IC Markets vs ThinkMarkets — 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

• ThinkZero all-in EUR/USD cost of about 0.8 pips - raw spreads from 0.0 pips plus USD 3.50 per lot per side on forex and metals
• Three top-tier licences - FCA 629628, ASIC AFSL 424700 and JFSA registration 0250 - alongside CySEC 215/13 and FSCA FSP 49835
• Roughly 3,260 instruments on ThinkMarkets' own contract table, including 2,796 share CFDs and 324 ETF CFDs, which is unusually broad for a CFD-only broker
• ThinkTrader mobile is a full trading client with proper charting, drawing tools and server-side alerts, and is consistently rated among the best mobile apps in the category
• No minimum deposit on the Standard account and no broker fee on deposits or withdrawals on the published methods
• Seven base currencies including CHF, AUD, SGD and NZD, which removes a conversion layer for clients outside the euro and dollar
• Copy trading through both the in-house ThinkCopy layer and the ZuluTrade network, plus MT4, MT5 and TradingView on the same account

Cons

• 75 percent of ThinkMarkets UK retail accounts lose money trading CFDs, and disclosures across the group's entities have ranged from roughly 68 percent to 89 percent
• Withdrawals are the recurring complaint in public reviews: repeated document requests on already-verified accounts, multi-week delays, and disputed payments marked as successful. A USD 100 minimum withdrawal adds friction on top
• Dormancy is charged on the UK entity: GBP 10 per month from day 181 without a trade, for as long as the balance is positive. The CySEC, ASIC and offshore entities publish no comparable figure we could verify
• No published currency conversion rate, so the true cost of trading a US share CFD from a EUR or GBP account cannot be modelled before you trade
• The FG Acquisition Corp SPAC merger that would have listed the group in Toronto never completed, so there are no public accounts and no listed-company disclosure
• No listed options, no exchange-traded futures, no bonds, no funds and no share ownership - the entire book is contracts for difference