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IG Index is one of the UK’s biggest and oldest established spread betting companies with 2009 marking its 35th year as a spread betting provider. According to a survey conducted by specialist Investment Trends one in every two active financial spread betting traders in the United Kingdom now holds an account with them. It’s fully regulated by the UK’s Financial Services Authority and quoted on the FTSE 250 so a very solid company. Their platform is superb and their spreads acceptable although not the best.
Tags: IG Index, iggroup, igindex, igmarkets, spread betting
Posted on June 6th, 2016 at 4:16 pm
I do find their spreads often very wide (and opportunistic) and, as they say, you really do pay for guaranteed stops. Also agree with their comments on transparency especially when they are and are not willing to accept a trade : it’s infuriating when you can’t enter or exit a trade without phoning, especially when I’m travelling especially when, in the context of the size of their operations, the amounts involved are trivial.
I think the moral of all forms of betting is that the odds are weighted heavily in favour of the guy making the book and don’t get involved unless you understand the implications of that on your wallet !!!
Posted on December 30th, 2015 at 1:02 pm
Anyone who traded with IG during the Swiss franc incident has nightmare stories to tell about this outfit. The execution was ridiculously slow with manual processes that took too much time and put most clients sharply in the red. IG’s arrogant response was: “sorry, you signed the Terms and Conditions…” and basically clamming up when requesting more information. Their systems melted down and they hid behind illiquidity. They also went after clients whose accounts were in negative territory – all this because IG failed them. I would never use them. Trade with a provider that has a no-negative balance policy.
Posted on February 18th, 2015 at 2:57 am
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1In general yes they trade as well as any provider. HOWEVER, when push comes to shove good luck – they will let you down.
A recent example. On Jan15th 2015, the SNB removed the EURCHF floor at 1.20. As a result, IG manually aggregated client positions and started selling positions (margin calls & stop losses) about 10 mins after the announcement. By this time most of the liquidity was gone and by 10am (30mins later), most clients were given a fill of 0.9250. In comparison, FX PRO average fill was 1.11 and FXCM was similar.
IG see their whole manual process as completely fair and are chasing retail users for negative balances caused by IG’s 2600 point slippage. I repeat…..stop losses had slippages of over 2600 points! Other reputable brokers forgave negative balances.
IG did not even have the decency to email all clients on the day and explain what happened – other brokers did.
Posted on February 17th, 2015 at 5:57 pm
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1.3Take a recent example…. EURCHF move. They did not react for ten minutes. They missed all volume at semidecent levels and filled clients with a 2600 point slippage. Unlike some competitors, they are chasing negative balances.
Posted on November 25th, 2014 at 8:30 pm
I have a spreadbet account with IG Index which i am happy with apart from their margin treatment of pending orders.
ie : they subtract the margin requirment for pending orders set, as well as the margin requirement for actual live positions.
This means i can’t set more than a few pending orders without using up a huge whack of my account margin. Which is really daft.
So i am looking for alternative spreadbet providers who only calculate your margin on the basis of actual positions taken rather than on pending orders aswell.
I have a CFD account with CMC Markets which allows me to set as many orders as i like. And those orders only affect my account margin if they become live account positions. Which makes sense.
Any suggestions please for “spreadbet” providers who only calculate account margin on the basis of actual live positions ?
Posted on January 16th, 2012 at 8:50 pm
Been with IG over 10 years. Used to use stop orders quite frequently but all stopped when i had an order placed to sell gold.
The price had moved through my order price by 26pts before they opened it!
When i called them some sniveling git says to me “It’s slippage”
Slippage! 26pts! More like slippery if you ask me.
Now i know why they changed their limit targets from prices to points!
It’s a real shame that previously when Wheeler owned them they were quite trustworthy, but since he sold out they have become untrustworthy. Especialy when it comes to triggering orders. As for their charts – I can sum those up with one word – RUBBISH.
