IG review: wide regulation, a spread that is not the cheapest

We opened a live IG account with a UK bank transfer, no minimum deposit required, and ran EUR/USD and GBP/USD positions alongside a small FTSE 100 CFD position for four weeks. IG has been around since 1974, and it shows in how the account onboarding, the risk disclosures and the customer support all feel built for scale rather than for a single product.

01The regulation is the actual pitch

Most forex marketing talks about spreads first. IG talks about licences first, and on our statements that mattered more than we expected. IG Group holds regulatory approval from the FCA in the UK, ASIC in Australia, MAS in Singapore, FINMA in Switzerland, BaFin in Germany, the FSCA in South Africa and the CFTC/NFA in the United States. That is eleven licences across the group, eight of them from what the industry calls tier one regulators. When we asked support a compliance question about client money segregation, the answer came with a specific regulatory citation rather than a marketing line. That eleven-licence footprint is also why IG can legally onboard a client in the United States through the CFTC/NFA arm, something several of the raw spread brokers we test cannot do at all.

02What EUR/USD actually cost us

IG's own published product data lists a minimum EUR/USD spread of 0.6 pips, with an average of 0.86 pips during the busiest London and New York hours and 1.13 pips across the full day. GBP/USD is wider: a 0.9 pip minimum and an average that climbs to 2.38 pips outside peak hours. Our own fills matched that pattern closely. A morning EUR/USD trade during the London open cost us close to IG's stated average; an evening GBP/USD trade, placed deliberately outside the busy window, cost noticeably more. There is no separate commission on IG's standard forex account: the spread is the whole cost, apart from a tom-next overnight funding rate plus a small admin fee if you hold a position past the daily rollover.

ig.com

One charge caught us out on paper before it caught us in practice: a 1.0% currency conversion fee applies whenever a CFD trade settles in a currency different from the account's own base currency. Traders who open a GBP account and trade USD-quoted instruments should expect that fee to show up, and it is not obvious from the front page.

03A platform for every kind of trader, which is also a small tax on simplicity

IG gives a choice of its own web and mobile platform, MetaTrader 4, ProRealTime and TradingView, all connected to the same account. We tested two of them: IG's own interface for day to day order entry, and TradingView for chart analysis. Switching between them worked without re-entering credentials, and open positions synced correctly both times we checked. The tradeoff is that a broker offering four platforms cannot make any one of them the single obvious default, so a first time user has to actually pick one before getting started, rather than being handed one interface and told to learn it.

ig.com

ig.com

04Where the cost catches up with the range

IG lists more than 17,000 markets, spanning forex, indices, shares, commodities and bonds. For a trader who wants one account and one login for all of that, the range is real and we found the market search fast and accurate. But a trader whose only interest is forex, and who is optimising purely for cost per lot, is paying for that breadth whether they use it or not. A raw spread broker charging 0.0 pips plus a fixed per lot commission will usually beat IG's blended spread once volume climbs, even if the headline commission number looks worse on its own.

05Our verdict

IG is not the broker we would recommend to someone whose only question is "what is the cheapest way to trade EUR/USD." It is the broker we would recommend to someone who wants forex, shares and CFDs on one regulated account and is willing to pay an average spread instead of hunting for the tightest one. The eight tier one licences are the reason to trust IG with a deposit; the 1.0% conversion fee and the average, not minimum, spread are the reason to read the cost page before assuming IG is the cheap option.

A scalper running dozens of small EUR/USD trades a day should count the spread cost before opening an account here, because that average of close to a pip adds up quickly at volume. A trader opening a handful of positions a week across several asset classes, who wants the regulatory paper trail more than the tightest possible fill, is the person IG was actually built for.

This review describes what we saw on our own accounts. It is not personal financial advice.