IG review.

Overview

IG Group stands as one of the world’s most established online brokers, operating since 1974 with over 50 years of market experience. This FTSE 250 company serves 400,000+ traders globally from 18 international offices, offering access to 17,000+ tradable markets. Named #1 Overall Broker in 2024 by ForexBrokers.com, IG maintains regulatory licenses with 11 top-tier authorities, including the FCA, ASIC, and CFTC.

For more detailed information about IG’s products, services, and performance, visit their official website.

Overview Table

Facts List

1. Founded in 1974 – one of the world’s oldest online brokers
2. FTSE 250 publicly traded company
3. 400,000+ global traders
4. 17,000+ tradable markets
5. 11+ regulatory licenses worldwide
6. 6 trading platforms available
7. Negative balance protection for retail clients
8. 18 global offices
9. IG Academy educational resources
10. 24-hour customer support available

Licenses & Regulation

IG’s multi-jurisdictional regulatory framework provides exceptional client protection through strict capital requirements, segregated client funds, and regular audits. This extensive oversight across 11 major authorities demonstrates IG’s commitment to maintaining the highest standards of financial security and operational transparency. Each license requires adherence to stringent compliance protocols, ensuring traders benefit from comprehensive investor protection schemes.

• United Kingdom: Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
• Australia: Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC)
• United States: CFTC and NFA
• Germany: BaFin
• Switzerland: FINMA
• Singapore: MAS
• South Africa: FSCA
• UAE: DFSA
• Japan: FSA
• New Zealand: FMA
• Bermuda: BMA

Trading Instruments

IG’s extensive market coverage spans over 17,000 instruments, providing traders with unparalleled diversification opportunities across global markets. The broker offers competitive spreads starting from 0.6 pips on major forex pairs and unique features like weekend trading on key indices. This comprehensive asset selection enables traders to implement sophisticated strategies across multiple markets from a single account.

Account Types

Which company you sign a contract with depends entirely on where you are when you apply, and the two propositions are not variations of one product — they are different products. We fetched ig.com from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Azerbaijan through Bright Data in July 2026. All four were served the international site at ig.com/en, whose footer reads: “CFD Accounts provided by IG International Limited. IG International Limited is licensed to conduct investment business and digital asset business by the Bermuda Monetary Authority.” [OWN, ig.com/en from id/th/vn/az]

What the UK visitor is offered

The footer of every ig.com/uk page names four FCA-regulated entities.

We looked all three firm reference numbers up on the FCA register and the Companies House numbers on the register records match the ones printed in IG’s own footer. A cryptoasset firm is registered with the FCA for money-laundering supervision only; IG’s own crypto risk warning says you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.

What the Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese or Azerbaijani visitor is offered

One entity, one product. IG International Limited, licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority, selling CFDs only. [OWN, id/th/vn/az] The international site’s own navigation carries no spread betting, no share dealing, no ISA, no SIPP and no Smart Portfolios — the “How to trade” menu lists CFD trading and nothing else. Everything this review says about spread betting, capital gains tax treatment, forward contracts, ISAs and joint accounts is a UK and Ireland matter and does not describe an account any of these four countries can open.

There is no published account-tier table on ig.com/en either. What exists instead is a volume-based invitation:

The difference in the upper tier matters more than it looks. In the UK, becoming a professional client is a regulated reclassification and IG spells out what you surrender: negative balance protection stops applying, you take on an obligation to make additional payments if the account goes negative, IG may assume your level of knowledge when assessing appropriateness, and on best execution it may prioritise speed and likelihood of execution over overall price. Premium status on ig.com/en is not that. It is a loyalty tier — personal account manager, higher volume-based rebates, priority phone service, invitations to events, interest on cash balances and “exclusive promotional offers” — awarded on trading volume, with, in IG’s words, “no additional fees or charges for holding the status of premium client”. No change of regulatory category is described on the page.

The minimum deposit we could not source — now we can, for one of them

Our record for IG carries a £250 minimum deposit. On the UK pages we still cannot source it: the charges page, the account-opening help articles and the deposits articles state no account minimum. On the international site IG does publish a figure, and it is not £250 — the minimum card payment is US$50 and there is no minimum at all on a bank transfer. [OWN, ig.com/en help centre article, revised 3 June 2026] Treat £250 as unconfirmed.