Posted on January 8th, 2012 at 3:54 am
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3Annoying salespeople. Prices look out of sync to me. Never bothered.
ETX Capital is brilliant execution (even for scalping)except limited share companies to trade & spreads are a bit high – but I suppose you get what you pay for.
Posted on December 9th, 2011 at 1:42 pm
A Forex trader of 30 years experience advised me to get out of IG as he knew dealers there who told him of all the scams they get up to rip off traders. I use it to trade equities as it is hopeless for Forex. While the platform is probably the best, all sorts of strange things happen on a regular basis such as prices mysteriously freezing, when your open positions are going up. The site froze on me today while I had a deal ticket open, but I didn’t execute the trade. I only noticed the trade had been executed when I noticed a loss in my funds. i.e the trade hadn’t even appeared in my open positions! Snivelling git on the end of the phone just parroted the line that they’d had no other complaints and it was my browser etc….Avoid.
Posted on December 7th, 2011 at 3:46 pm
On one particular day IG froze my ticket 3 times when i was scalping and each time i was in profit i got stopped out, cos when i went to take my profit the screen was already frozen and i could nothing but watch it reverse and stop me. Strange that when one profits from another’s loss……..and why they always get someone to watch u if its going good and even a friend of mine has been told to leave, as he is a serial winner! They r no different from the bucket shps of Jesse L’s day, the odds r stacked against u and if u constantly do well they freeze your screen etc and also don’t let u trade when a reversal is happening, they spin the crap that it’s your internet browser and that no one has ever complained before…utter ****…
IG control binaries and the odds r massively stacked against u when u think it’s such a small drop to zero………..its actually better from mid way!
If they deal the spread only, then why the concern by IG when u win consistently, they r the biggest dodgers going…. There is only one way to win trade the trend with stops brought up below swing lows and keep going until u get whacked out, small % risk to capital and time entries with very small stops…….and avoid indicators where possible except ma, trends and swings……..and SAR!
good luck
Posted on June 30th, 2011 at 3:36 am
I have traded with them for sometime now. Their customer service lacks what they promise. My stops get hit every single trade and I have never made any money with them. They run some sort of algorithm to makesure they always hit your stop even when I am trading with the trend and my stop is 10 – 20 points away! Once hit it then resumes to the actual market trend which I find strange why i always get hit no matter what strategy I use. Personally I would never go back with them although their TA part of the package is good its no help if they scam you!
Posted on March 15th, 2011 at 4:44 pm
OK, IG is quite good, it should be (is it one of the biggest?). But I can’t help thinking it is a bit like the banker’s umbrella. You know the joke about the bank giving you a free umbrella, then demanding it back when it starts raining. Look at IG share trading platform over the last few days-full of red crosses (can’t deal) and orange crosses (telephone only). You look at the smaller AIM stocks and you just can’t deal, or at least only to close trades. That is really very poor.
Posted on March 10th, 2011 at 10:03 am
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4.5In my opinion they have the best trading platform on the market and have the biggest choice of instruments to bet on. Another positive is you can withdraw funds online rather than having to call the company to do so.
Downs. IG still have a higher percentage margin above Libor than most other spread betting companies still. They are currently 2.5% + Libor and most others are 2%.
Posted on February 27th, 2011 at 10:39 am
IG Index’s interface is clear, simple and quite straightforward and importantly it works! I don’t want to get involved in the endless debate on spreads but for USA shares, the range is very wide and from what I’ve seen is far better than the competition. Fancy interfaces, coloured screens and all the rest is ok but not a lot of use if you can’t trade what you want.
Posted on May 27th, 2010 at 6:22 am
IG index is a very good platform. I’ve been using it now for about 3-4 months and have had very few problems.
The Pure DMA platform is pretty useful and there is a small amount of L2 data available at a cost, but if you make something like 30 trades a month then this becomes free. They also have ‘advanced charts’ again for a fee which is then refunded if you trade enough. These advanced charts are brilliant and whilst it took me a little while to get the indicators I wanted you can pretty much track anything you like and set up alerts to tell you when triggers are reached. On that note you can also automatically trade on triggers however that to me is far too risky so prefer the manual approach!
