Pros of IG Index

Good Points

Widest Markets Coverage: IG Index makes prices in a huge range of indices, currencies, commodities and options, as well as thousands of individual shares and other exotic bet-types - in fact IG quote some 10,000 different markets including ETFs, bonds and grey markets in new listings to the stock market when these happen. Only spread bet company that handles emerging markets (and not many others even handle iShare futures). Extensive pairs range.
Access to Small Caps/AIM/Sectors: IG also offer lots of small caps and shares quoted on AIM (quote prices on nearly all UK stocks with a market capitalisation of over £10 million). Like CMC, IG Index also offer sector bets on UK shares which are useful to avoid the annoying predicament of believing in a group as a whole, yet trading just one stock that happens to underperform against its peers. These can be found on the dealing platform at Indices -> UK Sectors.
Reasonable Spreads: Low spreads (0.1%) on major shares (platform -> market list -> UK Major shares and US Major shares).
Competitive Margins: IG have lowered their deposit requirements on more than 3750 global shares. Deposit rates now start at 5% with some 650 shares at this lowest rate. Thus, a spread bettor wishing to go long on Unilever Plc at 1,612p for £10 per point would pay an initial margin of 5% of 1612 x £10 = £806. IG Index has also started using an 'orders-aware' margining system whereby the margin requirement is reduced if you tie your spreadbet to a stop loss level.
Futures: They do lots of far months, e.g. now you can trade March, June, September (some spread betting companies don't offer the September far month).
No Minimum Deposit: As I stated above you do not need to deposit funds into your IG Index account to use the full features of the platform! You can just open a limited risk account, which isn't too much hassle, and check the platform for yourself. If you want to trade, call them up and have them upgrade your account to a standard account, register your card details, make a deposit, and trade.
Interest: All IG Index client accounts are now segregated and IG even pays interest rates on Premium accounts: 0.2% on accounts with balances of £100,000+ and 0.25% on segregated accounts with balances of £250,000+. The balance on which interest will be paid is calculated as: Cash ledger balance + unrealised profits - unrealised losses by currency.
Sophisticated Platform: Sophisticated online, mobile and PDA platform. IG's dealing screen is simple, very clear and easy to use/navigate. Trading interface is nice with key technical support information on many stocks. Overall, a great platform when it works the way it should... Platform works better on faster computers. Have recently introduced trailing stops which is a handy feature allowing you to lock in profits.
Execution: Fills are usually quick compared to some other providers - I like this because it is just scary waiting to see if the ticket is going to come back, wondering if you have been filled or not...etc. For this reason i can't use a platform that constantly leaves orders 'hanging'.
After-Hours Trading: IG are open 24 hours a day from when the markets in the Far East start trading (Sunday evenings London time) through to when the New York Stock Exchange shuts (Friday 9pm London time).
Guaranteed Stops Availability: Guaranteed stop losses are available at IGIndex on most markets (except binary bets and options). Minimum and maximum levels where a guaranteed stop loss can be placed depends on the market you are trading on, there is no set rule, the levels will be stated on a deal ticket when you selecting your stop level. No cost is incurred for moving a guaranteed stop, but you will pay a premium for the initial use of a guaranteed stop - this is factored in to the spread of the market. So, for instance, if you were short selling Rank Group and the sell price was 55.86 when you select a deal ticket to open the trade, and then select guaranteed stop, you will see that the extra spread incurred on the use of a guaranteed stop in this particular market is 0.169. So, in this example, as you are selling to open you would subtract the 0.169 from 55.86 to get your actual opening level of 55.691.
Solid Commitment to improving their Platform: Many trading tools are included freely as part of the service. IG always seem to be improving things and offer plenty of widgets to help you trade - for instance text alerts allowing you to set a trigger when a share price hits a certain level so that you receive an SMS (or e-mail) as soon as your chosen level is hit (which comes in handy when you are away from your screen but still want to take advantage of opportunities as they arise) and DealThru charts allowing you to place trades directly by clicking on a chart and change orders such as stops and limits simply by dragging and dropping them without having to go back to the trading platform. i.e. place orders direct from the relevant price chart. I also note that IG Index show a 'flag' on the dealing screen (on IG it is a paperclip beside the quick chart symbol) for any relevant news regarding any companies/indices etc. on which I have an active spread bet which is also quite useful. Also, for instance when I'm using IG Advanced Charts I can set alarms on RSI, MACD and lines. When one gets triggered I get a "ping" to let me know it has/is triggering. Disadvantage is I only get 20 alarms but then you could always use third party software like ShareScope to screen charts for potential up and coming trades and update IG accordingly. They also introduced one-click dealing and more recently Bungee bets which are trades with a fixed stop loss.
IG Index accept rolling cash bets without expiry dates (not all companies support this), allowing you to refresh a position (without incurring a new spread) for a small daily charge. Effectively a rollover charge is a concession as it is cheaper for the client to use a roll over rather than close out a position and then re-open it the next day. An example for you of a rollover concession on a bet on the FTSE with a guaranteed stop is: close at official closing price and re-open with 1 extra point spread.