Deposits & Withdrawals

Correction, and a correction to a correction. An earlier version of this review listed a 1% fee on Visa credit card deposits and 0.5% on Mastercard. We then removed those fees, because IG’s UK charges page shows credit card deposits and withdrawals as free. That removal was wrong for most of the world. The funding page served to Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam states, in these words: “Credit Card — Cost: 1% charge for Visa and 0.5% charge for MasterCard.” [OWN, ig.com/en/fund-your-account from id/th/vn] The original figures were correct for IG International Limited; we deleted a real cost on the strength of a page no Asian client is served. They are restored below.

Note the internal contradiction on IG’s own international estate: the funding page prices credit cards at 1% and 0.5%, while the charges page prices a third-party card processor charge at 2.3%. Both were live in July 2026 and IG does not reconcile them. Assume card funding is not free and check the figure on the payment screen before you confirm.

Withdrawal limits by currency, international entity

IG publishes these directly, and the sterling row is the giveaway that the UK figures we previously quoted belong to a different table:

How the money physically moves

An Asian client is not paying into a UK bank. IG’s international funding page gives an HSBC account in Hong Kong in the name of “IG International Ltd – Client Trust Account” and a Standard Chartered account in Singapore, and for telegraphic transfers it gives the beneficiary address as 46 Reid Street, Hamilton HM12, Bermuda under registration number 54814. Hong Kong clients can also use FPS with the proxy [email protected]. IG will not accept cash, cheques, ATM or teller payments, commercial or business credit cards, or prepaid cards, cards may only be used on personal accounts, and payment must come from the named account holder. Payment receipts go to [email protected].

Where your money sits — and what happens if IG fails

This is where the two propositions diverge most and where the UK-sourced version of this section was most misleading. Under the FCA’s CASS rules, UK client money sits in segregated accounts under trustee arrangements split across several banks — IG names Barclays and Lloyds — and if IG failed, any shortfall would be covered by the FSCS up to £85,000. IG’s audited accounts put segregated client funds held by IG Markets Limited at £177.9 million at 31 December 2025. [OWN, audited accounts]

IG International Limited’s client-money page describes a structurally similar arrangement — segregated client bank accounts under trustee arrangements at regulated banks, HSBC named, deliberately split across several banks, never merged with IG’s own money, not used for IG’s hedging, and possibly placed in notice or term deposits of up to 95 days — but under Bermuda Monetary Authority rules, not CASS. Its protection in insolvency is described purely as trust law: deposits “would attract all legal protections afforded to trust money”, and net unrealised running profits likewise. No compensation scheme is named anywhere on the page, and there is no equivalent of the FSCS’s £85,000. If you are funding IG International Limited, the £85,000 figure in most reviews of IG — including earlier versions of this one — does not apply to you.

Special Offers

Correction. An earlier version of this section said IG “runs no deposit bonus” and that we had checked the UK, EU and international sites and found none. That was wrong about the international site. Fetched from Indonesia and Thailand in July 2026, ig.com/en carries a cash inducement in the top navigation of every page — “Get up to a $150 cashback” — alongside two further cash schemes that do not exist in the UK at all. The UK and EU restrictions on promotional inducements for leveraged products bind IG’s UK and EU entities. They do not bind IG International Limited, and it uses the room.

Welcome Cashback — international only

New clients opening a CFD account with IG International Limited receive a rebate of the spread and commission they pay in their first two calendar months, capped at US$150, paid into the account within 45 days of the end of that welcome period. Eligible products are forex (excluding Forex Direct DMA trades), indices, commodities and shares; options earn nothing. No registration is needed. It cannot be stacked freely: if you would also qualify under the volume-based rebate scheme you receive whichever is greater, and if you arrived through a referral, the cashback is deducted from what the referral scheme would have paid. The scheme has been running since 10 October 2023 and is governed by English law.

One detail says something about how closely the page is maintained: clause 17 of the live terms still states “70% of retail client accounts lose money … as at December 1 2023”, while the banner on the same page says 69%.

Refer a friend — the same name, a different product

The international tiers are published in full: five qualifying trades pays the referrer US$100 and the friend a 10% rebate; a friend who pays US$250 or more in spread and commission pays the referrer US$250; US$1,000 pays US$500 and lifts the friend’s rebate to 20%; US$4,000 or more pays US$2,000 and 30%. Rewards land within 45 business days of the qualifying period. The structural point is simple and worth stating plainly: the UK scheme rewards someone for investing, the international scheme rewards someone for generating leveraged trading costs, and the friend’s reward rises with how much they lose to spread.