Posted on February 13th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
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4IG has variable spreads on their cable and euro /usd pairs.
many times, on cable, the spread is 3 (rarely 2). also quotes are up to 5th decimal point, i.e 14954.3 while rest of s/b’s quote as 14954
i prefer Capital’s platform with fixed 2 point spread in cable and 1 in euro.
Posted on January 21st, 2010 at 4:42 pm
I would warn anyone to make absolutely sure that they read the Terms and Conditions.
Posted on September 23rd, 2009 at 4:59 pm
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4.5I have used City Index, Capital Spreads, Cantor Index, CMC and WorldSpreads besides IgIndex. Igindex are the most reliable and the best platform in my opinion. I like everything they offer and it works. I don’t get the feeling that it’s a big con unlike the others…
You just don’t hear people complain about re-quotes, delayed fills, bust trades etc which you hear of all the time with others. To me that is a key issue when comparing their spreads with other companies that may be tighter. I also like the fact that you can place stop/limit orders and with trailing stops which is essential to my trading approach and something still not offered by so many others.
A note about spreads: Most of the time their forex EUR/USD and GBP/USD spreads will be 2 & 3 as before but occasionally they come in to 1 & 2 as advertised so you can’t take these lower spreads as a given. It does sometimes go to 1 on Eurusd but only for maybe 30 seconds to a minute. Usdjpy sometimes goes to 1 as well.
Posted on September 22nd, 2009 at 12:38 pm
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3.3Their spread is ‘average’ – there are much better spreads out there but you usually pay for this in other ways (requotes, slippage, etc). So good spreads doesn’t necessarily mean the cheapest trading.
The platform is the best out there by far in my opinion. The charting is good and you can place trades directly through the charts.
Also, the startup support is very good, they never tire of answering stupid questions! But when money is on the line I’ve found their support to be generally unhelpful. I gave them some simple tasks of trying to find out details of profit and loss on a particular trade. It took them 5 minutes and they had to dig into their own system. I asked them where to find this information on my account online and they couldn’t. Their response: ‘thats the way it is’.
Having said that – platform was changed a little, for the worse. Now they charge £30 per month for ‘advanced’ charts, although if you make 2 trades then they give it back to you at the end of the month so it seems IG have adopted this policy to stop people from opening an account with them for the charts and then dealing with someone else.
Posted on September 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
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3.3Looking at the IG website, they advertise that they offer spreads on the EUR/USD from 1 pip and GBP/USD from 2 pips, but I have never seen them offer these, does anyone else share the same view??? Sure, IG Index’s interface is good but all that glitters is not gold. Nowadays I’m with a less flashy spread betting company, but happy with the way its going and the spreads are more humane as well 🙂
Posted on August 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
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3.5I trade futures spread betting every day using IGindex 1 min charts or tick which allows me to trade directly off of the chart with any open positions clearly marked on the chart. The charts are quite advanced with moving averages with +/- horizontal or vertical shift, Tema, Dema etc and all indicators if you use them. The platform is worth $1000’s but there are no charges – just the spread which is 2 points ftse100, 2 points US$ v Euro, 4 points Dow30 etc. One thing I’ve noticed is that IG’s charts sometimes seem a tad out of sync,to be honest i just thought it was me, i have 2 major problems with ig first it tends to slow my pc down more than any other platform and secondly the 2pt spread ftse. I trade the FTSE and the Dow, why should I pay pay double up the price on the FTSE and the Dow?
Posted on April 6th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
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4.3IG index trading platform is INSTANT and reliable.
IG spread on the dow 4 and 6 out of hours, anyway there is no difference between 1 and 2 pip spread , i look at the whole picture here , i am talking about my opinion only i have account with IG CMC CS and others, and i look at other products not only indices, it is not always about the spread…
1.) wide range of products including options and 7000 shares
2.) best execution : example : while u buy or sell if the price goes against u within a second , they will fill u at the new improved price ( sometimes during volatility it was 40 points improvemnt price in a Dow trade ! ).
