ActivTrades vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• FCA licence 434413 held since 2005, plus a CMVM-regulated EU entity, an SCB entity and a Brazilian brokerage - one of the longest continuous track records in retail CFDs
• Excess-of-loss cover at Lloyd's of London pays up to USD 1,000,000 per claimant on an insolvency - and it covers the offshore entities, which is where clients have no compensation scheme at all; UK clients have FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 instead
• No minimum deposit at all on the standard account, and no deposit or withdrawal fee on any published method
• Four platforms on one account - ActivTrader, MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5 and TradingView - with the SmartOrder, SmartLines and SmartPattern add-ons bundled into MetaTrader
• Four base currencies including CHF, which is rare and removes a conversion round trip for Swiss clients
• Support runs 24/5 in roughly fourteen languages with a published average email response time of about 27 minutes
• UK clients can trade the same book as spread bets, which changes the tax treatment of gains in the UK

Cons

• 82 percent of ActivTrades retail accounts lose money on CFDs - the highest disclosed rate among the fourteen FCA-regulated CFD brokers surveyed by The Investors Centre in 2026, against a 69.9 percent mean
• Spread-only pricing is not cheap for active traders: ForexBrokers.com measured a 1.08 pip EUR/USD monthly average on the standard account, versus roughly 0.8 pips all-in at raw-spread competitors
• A 0.5 percent currency conversion fee applies whenever an instrument settles outside your base currency, which quietly taxes every US share CFD held in a EUR or GBP account
• Education is limited and poorly structured - archived webinars and roughly seventy articles folded into the research section rather than a course path
• Everything is a CFD. No listed options, no exchange-traded futures, no mutual funds, no fractional shares and no share ownership of any kind
• The Luxembourg entity was fined EUR 14,000 by the CSSF in December 2024 for AML and counter-terrorist-financing failings, including training written for UK rules and applied unchanged in Luxembourg

Pros

• Around 17,000 tradable markets in a single account — shares, indices, FX, commodities, bonds, ETFs, turbo warrants and crypto CFDs, subject to regional restrictions
• Six top-tier licences — FCA (FRN 195355), BaFin, FINMA, ASIC (AFSL 515106), MAS and JFSA — plus a mid-tier DFSA licence in Dubai; the FINMA licence among those six is a full Swiss banking licence at IG Bank S.A., which puts Swiss cash under esisuisse protection
• Zero commission on UK and international shares, and the GBP 24 quarterly custody fee was scrapped outright in January 2026 rather than merely waived for active traders
• Platform stack that scales with the trader: web and mobile for most, ProRealTime for charting and backtesting, L2 Dealer for full order-book DMA, plus MT4, TradingView and documented REST/streaming APIs
• US-listed options from USD 1.00 per contract to open with nothing to close, and futures at USD 1.00 per contract per side (USD 0.75 on micros) — rare for a European retail broker
• No inactivity fee at all, where most rivals start charging after three to twelve dormant months, and no minimum deposit on any account
• Weekend dealing on the FTSE 100 and Wall Street, plus published client-sentiment data showing how IG's own book is positioned

Cons

• The 0.8% currency conversion mark-up on foreign-currency CFD and spread bet trades is where much of the real cost hides — on a USD position round-trip it comfortably exceeds the spread
• EUR/USD at roughly 0.9 pips is mid-table; raw-spread brokers quote 0.1–0.3 pips plus a small commission and work out cheaper for anyone trading FX frequently
• The 0.49% share dealing conversion rate is a discretionary discount rather than a contractual one — IG has committed to it only until 4 September 2026 and can raise it afterwards
• No fractional shares on IG's own platform, which creates real cash drag when drip-feeding small sums into high-priced US stocks
• Pricing genuinely differs by entity and account type — UK GBP share dealing, multi-currency share dealing, IG Europe and IG Bank all run separate schedules, and the published tables are hard to reconcile
• Crypto CFDs are unavailable to UK retail clients under the FCA ban, so the headline market count overstates what a UK resident can actually trade