IC Markets

IC Markets competes on price and the numbers hold up.

Raw Spread is the headline account. EUR/USD raw spreads average about 0.1 pips and frequently print at 0.0; commission is USD 3.50 per standard lot per side on MT4 and MT5, so USD 7 round turn - worth roughly 0.7 pips on a one-lot trade. All-in that is about 0.8 pips on IC's own figures, and ForexBrokers.com measured 0.62 pips all-in during 2026 testing. In a EUR account the commission is EUR 3.25 per lot per side, in GBP it is GBP 2.75. On cTrader Raw the charge is USD 3.00 per 100,000 traded, which is cheaper again on standard-size positions.

Standard removes the commission and charges roughly a 0.8 pip mark-up on majors instead. Measured averages sit near 0.86 pips on EUR/USD. It is not a bad account, but Raw Spread beats it for anyone trading more than a token volume.

Above that sit Raw Pro at USD 1.50 per lot from a USD 5,000 balance and Raw Pro+ at USD 1.00 per lot from USD 100,000. That is a real ladder: a client trading 100 lots a month moves from USD 700 to USD 300 in monthly commission simply by funding the account differently.

Stock CFDs at the EU entity trade only on MT5, where one lot is one share. US listings on .NAS and .NYSE cost USD 0.02 per share per side; European listings on .ETR, .AMS, .PAR, .MAD and .LSE cost 0.10% per side. IC's own EU pages do not agree on this: the trading-costs page still describes share commission as starting from 0.1% per share, per trade. At Raw Trading Ltd, ASX share CFDs carry a minimum commission of AUD 7 per trade. Indices, commodities, bonds and futures CFDs are spread-only.

Non-trading costs are close to zero for an account that trades: no account fee, free deposits and free withdrawals across roughly nineteen methods. Two exceptions depend on the entity. Raw Trading Ltd (ic.com) charges no inactivity fee, but IC Markets (EU) Ltd reserves the right to charge 10 in the account currency (EUR, USD or GBP) per account per month once an account has gone six consecutive months without a trade. Logins, deposits, withdrawals and transfers do not count as activity; the fee is not charged while positions are open, never creates a negative balance, is preceded by a reminder at month five and stops once you trade again. The EU Cost & Charges Policy states the same fee but counts deposits and withdrawals as activity, which contradicts the EU terms and the Inactivity Fees Policy. At Raw Trading Ltd, clients who access ASX share CFD market data in a month pay a fixed AUD 22 market-data fee for that month, charged once however many accounts they hold or how often they access it. IC Markets charges no withdrawal fee of its own on any method; on an international bank wire the intermediary and beneficiary banks can still deduct their own charges, which is a third-party cost rather than a broker one. Where an entity differs, the figures above are the IC Markets (EU) Ltd and Raw Trading Ltd schedules.

What you do pay is swap. Overnight positions are charged per instrument and direction, tripled on Wednesdays for FX and metals and on Fridays for most other symbols - the cost of carrying a position, and the reason this pricing suits day traders more than swing traders.

This is the part of the IC Markets story that deserves the most attention, because the brand is one thing and the counterparty is another.

Six licences sit under the group, and they are not equivalent:

• International Capital Markets Pty Ltd - ASIC, AFSL 335692. This is the tier-1 entity and it serves Australian clients. Australia has no statutory compensation scheme for broker failure.
• IC Markets (EU) Ltd - CySEC 362/18, Cyprus registration HE 356877. EU clients contract here and are covered by the Investor Compensation Fund at 90 percent of a covered claim up to EUR 20,000. The EU entity discloses that 72.52 percent of its retail accounts lose money.
• Raw Trading Ltd - Financial Services Authority of Seychelles, licence SD018, trading as IC and IC Markets Global. This is where most of the rest of the world is onboarded.
• IC Markets Ltd - Securities Commission of The Bahamas, SIA-F214.
• IC Markets Kenya - Capital Markets Authority of Kenya.
• International Capital Markets (Pty) Ltd - FSCA, FSP 50715. South African authorisation; no investor compensation scheme attaches to it.

