CMC Markets

CMC's cost structure is cleaner than most, and the headline numbers hold up — but the conversion charge is where money quietly leaves.

Share CFDs. UK and European share CFDs carry 0% commission, with Greece the single exception at 0.45%. US shares are USD 0.02 per share with a USD 10.00 minimum ticket, and Canada mirrors that at CAD 0.02 and CAD 10.00. The USD 10 minimum matters: trade 200 shares and you pay the USD 4 that the per-share rate implies rounded up to USD 10, so small US tickets are proportionally expensive. Sizing up to 500 shares or more is where the per-share rate starts to work for you.

Forex. On the standard CFD account everything sits in the spread — EUR/USD starts around 0.5 pips in optimal conditions and averages roughly 0.7 pips through liquid London hours. FX Active flips the model: spreads from 0.0 pips on six major pairs, a 25% spread discount on the rest, and a fixed USD/GBP 2.50 per side per 100,000 notional — that is USD 5 round-trip on a standard lot, which is competitive with dedicated ECN brokers and materially cheaper than the standard account for anyone trading size.

The charge people miss. CMC applies ±0.7% to the mid-price when converting realised profit, loss and charges into your account currency. On a foreign-currency position this is applied to the result rather than the notional, so it scales with how well or badly the trade went — and at 0.7% it sits just below the 0.8% IG charges on equivalent CFD trades. Choosing a base currency that matches what you trade is the fix, and CMC's ten base currencies make that easier than most.

Ongoing costs. Positions held overnight attract a daily holding cost that varies by instrument and direction. The inactivity fee is GBP 10 per month after 12 months with no trading activity — not charged if the account is empty, and it cannot push a balance negative. Deposits and withdrawals are free on CMC's side, and there is no minimum deposit at all.

CMC Markets plc has been trading since 1989, when Peter Cruddas founded it as Currency Management Corporation with GBP 10,000 of capital, and launched one of the first online FX trading platforms in 1996. It listed on the London Stock Exchange in February 2016 at 240p, joined the FTSE 250 that June and trades under CMCX. Public listing means audited accounts, published capital ratios and market scrutiny of the balance sheet — a materially different transparency position from a privately held offshore broker.

The UK structure runs across three FCA-authorised entities: CMC Markets UK plc (FRN 173730) for CFDs, CMC Spreadbet plc (FRN 170627) for UK and Irish spread betting, and CMC Markets Investments Limited (FRN 948126) for stockbroking. All three sit at 133 Houndsditch, London. Client money is held in segregated accounts at NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds, reconciled daily, with monthly Client Money Asset Returns filed to the regulator and an annual audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers. FSCS cover is GBP 85,000 per eligible claimant, covering both firm failure and the failure of a custodian bank. Retail clients have negative balance protection.

Internationally, CMC Markets Asia Pacific Pty Ltd holds ASIC AFSL 238054, with further entities licensed by BaFin in Germany and MAS in Singapore.

The blemish worth knowing: in November 2023 ASIC required CMC, along with six other issuers, to compensate Australian retail clients who had been offered CFDs with leverage exceeding the product intervention limits. An Australian class action concerning leveraged CFDs and binary options marketed between 2011 and 2021 is also outstanding. Neither is fraud, and both concern conduct rather than client money — but both belong in an honest assessment.

CMC's own disclosure states that 68% of retail investor accounts lose money spread betting or trading CFDs with the firm.

Next Generation is the reason to use CMC, and it is not a close call against the retail field.

The charting package ships with 115+ technical indicators, 70 recognised chart patterns and 12 chart types, plus pattern-recognition scanners that flag setups across the instrument universe rather than requiring you to hunt them manually. Drawing tools persist across devices. The workspace is genuinely modular — you build the layout you want rather than choosing from three presets — and the module-linking system lets a click on one watchlist row drive every chart, order ticket and news panel on screen. That single feature saves more time in a trading day than most platform features combined.

Order handling is deep: market, limit, stop, trailing stop, guaranteed stop, boundary orders and price ladders, plus a client sentiment feed showing the long/short split across CMC's own book. Alerts can be set on price, indicator crossovers and pattern completion.

The platform is available as a browser build, a downloadable Windows and macOS desktop app for better multi-monitor handling, and a mobile app that carries an unusually complete subset of the desktop features — chart drawing, full order types and alerts all survive the transition.

MetaTrader 4 is offered but is a compatibility layer, not an alternative: around 220 instruments against 12,029 on Next Generation. If your strategy requires MT4 Expert Advisors you lose 98% of the product range, which is a real trade-off rather than a footnote.

TradingView integration is the genuinely useful third option. You trade CMC prices from TradingView charts against your Next Generation account, and because the full instrument universe is exposed, this is a real workflow rather than a marketing tie-up.

CMC quotes 12,029 products on Next Generation, which is a real number rather than a padded one — the count reflects individual instruments, not permutations.

• Shares — thousands of UK, European, US, Australian and Asian listings as CFDs. UK and EU listings carry 0% commission; US listings are USD 0.02 per share with a USD 10 minimum.
• Indices — all major global benchmarks, quoted with variable spreads that widen outside cash-market hours.
• Forex — the deepest part of the offering. Majors, minors and exotics, with FX Active available for volume traders.
• Commodities — energies, metals and agricultural softs, spot-style and forward-dated.
• Bonds and rates — government bond CFDs including Bund, Gilt and Treasury markets, an asset class most retail brokers skip.
• ETFs — CFDs across the major listed ETF universe.
• Options — OTC options with a strike and an expiry, traded as a spread bet or through the CFD account and always cash-settled. No commission, no holding cost, no financing charge; the cost is the spread.
• Cryptocurrency CFDs — available in several jurisdictions, but not to UK retail clients under the FCA's ban on crypto derivatives.
• Spread betting — for UK and Irish residents through CMC Spreadbet plc, with the associated CGT and stamp duty treatment.