3.) best customer service .
4.) guaranteed stops facility (very important for shares trading ), Also u can trade shares from the bill to the bill .
5.) If u have a cfd account with them u can have Direct Access to futures markets through their L2 dealer software . And if u have deep pockets they will give u direct access to Spot Fx with Tier 1 banks .
6.) They make 100 Million $ net profit annually = they can handle big winnings and big size traders . Plus IGIndex is a FTSE 250 company…
7.) 24 hour trading on popular markets , this is important for me.
Posted on March 6th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
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4I have been using IG Index for the past few weeks, I have only just started spread betting. The only thing that has irritated me that their charts seem to be a bit delayed and sometimes can just freeze. And the other, now that they know that I am coming to learn about the spread betting process, they have started me on this minimum price per point scenario. That I don’t like, i know that they need to make money but it says after my 7 weeks phasing in period they will set the minimum to a varied price. thats just wrong they should have the min set and not change the goal posts, as decreases my chances of winning more money unless I start putting a lot more money down on the table…
Posted on February 19th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
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3IG Index seem to have quite a few advantages over other major spread betting platforms. HOWEVER – how the HECK do I manage to convince them that I DO NOT need nor want a LIMITED RISK account? I want to get trading for real, with controls over my own stops and movements etc, without any handholding. I don’t get it, i signed the disclaimers, risk warnings etc. LET ME LOOSE!!?! With a limited risk account all trades come with guaranteed stops which cost more and stops have to be placed 5% away from the share price which limits a lot of the trades and also the stop loss system. It seems every single darn SB company has a MAJOR drawback in some way.
Posted on February 3rd, 2009 at 1:42 pm
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2.8My personal experience of IG index has been poor. I feel that their Customer Service policy is that they acknowledge your concerns but they don’t care. There have been a number of occasions where they have adjusted my opening price to my detriment and have not suitable informed me.
They also need to formulate a better margining policy for option trading such as call spreads, put spreads risk reducing trades but are penalised by charging margin on both legs.
Posted on January 20th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
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4.3I use IG and I love their new platform. It’s fast and they’ve stopped quoting mid-price on live positions and have started using the bid, which means you know where you are. The general view is that there isn’t much between the various betting companies on spread. IG and CMC seem to come out on top overall and they both have a well-staffed trading desk that you can speak to. For ease I would go with IG over CMC but I’m biased as CMC brings my laptop to a grinding halt so I don’t use it.
Posted on December 13th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
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4.3I’ve done around 4000 trades in the past year (some of them only paper trades) using spreadbet charts. I have tried most S/B companies and think CMC and IG are miles ahead of the others for T/A and provided you keep the minimum account size you have real time access to equities, commodities and forx. Timeframes from 1 minute up to weekly with most technical indicators – alas not the most important one imo which is volume. Given the choice I would rather open two accounts with separate S/B cos rather than put all my eggs in one basket. If the feed on one company goes down, open positions can be hedged with the other company – much quicker than trying to close a trade on the phone.
Posted on August 27th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
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4I use IG. It’s a server based system so you can access it from anywhere although you do of course need to beware of ‘keyloggers’ if not using your own pc. They also offer 24 prices, you can speak to a trader 24 hours (UK or Aus)…and they offer trading on the move on my IPhone!
No need for funds upfront, as far as I know, but very good graphs and indicators. Fixed +/- 0.1% spread in FTSE 100 shares; offer trading on smaller market cap companies as well. Been trying to get to grips with deal through charts does not always mirror pure deal but will persist to get it right…
One downside is that when everyone’s in a rush to trade it becomes obscurely slow (probably programmeed to protect IG’s cash flow!). Another is that it is difficult to keep accurate records with rolling positions that close/reopen daily.