The practical consequence: if you are not in the EU or Australia, your money sits with a Seychelles company supervised by a regulator with no compensation fund, no equivalent conduct-enforcement record and no leverage cap worth the name. That entity advertises up to 1:5000 on MetaTrader accounts. Client funds are held in segregated accounts and negative balance protection is applied, which are meaningful safeguards - but they are firm policy in that jurisdiction rather than a statutory guarantee.

IC Markets is privately held and has traded since 2007, but the EU entity carries an enforcement record. On 1 July 2024 CySEC fined IC Markets (EU) Ltd EUR 200,000 for circumventing the EU 1:30 retail leverage cap by routing clients to a third-country company in the same group offering leverage up to 1:1000 — treating the long duration and a comparable breach already in 2021 as aggravating — plus a further EUR 50,000 covering best execution, order-execution compliance procedures, and cost and charges transparency. That is not a clean record. It is also not a substitute for a tier-1 licence, and no broker structure of any kind makes a leveraged account safe.

Note also that the group has been consolidating its branding under IC and the ic.com domain; icmarkets.com now redirects there. Check the legal entity named in your own client agreement rather than relying on the brand on the website.

IC Markets made a deliberate choice: rather than build its own terminal, it optimises the ones traders already use and competes on infrastructure.

cTrader is the strongest offering. Full Level II depth of market, cAlgo automation in C#, sophisticated partial-fill and order-modification handling, and cTrader Copy built in for social trading. Servers are hosted in London. If you want to see genuine market depth on a retail account, this is where to go, and the USD 3.00 per 100k commission makes it the cheapest venue too.

MetaTrader 4 and 5 run on New York-hosted servers and are the reason a large share of IC's book is algorithmic. Expert advisors run without the throttling some brokers apply, free VPS is available above a volume threshold, and execution has been consistently fast in third-party latency testing. MT5 carries the wider instrument list of the two.

TradingView integration lets you trade the cTrader Raw schedule from TradingView charts. FIX API access is open to qualifying volume clients, which is a meaningful advantage over rivals that gate it behind nine-figure monthly turnover.

The gap is mobile and proprietary software. The IC Markets app handles account management and monitoring rather than functioning as a full trading terminal, and ForexBrokers.com explicitly flags the absence of a proprietary forex trading app. In practice you trade in the MetaTrader or cTrader mobile apps, which are capable but generic - you will not get the polished, opinionated mobile experience that a broker like OANDA offers.

More than 2,250 CFD instruments, and the mix is broader than most pure FX brokers.

• Forex - 61 currency pairs, priced off up to 25 aggregated institutional liquidity sources. This is the core.
• Stock CFDs - 2,100 plus names from the ASX, NASDAQ and NYSE, with some sources counting 2,500 large caps. The largest equity CFD shelf in this comparison set.
• Indices - 25 global benchmarks.
• Commodities - over 20 energy, metals and soft contracts.
• Cryptocurrency CFDs - 94 pairs, the deepest crypto CFD list of the three brokers here, though restricted for EU and UK retail.
• Bond CFDs - 9 contracts, useful for rate expression without a futures account.
• Futures CFDs - 5 index and commodity futures wrapped as CFDs.

Two things are absent and both matter. There are no ETFs in any form, which is a real hole for anyone who thinks in terms of index exposure rather than single names. And there is no share ownership: a position in Tesla here is a contract with IC Markets, not stock held in your name. You get price exposure and a dividend adjustment; you do not get the security, the vote or a transferable holding.

Copy and social trading are well served through cTrader Copy plus third-party integrations, which is one area where IC Markets is stronger than the platform-only summary suggests.