Volume-based rebates — international only

Not offered in the UK. Monthly notional thresholds of $5m, $25m, $100m, $200m and $400m put a client into one of five tiers, each paying a fixed dollar rebate per million traded that varies by asset class — at tier three, for example, $5 per million on indices, $7 on forex, $18 on energies and $10 on gold. Share CFDs are rebated as a percentage of costs instead: 5% at $1.5m notional rising to 25% at $15m. Rebates are calculated in sterling terms and paid in the account currency. Premium clients may be offered “exclusive higher volume-based rebates” on top.

Reduced minimums — both, on different terms

Platform and cash offers

ProRealTime is free for the first month on both sites. Afterwards the UK charges £30 a month, waived in any month IG earns more than £15 from your spread and commission; the international site charges $40 a month, waived if you trade at least four times. Interest on uninvested cash is a UK and Ireland investing feature — 3.75% AER on GBP balances up to £100,000 in a GIA, ISA or SIPP in a month where you hold a position or trade, 2.00% AER on EUR up to €20,000 on the Irish site. On ig.com/en, interest on cash balances appears only as a premium-client benefit, with no rate published.

How to Trade

The platform list is broadly the same wherever you stand, but the leverage is not, and the leverage is the part that decides how fast an account can be lost.

Leverage: the single largest divergence in this review

IG’s UK margin page and its international margin page are the same page in layout, the same “tier one” wording, and largely the same markets. The numbers in the retail column are not the same at all. Both were fetched in July 2026 through Bright Data — the UK page from a UK exit, the international page from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Azerbaijan, which returned byte-identical pages.

Read the forex and gold rows again. A client in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi or Baku is offered 1:200 on major currency pairs and on gold as a retail client — nearly seven times the UK retail cap on forex and ten times it on gold, and on shares four times. This is lawful: the FCA’s 2018 leverage caps bind the UK entity and the Bermuda Monetary Authority sets no equivalent retail cap. It is also the reason our own record has always carried maxLeverage: 200:1 while this section previously described 1:30 — the fact field was describing the international entity and the prose was describing the UK one.

Both sites use the same tiered margining: tiers one to four, with larger positions attracting higher margin. The figures above are tier one only.

Platforms

The full current list on ig.com/en is: web platform, mobile app, a progressive web app, MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, ProRealTime, L2 Dealer, TradingView, the IG tastytrade platform for US options and futures, and a documented API. The UK list is the same minus the tastytrade platform. MT5 is genuinely available on both — IG publishes a full MT5 page on the international site as well as the UK one, so the criticism an earlier version of this review made about MT5’s absence remains withdrawn.

The ProRealTime waiver is worth comparing carefully. The UK condition is revenue-based and reviewed automatically every three months; the international condition is a flat four trades a month. The international condition is easier to meet and, unlike the UK one, rewards trade count rather than value.

Who is on the other side of your trade

This is in IG’s audited accounts rather than its marketing, and it is the single most useful thing to know before you trade there. IG Markets Limited states that it is the counterparty to the OTC derivatives that clients enter into, that it is also the primary hedging counterparty for other IG group companies, and that it manages the resulting market risk by internalisation — offsetting individual client trades against one another — and by hedging only the residual exposure at defined limits, grouped by asset class rather than instrument by instrument. [OWN, IG Markets Limited Annual Report and Financial Statements, period ended 31 December 2025] The international site’s own footer confirms the link: “IG International Limited receives services from other members of the IG Group including IG Markets Limited.”

That is a principal, market-making model, disclosed plainly. It is not a criticism — it is how almost every CFD provider works — but it means your prices are IG’s prices and your trades are not on exchange.

The running costs

UK overnight funding is the relevant interbank rate plus an IG administration fee of 1.5% on FX and 3.4% on other asset classes for spread bets, and 1% and 3% respectively for CFDs, charged for holding past 10pm UK time. The international charges page describes the same two-part structure — admin fee plus or minus the interbank rate for shares and indices, tom-next plus a small admin fee for forex and spot metals, nothing for futures because funding is in the spread — but publishes no percentage for the admin fee. It does publish one number the UK page does not: a guaranteed stop premium on share CFDs “starts at 0.3% of the underlying transaction value”. Currency conversion is 0.8% on a UK leveraged account and 1.0% on ig.com/en.

Opening an Account

Applications are online and IG says many are approved quickly, some instantly, with the timeframe depending on how complete the application is and whether extra verification is needed. It also warns that leveraged accounts require manual processing and may not appear immediately. Existing clients add further accounts from the My IG dashboard rather than reapplying.

