IG vs CapTrader — which broker is better?

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

Pros

• BaFin-supervised German investment firm (institution number 10156708) with a Düsseldorf address, German contract law and a free German hotline until 20:00
• Eurex options and futures at EUR 2.00 per contract, Mini-DAX futures at EUR 1.00 and CME Micro E-minis at USD 1.25 — competitive with anything available to German retail traders
• Access to over 160 market destinations, more than 1.2 million instruments, one million-plus bonds and 37,000 funds from a single multi-currency account
• No account fee, no custody fee, no inactivity fee, and free real accounts on TWS, CapTrader Desktop, AgenaTrader Andromeda and the TraderFox Trading-Desk
• German shares on Tradegate, gettex, Chi-X and Turquoise DE from a EUR 2.00 minimum — noticeably cheaper than the EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum for small orders
• Trustpilot rating of 4.9 from more than 800 reviews, with support consistently named as the reason
• Interactive Brokers' execution stack underneath: SmartRouting, real-time margining, more than 60 order types and a mature API

Cons

• No Abgeltungsteuer is withheld. German investors gain a compounding advantage but must declare everything themselves via Anlage KAP, and a Freistellungsauftrag is not possible — for many people that alone rules CapTrader out
• Commissions are a visible markup on Interactive Brokers' own schedule: 0.10% with a EUR 4.00 Xetra minimum against IBKR's 0.05% and EUR 1.25, and USD 0.01 per share against IBKR's USD 0.0035
• Currency conversion costs 0.3 basis points with a EUR 3.75 minimum — one and a half times what IBKR charges direct, and the minimum bites on every small conversion
• Investor compensation for EEA clients is the Irish scheme's 90% of EUR 20,000, thin against the German EUR 100,000 deposit guarantee investors are used to
• EUR 2,000 minimum deposit and per-order minimums make small, regular ETF purchases uneconomic; there are no free savings plans
• No spot crypto — only Bitcoin futures and exchange-traded products — and real-time market data is a paid monthly subscription per exchange