Avanza vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• Start class: 0% courtage on Stockholmsbörsen and 100% of fund fees refunded for customers who have never had SEK 50,000 in total savings at Avanza, until SEK 50,000 or more than 500 free trades in 12 months
• Mini class from 0.25% with a SEK 1 minimum on Stockholmsbörsen and First North, and a USD 1 minimum on US shares
• Avanza Bank AB is a Swedish bank supervised by Finansinspektionen, and the parent Avanza Bank Holding AB is listed on Nasdaq Stockholm as AZA
• Two Swedish schemes: the deposit guarantee covers uninvested cash up to SEK 1,150,000 per customer and institution, the investor compensation scheme covers securities up to SEK 250,000
• SEK 0 annual, management and deposit fees on every account type in the price list, ISK, kapitalförsäkring and pensions included, and no minimum deposit
• Wide range for a domestic bank: shares in the Nordics, North America and nine further European markets online, desk orders on most other exchanges, funds without courtage, ETFs, options, futures, certificates, warrants and bonds
• Avanza calculates the ISK flat-rate income and reports it to Skatteverket, and the pre-filled K4 form costs SEK 0 since January 2026
• Free real-time prices for the Nordic markets, Nasdaq and NYSE, and US trading from 11:00 to 22:30 Swedish time

Cons

• The website and app address residents of Sweden; residents abroad cannot trade European shares online, and we found no route in from Germany, Austria or Switzerland
• Automatic currency exchange costs 0.25% in each direction, 0.5% on a round trip; the manual service at 0.125% per direction does not cover funds and, according to Avanza, cannot be added to an ISK and needs an approved securities credit on the aktie- och fondkonto
• One courtage class applies to all orders on all accounts: a SEK 10,000 order costs SEK 25 in Mini but SEK 39 in Small, SEK 69 in Medium and SEK 99 in Fast Pris
• We found no demo account and no source for fractional shares; crypto exposure is limited to exchange-traded certificates, and Avanza does not sell crypto assets directly
• Support in Swedish, by phone and by secure message in the logged-in area; we found no live chat and no email address, and general opening hours were not readable on the pages we could open

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
• Non-sterling share purchases now carry IG's standard 0.7% conversion charge — the discounted 0.49% rate IG had committed to only until 4 September 2026 no longer appears in its price list
• Fractional shares are advertised only for the General Investment Account, and IG's help article for the IG Invest app still says whole shares only — check where they apply before 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