The steps

1. Apply from ig.com — or, if you already hold a live account, choose add an account in My IG.
2. Give personal details, financial circumstances and trading or investing experience. IG says the form typically takes about five minutes.
3. Answer the appropriateness questions on trading and professional experience and education, then confirm and finish.
4. Complete identity verification. IG says most clients are verified automatically without uploading anything.
5. Fund the account by debit card, credit card, Apple Pay or bank transfer, and start trading.

What will trip the application up

IG’s own troubleshooting pages are unusually specific, and every item here is a real rejection reason it publishes:

• The card or bank account must be in your own name and the name and address must match your IG profile. Third-party funding is refused outright.
• American Express, prepaid cards, business and corporate cards, and cards from certain jurisdictions such as the US are not accepted. Corporate account holders can only fund by bank transfer.
• You may link a maximum of three debit or credit cards to a profile at a time.
• Proof of payment must be non-editable, uploaded the same day as the transaction, and show your bank’s logo, IG’s bank details as beneficiary, the amount and currency, your full name, your five-character IG account ID and the payment date. It is reviewed manually, monitored from 21:30 UK time on Sunday to 22:00 on Friday, and for new accounts the facility only opens 24 hours after your first trade.

Reopening, joint accounts and reclassification

A closed IG account cannot be reactivated. Returning clients submit a new application, receive a different account number and new login credentials, and carry over no trading history, settings or activity — IG treats it as a fresh account and requires identity verification again regardless of how recently the old one closed. The reapplication route is for retail clients; professional clients are told to contact IG through chat or WhatsApp.

Joint accounts need both parties to hold individual accounts first, so that IG can run the checks its regulator requires, followed by a signed PDF form — separate forms exist for spread betting, CFDs, share dealing and a combined share dealing and CFD account. Professional reclassification is requested afterwards in My IG under settings, then client and account status, and applies to every account you hold with IG.

Which company you are contracting with is decided by where you live, not by which site you happen to land on: a UK resident opening a CFD account contracts with IG Markets Ltd, a German resident with IG Europe GmbH, a Swiss resident with IG Bank SA, an Australian resident with IG Australia Pty Ltd, and a visitor in Dubai, India, Indonesia or Vietnam with IG International Limited in Bermuda. Two-factor authentication is available on the account once open.

Negative Balance Protection

Negative balance protection applies to retail clients of the UK entities, and IG describes it as a regulatory requirement rather than a courtesy: if the account falls into a negative balance for any reason, IG is obliged to return the balance to zero as soon as possible, at no cost to you. The same protection is a requirement across the EU for IG Europe GmbH’s retail clients.

It does not apply to UK professional clients. IG states this in three separate places — the professional trading page, the professional-client help article and the risk warning at the foot of every ig.com/uk page, which reads that professional clients trading spread bets and CFDs can lose more than they deposit and have an obligation to make additional payments if the account goes negative. Against that sits a specific number: the FTSE margin rate falls from 5% for a retail client to 0.45% for a professional one.

The gap that matters if you are not in the UK or the EU

We looked for a statement of negative balance protection for IG International Limited, the Bermuda-licensed entity served to Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Azerbaijan, and did not find one. In July 2026 we read, through Bright Data from those vantages: the international margin page, the charges page, the client-money page, the CFD trading page, the terms-and-agreements index, the website terms and conditions, and the CFDs collection of the international help centre. None of them mentions negative balance protection. The client-money page, which is where a UK reader would expect to find it, describes segregation and trust protection under Bermuda Monetary Authority rules and stops there. The CFD customer agreement itself is served from an endpoint we could not retrieve through Bright Data, so we have not read it and we are not going to assume what it says.

We are therefore not asserting that IG International Limited offers no negative balance protection. We are stating what is checkable: it publishes no such commitment on any page we could reach. If that is the entity opening your account, ask for it in writing before you fund.

This is not an abstract gap, because the same clients are offered far more leverage. A retail client of IG International Limited trades major forex and gold at 1:200, where a UK retail client is capped at 1:30 and 1:20. More leverage plus no published floor under the account is a different risk profile from the UK one, and it is the profile most of IG’s Asian clients are actually offered.

What protects an account before the protection is needed

A guaranteed stop closes the position at your chosen price even if the market gaps through it, and IG only charges the premium if the stop is actually triggered — the cost is shown on the deal ticket beforehand. It is offered on both sites; the international charges page adds that on share CFDs the premium starts at 0.3% of the underlying transaction value. Non-guaranteed stops do not carry that certainty. Both sites describe maintenance margin and margin calls in the same terms, and neither commits to closing your positions for you: the international margin page says only that you “should monitor your account balance and ensure that it is sufficiently funded at all times”.

