IG vs CMC Markets

With the regulatory profile settled, the next honest question for a UK reader is what the account actually costs to run. Regulation tells you the money is safe; fees tell you how quickly a working balance is eaten by cost of trading before a single strategy has been tested. For that reason the Fees block below is the single most-read table on this page.

The table stacks minimum deposit, EUR/USD headline spread, commission per round-turn lot, retail leverage on majors, and the funding methods side by side, so you can price a typical week of trading on IG against CMC Markets in less than a minute. If you trade 5 to 20 round trips a week on majors, the difference between the two headline spreads is a number you can multiply by hand: (spread IG minus spread CMC Markets) × trades × lot size × £8 per pip. That is your real weekly cost gap in GBP, before commission and financing.

Cost is one axis; the trading environment is the other. For many UK readers a specific chart engine , MT4, MT5, cTrader or a TradingView-connected chart, is a hard filter rather than a preference, because their entire order-management routine, indicator stack and (in many cases) their expert advisors are already built on top of one of those platforms.

The Trading platforms block below settles that platform-fit question. It goes beyond a checklist by pairing every platform row with the practical detail that matters on a UK retail account: whether the desktop stack is proprietary or third-party, whether the mobile app carries the same order types as desktop, whether the charting engine ships 100+ studies as standard, and whether trade-from-chart works out of the box without a paid upgrade.

A trading platform is only as good as the ideas that feed into it. On a UK retail account, the difference between "you have to bring your own edge" and "an edge is already sitting in the platform" comes down to the research stack a broker chooses to license.

The Market research block below compares the third-party feeds, in-house desk notes, sentiment tools and economic calendars each broker ships by default. Watch specifically for Autochartist and Trading Central, the two most commonly licensed third-party feeds, and the row on client sentiment, which is the single row that separates a broker that treats research as a cost centre from one that treats it as a hook to keep the account funded and active.

For readers new to leveraged trading, the Beginners and education block below is the pillar that most changes the account decision. A broker with a strong structured course, real live webinars and a demo that mirrors the live feed can shorten the learning curve by weeks and genuinely reduce the risk of blowing up a first live balance.

Both IG and CMC Markets ship a full education stack; the table below isolates where they actually diverge, length of the structured video path, presence of quiz-based progression checks, and whether the demo account is time-limited or permanent. If you are within your first six months of live trading, weight this pillar as heavily as fees.

With every pillar priced, the last step is rolling them into one editorial view. The Winner scorecard below scores IG and CMC Markets on the same eight pillars the Amazing Reviews desk uses across every UK broker review, regulation, fees, platforms, mobile, research, education, execution and customer service.

Each pillar is scored out of ten and a pillar-by-pillar winner is highlighted. The overall totals at the foot of the scorecard are the same numbers that drove the editorial rankings for IG (#1) and CMC Markets (#2) on our master list of FCA regulated UK brokers, so nothing on this page is scored differently to the rest of the site.