Begin, as this desk always begins, with the Register. IG operates in the UK through FCA-authorised entities, and the reader’s first act — before opening this review, ideally, but certainly before opening an account — is to verify that authorisation on the Financial Services Register and to confirm that the details there match the details in front of them. That done, we may proceed to the less scriptural question of whether the UK’s incumbent derivatives broker deserves the position it occupies.
The firm in brief
IG is old, by the standards of this industry — founded in 1974 as IG Index, offering spread bets on the price of gold, in the company’s own telling — and it is large, listed on the London Stock Exchange and carrying the sort of scale that makes “incumbent” a description rather than a compliment. Half a century of continuous operation through every market regime since the end of Bretton Woods is a fact about the firm that no challenger can purchase, and this review will weigh it as one. It will also weigh what the scale costs the customer, because it costs something.
The regulatory record
The part of the review a compliance-minded reader wants first: IG’s UK entities are FCA-authorised, its retail clients sit inside the standard UK protections — negative balance protection, the leverage caps, segregated client money under the client-asset rules — and, as customers of an authorised firm, eligible claimants would have recourse to the FSCS up to £85,000 should the firm fail owing them money. The desk repeats its standing caveat because the misreading is eternal: the scheme covers firm failure, not losing trades. On the record itself there is little to prosecute. A listed parent publishing audited accounts is a firm the reader can actually examine, which is more than most of this industry offers.
Pricing, versus the challengers
Here the incumbency bill arrives. IG’s published minimum spread on EUR/USD stands at 0.6 points as of this writing, which is respectable and, a decade ago, would have closed the discussion. It no longer does. A generation of challenger brokers has made sharper headline pricing its entire pitch, and on the published numbers alone, IG is not consistently the cheapest way to trade a major pair in the UK. The firm would answer — reasonably — that headline spread is not total cost, that execution quality and market depth are paid for somewhere, and that its range dwarfs the challengers’. All true, and all the sort of thing incumbents say. The reader comparing published price schedules line by line will find rows where IG is beaten, and this review would be advertising if it pretended otherwise. Overnight funding charges and the fees schedule generally deserve the same line-by-line reading; the published inactivity fee — £12 a month after two years without activity, as of this writing — is the sort of small print that costs nothing to know and something to discover.
Platform sprawl
The second genuine con is the mirror image of a strength. IG offers its own web and mobile platforms, MT4, ProRealTime for charting, and L2 Dealer for direct market access — a breadth that reads impressively in a features table and less impressively at nine in the morning when a new customer is deciding where, among several partially overlapping environments, a given job is actually done. The proprietary platform is capable; the ecosystem around it has accreted the way fifty-year-old institutions accrete, and the result is that there are frequently two or three sanctioned ways to accomplish a task, each documented in its own corner. A challenger with one platform and one price list offers a simpler contract with the customer’s attention. IG offers an estate. Estates require staff.
Bottom line
IG is what a UK retail broker looks like when it has survived long enough to be boring, and this desk means that as praise of a specific, limited kind. The authorisation is verifiable, the parent is listed, the protections apply, and the range is genuinely unmatched in this market. What the reader gives up is the sharpest published price on any given pair and the simplicity of a single coherent platform. Whether that trade is worth making depends on what is being traded and how often — a question each reader answers with the fee schedule open and, as scripture requires, the Register checked first.
Risk note, as always: spread bets and CFDs carry substantial risk of loss, and nothing in this review is financial advice.