone Platform
• Three top-tier licences - FCA 684312, ASIC AFSL 414530 and BaFin 151148 - so most clients contract with a tier-1 supervised entity
• EUR, CHF and GBP accounts at every European entity (UK, Cyprus, Germany), which removes a layer of conversion cost for European clients
• Account approval typically inside 4-8 hours, with a USD 10 minimum first deposit and no minimum by bank transfer
• Active Trader rebates take the all-in EUR/USD cost down to roughly 0.26 pips at high volume
• UK clients get the same book as spread bets, with EUR/USD from 0.6 points

Cons

• Everything is a CFD. You never own the share or ETF, so there are no voting rights, no transferable holdings and no dividend tax reclaim
• Overnight financing on index and share CFDs is charged at 2.5 percent over the benchmark rate, which quietly punishes anyone holding for more than a few weeks
• No options, futures, bonds or mutual funds - the product shelf is narrow next to a full-service broker
• Education is a webinar and article archive rather than a curriculum; ForexBrokers.com marks it down for having no interactive courses or quizzes
• FIX API access is reported to need around USD 250 million in monthly volume, so systematic traders are confined to MT4, MT5 or cTrader automation
• Pepperstone publishes no headline currency conversion rate, which makes the true cost of a US share CFD from a EUR account hard to model before you trade