FP Markets vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• Raw account at USD 3 per lot per side with EUR/USD measured at 0.1 pips and GBP/USD at 0.1 — competitive across the majors
• The widest platform lineup in its peer group: MT4, MT5, cTrader, TradingView, Iress Trader/ViewPoint, Iress Investor and WebTrader on one account
• Iress gives genuine direct market access with full depth on seven exchanges and published per-exchange commissions from 0.06% on the ASX
• No custody fee, and no account fee at all on MetaTrader or Iress Investor; the CySEC entity currently charges no dormant fee and the Australian terms list no inactivity fee
• Twelve base currencies including CHF, plus sub-accounts so you can hold USD, EUR and GBP ledgers separately and avoid conversion
• 24/7 multilingual support that aggregated user feedback consistently describes as quick, helpful and patient
• ASIC licence 286354 held since 2005 alongside CySEC 371/18 — a genuinely long operating record for a CFD broker
• Account opening takes 10–15 minutes and is usually approved the same day, from an AUD 100 minimum on MetaTrader

Cons

• No options of any kind — exchange-traded, OTC or CFD — so options traders need a second broker
• Investor compensation exists only for EEA clients under CySEC (EUR 20,000); ASIC, FSCA and Seychelles clients get none, and the international site is run by a Saint Lucia-registered company with no prudential supervision
• The Iress side carries costs MetaTrader clients never see: AUD 85 per month for Iress Trader/ViewPoint unless you trade enough, AUD 25 per month for ASX live data, and card deposit surcharges of 1.6%–3.18%
• Fixed income and commodities are token: two bond CFDs and twelve commodity CFDs, well behind competitors listing dozens
• Privately held with no public financials, no banking licence and no exchange listing, so the group's capital position cannot be independently verified
• Recurring public complaints through mid-2026 about withdrawal friction, profit disputes and opacity around account restrictions

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