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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.