IG Bank SA in Geneva publishes a figure almost nobody in this industry does: alongside its retail loss rate, it discloses that 3.54% of retail accounts had positions closed because of margin calls in the previous twelve months. No equivalent figure is published on ig.com/en.

Prohibited Countries

IG publishes no list of prohibited countries. We looked again in July 2026, this time from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Azerbaijan through Bright Data rather than from a UK connection: the international site at ig.com/en, its website terms and conditions, its terms-and-agreements index and its help centre carry no country blacklist. Nor does ig.com/uk. Any review presenting one for IG is presenting something the firm does not publish.

Correction, standing. An earlier version of this review carried a list naming Canada, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, Sudan, Crimea, Nigeria and Brazil. We could not source it to IG or to any IG group document and we removed it. It has not been reinstated and nothing in this re-check supports any part of it.

What IG does state

• The UK site carries a standing notice that its information is not directed at residents of the United States or Belgium, nor at any jurisdiction where distribution would breach local law.
• The international site carries the same notice naming the United States only, in the footer of every page and again in its website terms. [OWN, id/th/vn/az]
• IG Group’s licence disclosure states that tastyfx LLC, its US-registered retail foreign exchange dealer, may not offer accounts to residents of Arizona or Ohio. That is the only sub-national restriction IG names anywhere we could find.
• The international demo-account form carries a conditional message — “Sorry we cannot open an account for clients with your country of residence through this site” — which redirects rather than refuses, and the country list behind it is loaded at runtime and is not published as a document.

The practical answer is which entity, not which country

ig.com/us redirects to tastyfx.com; the US retail forex business trades under the tastyfx name, is registered with the CFTC as a retail foreign exchange dealer and introducing broker, and is an NFA member under ID 0509630. Everywhere else, the entity is decided by where your IP address and your residence place you: the United Kingdom is served the FCA entities, South Africa IG Markets South Africa Limited, Switzerland IG Bank SA, Australia IG Australia Pty Ltd under AFSL 515106, Japan IG Securities Limited, and Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Azerbaijan are all served ig.com/en and IG International Limited, licensed by the Bermuda Monetary Authority.

Correction. An earlier version of this section said that the UAE, India, Indonesia and Vietnam were served pages with no retail loss percentage shown at all. That is wrong, and the error was ours rather than IG’s. ig.com/en does publish a loss disclosure, on every page we fetched from all four Asian vantages: “69% of retail client accounts lose money when trading CFDs, with this investment provider.” Our earlier check searched for the UK’s exact wording — “retail investor accounts … when trading spread bets and CFDs” — and IG International’s wording is “retail client accounts … when trading CFDs”, so the check found nothing and we published a finding that was an artefact of our own pattern matching. IG discloses the number to these markets. We have removed the claim that it does not.

One methodological caution for anyone repeating this test. Fetching the bare domain ig.com is not a reliable way to establish what a country is served: from Indonesia, two requests minutes apart returned the South African site and then the Japanese site, neither of which has anything to do with an Indonesian visitor. The stable, reproducible result is ig.com/en, which every one of our four Asian vantages reached and which returned byte-identical pages from each. Conclusions about IG’s geo-routing should be drawn from the localised sites, not from the apex domain.

Education & Analysis

IG Academy represents a significant investment in trader education, offering structured learning paths from beginner fundamentals to advanced strategies. The integration of Reuters news feeds directly into trading platforms ensures real-time market awareness, while Autochartist pattern recognition provides automated technical analysis. These resources combine to create a comprehensive analytical ecosystem supporting informed trading decisions.

Customer Support

IG has no support telephone number for retail clients on either its UK contact page or its international one. Both publish web chat and WhatsApp and nothing else. [OWN, both fetched via Bright Data in July 2026] Its regional sites still publish numbers, which makes the position on the two largest sites a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Singapore is the outlier worth noticing: a 50-hour week against near-continuous cover elsewhere, from an entity, IG Asia Pte Ltd, holding a Monetary Authority of Singapore capital markets services licence. If you trade outside Asian hours from Singapore, you are trading outside your support hours.

The help centre is not the same size in both places

Both estates run on Intercom, and both are genuinely deep rather than decorative. They are not, however, the same resource.