Opening is fast, and at Raw Trading Ltd the entry ticket is as low as it gets. The application is fully digital - identity document, proof of address, a trading-experience questionnaire and a source-of-funds declaration - and approval usually lands within one business day.

The minimum deposit depends on the entity. At Raw Trading Ltd (ic.com) there is none on the three retail accounts: Standard, Raw Spread on MetaTrader and Raw Spread on cTrader all open at zero, so you can fund with whatever you are prepared to risk while you test execution. There, only the volume tiers gate on capital - Raw Pro requires USD 5,000 and Raw Pro+ USD 100,000, and both buy a lower commission rather than access to the platform. IC Markets (EU) Ltd, where EU clients are booked, asks for at least EUR 200 or the equivalent in another currency.

Funding is otherwise excellent. Roughly nineteen methods are supported free of internal charges: bank transfer and SEPA, Visa and Mastercard, PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, Apple Pay, Google Pay, UnionPay and crypto wallets. Cards and e-wallets credit instantly or within 12 hours; bank transfers take one to three business days. Withdrawals go back to source, clearing same-day to one business day on e-wallets and crypto and two to five days by wire. IC Markets levies no withdrawal fee on any method; card and e-wallet payouts arrive in full, while an international wire can be trimmed by the correspondent and beneficiary banks along the way.

The base currencies depend on the entity as well. Raw Trading Ltd (ic.com) offers ten - AUD, USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, SGD, NZD, JPY, CHF and HKD. IC Markets (EU) Ltd, where EU clients are booked, offers accounts only in EUR, USD or GBP, so a CHF account is not available to them. An account in the currency you deposit in spares you a conversion on deposits and withdrawals, but not on positions: the EU Cost & Charges Policy says currency conversion may occur on an instrument denominated in a currency other than the account's base currency, at the prevailing market rate and possibly with a mark-up applied by IC Markets or its liquidity providers.

Research is the weakest link in an otherwise sharp product, and IC Markets does not really pretend otherwise. What exists is daily market commentary, technical analysis notes, an economic calendar, over a hundred articles, several dozen videos and the IC Your Trade podcast with an accompanying YouTube channel. ForexBrokers.com rates both research and education at 4 out of 5 while flagging limited proprietary research compared with competitors.

What is missing is a staffed analyst desk with a point of view. There are no in-house price targets, no proprietary sentiment data of any depth, no research portal that would change how you sized a trade. Traders who want that layer typically pair IC Markets execution with TradingView, Autochartist or a third-party research subscription - which, given how cheap the execution is, is a rational way to assemble a stack.

Education has the same shape: capable individual pieces, no curriculum. There is no graded learning path, no progress tracking and no assessment, so a beginner has no way to know what they have not yet covered. The unlimited demo account is the genuinely useful learning tool here, and it mirrors live pricing including commission, which many demos do not.

The honest summary: come to IC Markets for the fill, not for the education. If you need to be taught, learn elsewhere first.

Support is a genuine strength and one of the few areas where IC Markets outperforms its larger rivals. Cover is 24 hours a day, seven days a week - not the 24/5 that most CFD brokers offer - across live chat, email and phone, with dedicated regional hotlines for markets including Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Colombia and South Africa.

Response quality is consistently reported as fast. Trustpilot feedback across both the global and EU entities repeatedly cites issues resolved within minutes on live chat rather than escalated into a ticket queue, and the EU entity holds one of the stronger review profiles in the category with several thousand ratings.

Language coverage spans English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Arabic among others, and the non-English desks are staffed rather than machine-translated.

Two caveats worth setting expectations on. First, the depth of answer on technical questions - exact swap derivation on a given symbol, or how a specific stock CFD minimum commission is calculated - is variable, and complex queries often get routed to a written follow-up. Second, support cannot change what jurisdiction you are in: if you are onboarded to the Seychelles entity, no amount of responsive chat converts that into a tier-1 relationship. Judge the support on speed and courtesy, which are excellent, and judge the counterparty separately.