IC Markets vs IG — which broker is better?

Pros

• All-in EUR/USD cost of roughly 0.6 to 0.8 pips on Raw Spread - a 0.0 to 0.1 pip raw spread plus USD 3.50 per lot per side
• 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 - a real volume ladder rather than a marketing tier
• No withdrawal fee of IC Markets' own across roughly nineteen funding methods, and at Raw Trading Ltd (ic.com) no inactivity fee and no minimum deposit on the Standard, Raw Spread and cTrader Raw accounts; EU clients deposit at least EUR 200 and can be charged an inactivity fee after six months without a trade
• Four execution front-ends on one account: MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradingView, with New York and London server hosting and FIX API for qualifying volume
• Genuinely 24/7 multilingual support - live chat responses are consistently measured in minutes, not hours
• 2,250 plus instruments including 2,100 stock CFDs, 94 crypto CFDs, 25 indices, 9 bond CFDs and 5 futures CFDs
• Accounts in EUR, USD or GBP at the EU entity, so deposits and withdrawals in those currencies need no conversion; Raw Trading Ltd (ic.com) offers ten base currencies including CHF

Cons

• Most non-EU, non-Australian clients contract with Raw Trading Ltd under Seychelles licence SD018 - an offshore regulator with no investor compensation scheme behind it
• Leverage advertised up to 1:5000 through that entity is a genuine hazard, not a feature; at that ratio a 2 pip move against a full-size position wipes the account
• International bank wires can still arrive short: IC Markets deducts nothing, but intermediary and beneficiary banks take their own cut, which no fee table here can predict
• No proprietary trading platform or flagship mobile app - the experience is whatever MetaTrader and cTrader give you, and ForexBrokers.com marks IC Markets down for exactly this
• Research is thin: daily commentary and a podcast rather than a staffed analyst desk, and education has no structured progression
• No ETFs, no options, no funds and no share ownership - stock exposure is CFD-only, so no voting rights and no transferable holdings

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