CMC Markets vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• Next Generation is one of the strongest charting suites bundled with a retail CFD account —115+ indicators, 70 chart patterns, 12 chart types and pattern-recognition scanners, at no extra cost
• 0% commission on UK and European share CFDs (Greece the sole exception at 0.45%), against IG's spread-plus-conversion model
• EUR/USD averages around 0.7 pips on the standard account, and FX Active delivers from 0.0 pips for USD/GBP 2.50 per side per 100,000 notional
• No minimum deposit at all — CMC only suggests around GBP 100 to cover margin, which makes it genuinely testable with small money
• Three FCA licences (173730, 170627, 948126) plus ASIC AFSL 238054, BaFin and MAS, with FSCS cover of GBP 85,000 and client money segregated at NatWest, Barclays and Lloyds under annual PwC audit
• Cash-settled OTC options, available as a spread bet or through the CFD account, carry no commission and no holding or financing charge — the whole cost is in the spread
• 12,029 instruments on Next Generation, all of which are also tradable from TradingView charts
• Ten account base currencies including NOK, SEK, PLN and SGD, which removes conversion drag for Nordic and Asian clients

Cons

• None of CMC's derivatives is exchange-traded: the options it quotes are OTC and cash-settled, and there are no cleared futures at all, so CMC is the counterparty on every derivative contract and no clearing house stands behind it
• The 0.7% FX conversion charge on realised profit, loss and costs is high; IG applies 0.8% on the equivalent CFD trades
• Inactivity fee of GBP 10 per month starts after just 12 months without trading activity
• ASIC required CMC to remediate Australian retail clients in 2023 over CFDs offered above the product intervention leverage limits, and an Australian class action over 2011–2021 marketing remains outstanding
• MT4 carries only about 220 instruments against 12,029 on Next Generation, so algo traders who need MT4 lose most of the product range
• CMC does not publish a fixed index spread table, which makes cost comparison against brokers that do quote fixed minimums harder than it should be

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