The international help centre has no collection on investments, crypto, corporate events or the Invest app, because those products are not sold to those clients. The specifics we used throughout this review — withdrawal limits, deposit minimums, card rejection reasons — come from these help centres rather than from marketing pages, and the international articles carry revision dates of 3 June 2026. That is a point in IG’s favour on both sites.

Two blemishes on the UK estate, both still present when we re-checked through Bright Data in July 2026: the help centre footer shows a 68% retail loss figure while every other ig.com/uk page shows 69%, and the account-types article still quotes the ISA allowance for the 2022/2023 tax year. Neither will cost you money; both suggest the estate is larger than the team maintaining it.

When support is not the answer

This is the sharpest practical difference in the section. UK complaints escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service, free of charge, if IG has not resolved the matter within eight weeks or you are unhappy with its answer. On ig.com/en, complaints information is published, but no external ombudsman or dispute-resolution body is named, and the website terms place disputes under English law and the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the English courts. For a client in Jakarta or Hanoi, that is a materially harder route than the UK one, and it is not disclosed as a difference anywhere on the site.

IG’s head office is Cannon Bridge House, 25 Dowgate Hill, London EC4R 2YA on both sites. The UK contact page says IG has offices in a further 16 countries; the international contact page says 14.

Key Takeaways

1. Unmatched Regulation: 11+ top-tier licenses ensuring maximum client protection
2. Extensive Markets: 17,000+ tradable instruments across all asset classes
3. FTSE 250 Company: Publicly traded with 50+ years industry experience
4. Platform Choice: 6 platforms including proprietary, MT4, and TradingView
5. Superior Education: Comprehensive IG Academy with structured learning
6. Negative Balance Protection: Available for all retail clients
7. Competitive Spreads: Transparent pricing with no hidden fees
8. Global Presence: 18 offices providing localised support
9. Professional Options: Advanced tools like L2 Dealer for experienced traders
10. 24-Hour Support: Multilingual assistance throughout the trading week

Conclusion

IG is one of the few brokers in this catalogue where the safety question can be answered from audited documents rather than inference. It is the retail arm of a London-listed group, its three UK operating companies file separate accounts audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and we read them.

What the accounts show

All three state that regulatory capital requirements were met throughout both periods, and all three changed their financial year end from 31 May to 31 December, which is why the current figures cover seven months and are not comparable with the prior year. [OWN, audited accounts] IG Markets Limited held £177.9 million of segregated client funds off balance sheet at 31 December 2025.

The honest picture

Regulation is real and it is verified, not claimed: FCA firm reference numbers 195355, 114059 and 944492, all Authorised, all with permission to hold and control client money, all with Companies House numbers matching IG’s own footer. Retail money is segregated under CASS across several banks, and the FSCS covers shortfalls to £85,000. Outside the UK the protection changes with the entity — BaFin for IG Europe GmbH, FINMA for IG Bank SA, ASIC for IG Australia Pty Ltd, MAS for IG Asia Pte Ltd, the Bermuda Monetary Authority for IG International Limited — and only the first two sit inside a European-style compensation regime.

Set against that, four things a prospective client should weigh. IG Markets Limited is the counterparty to your trades, internalising client flow and hedging only the residual — its own audited language. The retail loss disclosure is 69% in the UK, 72% across the EU, 71% in South Africa and 75% in Switzerland, and it disappears entirely on the pages served to the UAE, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Taking the professional upgrade for lower margin means surrendering negative balance protection and accepting liability for shortfalls. And IG’s own instrument count varies between 15,000, 16,000, 17,000, 19,000 and 21,000 depending which of its pages you read — not a safety issue, but not the precision the rest of its disclosure achieves.

Corrections in this revision

• MetaTrader 5 is offered. We previously called its absence a weakness. It has a full product page and sits in the platform menu.
• There is no inactivity fee. IG’s charges page lists account opening, closing, maintenance and inactivity as free on investing, spread betting and CFD accounts. Our earlier criticism was out of date.
• Credit card deposits are free. The 1% and 0.5% card fees we published no longer appear anywhere on IG’s charges page.
• The prohibited-countries list has been removed. IG publishes no such list and we could not source the one we had carried.

IG suits someone who wants a large, publicly accountable counterparty with published costs and a documented complaints route to the Financial Ombudsman Service, and who is willing to read which of the four UK entities their account sits with. It suits less well anyone chasing high leverage — retail margin is capped at 3.33% on major forex and unlocking more means giving up the protection that stops a bad day becoming a debt — or anyone who wants a telephone number in the UK, because IG no longer publishes one.

FAQ