“Would by good if IG offered a demo account to run along side the main trading account allowing the testing of different trading strategy's without the risk of losing money.
Demo accounts are offered by other company's`”
“Large company with sound financial backing, a major league player in the leveraged markets of CFD's and Spreadbetting. Reasonable quick to pay out from clients accounts to their bank account. Very wide range of instruments to trade from FX, UK, USA and European equities, sectors, commodities etc. IG's standard charts are poor. You can pay extra (£35 month) for advanced charts that are a little better. If you trade regularly they will discount this. Clients must realise that if you use more than 50% of your account balance you run the risk of IG closing out your trades. By comparison City Index allows you to use up to 80% and FXCM almost all of your account. Platform reliability could be improved. Recently their platform for both CFD's an SB has fallen over being down for a few hours preventing clients from opening or closing trades. Their IT seems dated and rickety. Standard charts sometimes show prices differently to the open ticket prices although they sometimes warn you by displaying this on the chart. Just check before accepting the ticket price. There can sometimes be as much as 10 points difference. There data feed can be slow. I've compared IG's spot prices with live streaming prices and they can be up to 20 sec difference, this could be to you advantage or otherwise, you decide. Don't forget all of these SB and CFD companies are your counter parties, that is when you win they lose and vice versa. Read all of the Terms and Conditions before trading even though there up to 50 pages long. Don't overtrade, keep to your stategy. IG is basically a sound company but in my opinion their platform performance compared to their competition is poor.”
“I've been trading for 15 years & have used many brokers and spread betting firms but I find the whole experience of using IG for equities, commodities & currencies the best available on the market.”
“The trading screen is quick and easy to use. Any time I have had queries they have been answered promptly and efficiently on the telephone. I have found the ProRealTime charts particularly helpful.”
“Wide and uncompetitive spreads is the biggest negative. Don't imagine you'd change that!
Design of platform is the second biggest negative. Silly things like when the cursor is over the buy or sell, a window pops up that says 'buy' or 'sell' accordingly. Why would you need that? Lots of little things like this that suggest the person designing the platform is not a regular user.
The most negative design aspect to all the platforms, not just IG, is that the screen is full of information you don't need and cannot hide from view (space is at a premium and it's nice to see all info simultaneously). Apart from the charts what you need is just the ticker codes of say 100 instruments simultaneously on your screen (rather than IG's about 30). You don't need to be told that GSK is GlaxoSmithKline, that your list of instruments is a 'watchlist' (duh!) for example, waste of space and a distraction. The code should be bold and other than that just buy/sell boxes, the whole window taking up about 15mmx20mm rather than approx 2" X 3" minimum currently.
Countless other improvement could be made, would be happy to provide examples but don't imagine you'd make the changes.”
“Overall very good. Tight spreads and not much slippage. Alerts service very ggod and reliable. Basic charts ok for a quick look but not that usefull for serious traders. Platform very easy to use and set up pending orders.”
“Good execution of trades and variety of markets. The site has a lot of resources...video, comment, overviews.
The platform is very good and continues to evolve with new features.
The Support team give good comprehensive answers when responding to queries.”
“Your Binary FX products are simply untradable with the current spreads. You should either restore the previous spreads or just remove the Ladders and OT options from your product list. IG is ne of the largest brokers with 40 years of history and I don't think it is normal to provide its clients with financial products that doesn't make trading sense.”
“I find both IG CFD trading platforms (stand alone and browser based) simple and easy to use. Both have their quirks and differences and I prefer the stand alone software. Both are transparent and easy to use (at least the functions that I use are) although there are some aspects where extra care is needed.
The data available on existing and previous trading is clearly presented and data extraction is simple making it extremely easy to keep a good set of records on one's own data storage systems. Funding the account and receiving money back is again very simple and efficient.
Customer service is easy to access and very efficient. There have been times when the upgrading of the stand alone software has caused problems but this has usually been resolved relatively quickly once an issue has been highlighted, however, these usually show a deficiency in the software testing before release.
Costs of operating an account are relatively minor, and the charges made do not seem (to me) to be in any way excessive. I would wholeheartedly recommend the IG CFD service to anybody. I cannot make any comment on the spread-betting or stockbroking sides of IG's business since I have no experience yet of using them.”
“Overall IG are a good provider for trading a wide range of markets and equities. I trade almost only US Equities and they have the widest choice. Spreads are generally OK but I dislike the Extended Hours Trading as the spreads are wild. If you are not a day or intra-day trader then you can easily get stopped out so have to place much greater stop distances from entry to allow for this. I would prefer it if one could opt-in to extended trading rather than it be the default position. So that this is balanced, the extended hours trading does mean that you are much less likely to get gapped into a trade at market open.
I have looked for alternative providers, but IG remain the best for my Spread-Betting so I will stay with my rating of good.”