Price Improvement: IG Index have launched a new platform dubbed PureDeal which is no longer Java-based, making it easier for people to access. The PureDeal trading platform is browser-based so you do not need to download any software and do not have to worry about conflicts with firewalls. Clients using the new platform can choose whether they view price in the 'Pairs' format - how real traders view prices - or in the current way they are presented in the firm's existing platform. Tim Hughes head of sales trading at the company says that the PureDeal platform includes a price improvement technology. 'One of the checks that every trade goes through compares the selected trade with the current market level at the time that we receive the order. If it is outside a certain range, such as in a fast-moving market, for instance, the trade is automatically rejected. PureDeal will, when the market movement favours the client, accept the trade at the improved price rather than rejecting it. No other spread betting firm does this,' he says. Let's take an example: Consider the scenario where rumours are circulating in the market that an imminent Bank of England announcement will see sterling weaken against the US dollar, so you open a deal ticket and see the current price at 1.5160-1.5161. You place a sell order at 1.5160 but as your transaction is being processed the price jumps to 1.5166-1.5167, or a six-pip rise in your selling price. Rather than requoting the order at the new price, as the move is in your favour the deal is struck and your deal ticket will reflect the savings made. A comment on IG's price improvement - I suppose it is better than being filled at the original price but this is a big claim we will have to see in the coming months whether IG Index lives to its promises. An analogy would be when you get foreign currency to go abroad and they shout 'we buy your unused currency back off you for ZERO commission'...yeah right, you don't charge me any commission but your buy back exchange rate is enough to make me projectile vomit over your cubicle...
Excellent Charting: IG Index's clients stand to benefit from the functionality and features of a professional charting package, supplied as standard, and enjoy unprecedented facilities for analysing historic price data. IG currently have three chart levels - basic quick charts (for those who just want to view the recent price activity and do some basic analysis), advanced charts and (pro)realtime charts. IG's 'real time' charts are provided by ProRealtime and does everything that a commercial technical analysis package does including backtesting. You could also get a light version free from the ProRealtime website (google it). ProRealTime must be the best free multi-chart platform on the net - in the free version you don't get the intraday data - you would have to pay for that and IG Index are quite generous in providing it for free to clients who place at least two trades a month (otherwise it is £30). Basically you get 50 videos on everything from setting trend lines to multi indicator scans and easier than sharescope data mining plus back testing facility. Worldwide exchange coverage including forex, bonds and commodities. FTSE top 200 but no smallcaps. Included in the charting package are some 70 preset indicators all displayed in real-time with full customization with top movers, portfolios and lists, drawing capabilities and historical data. The site is owned by IT-finance. On IG you can even customise the display so as to open several charts and watchlists at the same time meaning you can check multiple charts and quickly identify trading opportunities. There's 2 things missing from IG's real time platform that would make it, IMHO, the best package by a mile. The first is volume with the appropriate volume indicators, and the second is a Level 2 plugin.
Supplementary Tools: IG is now offering a new great tool; IG Chart Pattern Recognition (Autochartist) which can be used to scan thousands of stocks in real-time. IG's Autochartist (available free of charge to clients) is an automated technical analysis tool that will scan your selected market for almost any pattern you would wish, either technical analysis or Fibonacci related. Basically the application consists of an automated pattern recognition tool that scans various markets on your behalf and can flag up when certain criteria are met. You can either run these scans on very short-term charts or you can set the application to analyse longer-term charts, say once a day to highlight any opportunities. Start with their settings and have a play. Use it to scan for patterns such as double tops, double bottoms, heads and shoulders...etc. Put your own patterns in and have even more fun.
Fundamental Analysis: Equity fundamentals include overview of a stock with all related key financials. This includes consensus estimates, per-share data, valuation ratios, dividend-per-share, sales and profit estimates as well as recent news about the company, snapshot charts and a summary of the company's structure and core businesses. You can also get up to five years' financial data for each company, including revenue, income and EPS data, along with a broken-down cash flow history. All this is provided free to clients.
Market Research: Independent experts 'Trading Central' supply technical commentaries on equity, index, fixed income, forex and commodities markets identifying trend and associated pivot points, as well as highlighting key support and resistance levels on each market. A detailed analysis of the foreign exchange (FX) markets and UK equities is also provided by Investors Intelligence. IG Index also makes available a Monday morning briefing note that lists all the UK and USA companies that are due to report in the week. The note also includes details of upcoming economic announcements.
Social Interaction: Apart from the company's analysts posting latest tweets about the markets as well as podcasts and videos, IG Index has recently also released a trading tool called Insight as an addition to its trading platform. Insight starts by bringing together news and market commentary for the different markets that can be traded with IG. This includes a Reuters newsfeed which can be filtered by market or region and pattern recognition charting software for those traders that use technical analysis to trade. The tools integrates live news and prices with a snapshot of open trades and watchlists in a neat setup. This tool also provides users with an aggregate perspective of what other IG clients are trading returning client sentiment and trading activity data. Individual client positions are not revealed but the scope of the application is to show clients what their peers are doing. Pie-charts display the percentage of long and short spreadets on a particular market and what traders in that market are placing other bets on. Users can also see similar client sentiment charts for the most popular bets each day. IG Markets is independent from Insight for IG Index (not sure if that's good or bad). Comment: I'm not sure whether Insight will help traders much but still another little area to muddy the waters even more ;) Percentages based on number of clients gives a different measure than if based on weight of money. If 9 traders have say a £1pp up bet and two have £50pp downbets, that would show at present as over 80% positive sentiment. If measuring how much money is being risked, it would show as more than 90% negative ;o) I suppose on larger companies/indices where the number of individual positions is large you could assume the size of these positions even out and therefore more confidence could be put to the indicator. On companies with limited open positions I don't think so. Maybe IG would care to give sentiment readings based on both - the number of clients, and the weight of money. Another thing IG Insight gives us no insight into is traders time frames, nobody knows whether the herd are trading from the 3 min or daily.
Streaming Newswires: Live Streaming news from Reuters through an integrated news service covering all markets and reports on international equities as well as complete coverage of economic releases. The feed is fast and accurate, it being updated continually and provides unbiased information. You can access it in three ways: Newflashes, Browse and Search, for you to keep up with the latest events.
Good Customer Service: I used to email them quite often in my early days as a client of theirs, and they were always excellent in their response.
Suitability: Good for both intraday/long term/futures & spots (not for scalpers, use ProSpreads if you wish to scalp).