IG vs LYNX — 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

• LYNX+ is a genuinely good browser platform, and having it alongside full Trader Workstation access means you can start simple and grow into the terminal
• No minimum deposit and no custody or account fee for individual and joint accounts
• Eurex options at EUR 2.00 per contract, Micro-DAX futures at EUR 0.99 and CME Micro E-minis at USD 2.50 — the derivatives schedule is competitive
• Börse LYNX is one of the strongest free German-language education and analysis libraries any broker publishes, with a substantial webinar programme
• German-language service desk on a free number Monday to Thursday until 20:00, rated 4.8 on Trustpilot from over 760 reviews
• Trading since 2006 through a Dutch AFM-authorised entity with a BaFin-supervised German branch, and access to 100-plus exchanges in over 30 countries
• Free outbound transfers if you leave, which is rarer in Germany than it should be

Cons

• The most expensive of the German Interactive Brokers introducing brokers on equities: 0.14% with a EUR 5.80 Xetra minimum and a USD 5.00 minimum on US shares, against CapTrader's EUR 4.00 and USD 2.00
• Currency conversion costs 0.005% with a EUR 5.00 minimum — two and a half times Interactive Brokers' own rate, and a permanent drag on any multi-currency portfolio
• No Abgeltungsteuer is withheld, so German investors must declare everything through Anlage KAP; and a German withholding-tax certificate costs EUR 30.00 per line on top
• Investor compensation is the Irish scheme's 90% of EUR 20,000 for EEA clients — thin next to the EUR 100,000 German deposit guarantee investors expect
• Business accounts pay a EUR 15.00 monthly minimum activity fee whenever commissions fall short of that amount
• The Stock Yield Enhancement Program hands LYNX a quarter of your securities-lending revenue, and there is no spot crypto despite the crypto-broker marketing