The gap is structural and worth stating plainly: none of CMC's derivatives is exchange-traded or cleared. Options do exist — CMC quotes them with a strike and an expiry, as a spread bet or inside the CFD account, cash-settled and free of commission, holding cost and financing charge, which is a genuinely cheap way to hold a directional option position. But they are OTC contracts written by CMC, not contracts on a listed chain, so there is no clearing house, no open interest to read, no assignment of an underlying and no exercise into stock. Futures are the same story one step further: CMC quotes forward-dated CFDs on indices, commodities and bonds that behave somewhat like futures for directional exposure, but there is no CME clearing behind them. For a directional trader none of this matters. For anyone who needs a listed chain, cleared margin or physical settlement, CMC is not the right venue, and the headline instrument count should not obscure that.

CMC's separate stockbroking arm — CMC Invest, run through CMC Markets Investments Limited in the UK and equivalent entities in Australia and Singapore — does offer genuine share ownership, but it is a distinct product with its own pricing and is not what the 12,029 figure refers to.

The application is fully online and typically approved the same day. You supply identity and address details, complete an appropriateness assessment covering trading experience and understanding of leverage, and are verified electronically. Where the electronic check does not clear you upload identification documents, which adds a day or so.

The most consumer-friendly line in CMC's whole proposition is the absence of a minimum deposit. There is no formal threshold at all — CMC simply suggests funding with around GBP 100 so that you have enough to cover margin on a first position. Against Plus500's USD 100 this makes CMC the easier of the two to trial with genuinely small money, though IG sets no minimum either and takes card payments from GBP 1, and it removes the psychological pressure to deposit more than you intended just to open an account.

Funding methods are the narrowest part of the offer. CMC accepts debit and credit cards (Visa and Mastercard only), online banking and standard bank transfers. There is no PayPal, no Skrill or Neteller, no Apple Pay or Google Pay. If you expect to fund an account from an e-wallet, this will frustrate you. Card deposits credit instantly; bank transfers take up to two business days. CMC charges nothing for deposits or withdrawals on its own side.

Where CMC is unusually strong is base currency choice: GBP, EUR, USD, AUD, CAD, NOK, NZD, PLN, SEK and SGD. Ten currencies is more than IG or Plus500 offer, and given the 0.7% conversion charge on realised results, matching your account currency to the markets you trade is the single most effective cost saving available. A Swedish client trading Nordic shares in SEK avoids the conversion entirely.

Withdrawals return to the original funding source and settle in one to three business days.

CMC's research is embedded in the platform rather than bolted on as a content marketing exercise, which makes it more usable in practice than it looks in a feature list.

Research. Next Generation carries Reuters news at instrument level, an economic calendar, Morningstar equity research on individual shares, and CMC's own client sentiment data showing how the firm's book is positioned. The pattern-recognition scanners deserve separate mention: rather than making you scan manually, the platform flags completed and forming chart patterns across the instrument universe and lets you filter by reliability score. Combined with the module-linking system, that turns idea generation into something you can actually run through in a few minutes rather than an hour.

Education. CMC runs a structured learning programme covering platform mechanics, order types, risk management, technical analysis and the specifics of spread betting versus CFDs. There is a regular webinar schedule with archived sessions, plus market analysis videos. The demo account carries virtual funds, runs on the full Next Generation platform rather than a simplified version, and has no expiry pressure — you can genuinely learn the platform before funding.

Where CMC trails IG is breadth and structure. IG Academy is a graded curriculum with progress tracking and assessments; CMC's material is closer to a well-organised library. For a trader who already knows the fundamentals and wants to master a specific platform, CMC's approach is arguably more efficient. For a genuine beginner who needs a path rather than a catalogue, IG's structure is better.

The MT4 offering also weakens the education story for algo traders — CMC provides MT4 access but comparatively little material on building or validating Expert Advisors, and the 220-instrument limit means most of what you learn there does not transfer to the main platform.

CMC provides telephone, email and live chat support running 24 hours a day from the Sunday market open to the Friday close, with regional teams in London, Sydney and Singapore covering their own time zones and languages.

Coverage spans English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian and Chinese, reflecting CMC's licensed presence in the UK, Germany, Singapore and Australia rather than a single outsourced hub. Nordic language support in particular is stronger than most competitors offer, which pairs sensibly with the NOK and SEK base currency options.

In practice, phone response during London and Sydney hours is quick and the staff answering are generally able to resolve platform and pricing questions without escalation — a meaningful difference from brokers whose first line can only read from a script. Live chat is efficient for routine account queries. Slower responses cluster around withdrawal processing questions and anything involving the stockbroking entity rather than the CFD business, where handoffs between teams introduce delay.

Public sentiment is the strongest of the three brokers covered here: CMC Markets carries a Trustpilot average around 4.3 from roughly 3,000 reviews, ahead of Plus500 at 4.2 and IG at 3.8. The volume is lower than Plus500's near-20,000 reviews, so the sample is thinner, and it is worth noting that CMC's Australian domain carries a much weaker separate rating — a reminder that support quality is not uniform across entities.

The substantive gap is availability at weekends. CMC does not quote weekend markets the way IG does, and support coverage reflects that: if something goes wrong with an open position on a Saturday, you are waiting until Sunday evening.