The order of business does not change for a smaller firm. Before any assessment of Spreadex, the reader opens the Financial Services Register and satisfies themselves that the entry describes the company whose website they have been reading. Spreadex’s own site states that Spreadex Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. That is the firm’s statement, and a firm’s statement about its own permissions is a starting point, never a conclusion.

The firm in brief

Spreadex is one of the few genuinely independent British houses still selling retail derivatives, incorporated in February 1999 and unattached to the listed groups that dominate this market. Its financial arm offers spread bets, CFDs and options across indices, shares, forex and commodities, per its published pages; the same brand runs a sportsbook. The absence of a listed parent is the defining fact here: nothing in the firm’s own materials claims one, so there is no share price and no half-year statement to read against the marketing. What the reader does get is the statutory record — Spreadex Limited, company number 03720378, files group accounts at Companies House, most recently for the year to 31 May 2025 — slower and thinner than a listed rival’s reporting, but not nothing.

The reference number, and what it is worth

Spreadex publishes a firm reference number in its own footer, alongside a separate Gambling Commission account number for fixed-odds betting. Publishing it is to the firm’s credit; many operators print “regulated” and leave the reader guessing which entity is meant. This desk nonetheless declines to reprint the digits as though it had checked them: a number copied from a marketing footer is a claim, not a verification. The reader’s task takes ninety seconds: search the Register, match its number against the footer’s, confirm the permissions cover spread bets and CFDs, and use the contact details the Register holds. Clone operations exist because that last step gets skipped.

A closed platform estate

The published platform list is the firm’s own web and mobile environment, a charting package and a TradingView integration. It contains no MetaTrader, which for many readers is the most consequential sentence here. Indicators, templates and automated logic built up over years in MT4 or MT5 cannot come in, and a method built inside Spreadex’s environment cannot go out. Closed estates are cheaper to run and more expensive to leave — a trade the firm may make and the customer should price beforehand.

The pricing this review cannot show you

Here the assessment stops short. Spreadex markets tight spreads and low margins on its own pages, but this desk could not obtain a schedule of spreads and financing rates to set against the figures larger houses print — and it does not measure prices itself, nor repeat a rival’s figure as its own. The consequence is plain: cost is hard to compare before an account exists, whereas the incumbent’s published minimums can be read side by side. A dealer-priced product bought without a price list is bought on trust.

Two regulators, and the disclosures underneath

One brand carries an FCA authorisation and a Gambling Commission licence, per the firm’s footer — the ordinary shape of a British house with sporting roots, but two rulebooks, and protections follow the product, not the login. On the authorisation the firm states, the financial side carries the retail apparatus: leverage caps, negative balance protection, the client-money rules, and eligibility for the Financial Services Compensation Scheme should the firm fail owing money — a scheme that covers the firm’s failure, never a losing trade. Two further disclosures belong together: professional clients may, per the firm, trade via credit without negative balance protection and lose more than they deposit, and the firm displays, as the rules require, that 61% of retail investors lose money with it. Read consecutively, they describe a door most readers should leave shut.

Bottom line

Spreadex suits the reader who wants a long-established British firm, is content inside one proprietary environment, and takes the firm’s own 61% figure and professional-client warning at their word. It suits less well the reader arriving with a MetaTrader workflow, choosing brokers by comparing cost schedules, or wanting a listed parent to examine first. None of that is concealed; it is what a private, closed-estate operator looks like. And it is read as everything here is read — Register first, disclosures second, awards last, the compensation scheme understood for what it covers rather than what a customer hopes.

The customary note: spread bets and CFDs carry substantial risk of loss, most retail accounts lose money, and nothing above is advice.