IG

Good platform but recently continual IT Problems

I wanted to leave a more in depth and balanced review of IG, as someone who trades with them regularly, as having read through the remaining reviews on here, in my view, only a handful really sum IG up properly. The remainder seem to be a mix of somewhat historic reviews from people overseas who simply claim IG are crooks etc, or people who got stung recently by the actions of the SNB which caused the Euro to make that unprecedented 18% move in a couple of mins back in January 2015, or bigger ticket traders who have moved on to bigger things and the pure STP / ECN brokers (which is not yet me). I am a bit more interested in a couple of the other reviews which suggest IG start to manage you out once you consistently start winning and upping your stake more significantly (not quite me yet either so cannot comment on that). So this is long review but if you are interested bear with me.
I am in the UK and have been trading now for two and a half years, as a retail trader, with progression from losing, then to breaking even, then to making consistent but very modest profit. The plan is to now go to the next level and start making bigger profit of course but I am in no rush and consistency is what is important to me. For the last six months I have concentrated solely on trading the Dax Futures on a day trading basis. I trade perhaps what some traders would call scalping. But it is not scalping in the proper sense, whereby huge stake players try to make a point or so and then close and are in for micro seconds. More in terms of going circa 2.00 to 20.00 a point and averaging anything from a few seconds to 15 minutes in a trade. So I am not a swing or position trader and dont hold trades for an hour or two or overnight etc. As such I dont trade the front month futures which have a wider spread but no overnight costs, but simply the daily futures (which have a 1 point spread on the Dax). I trade every day and rarely outside of cash hours.
I have used IG consistently over the last two years but have had a look at the competition as well.
Firstly, IG are not some sort of bucket shop or offshore dubious, or even criminal or fraudulent, operation. They are a UK company regulated by the FCA and are listed (on the FTSE 250 I think) along with all the strict obligations which come with that.
Secondly, there appears to be a bit of debate over whether they are the counterparty to your trade or not. There should not be this debate. As most other reviewers have (negatively) concluded, IG are indeed the counterparty to your trade. IG are a market maker not an STP or ECN broker in the true sense. If you trade with IG they offer either spread betting or CFDs but very few people in the UK will do anything other than spread betting with them, as profits / losses from spread betting are not subject to taxation in the UK whereas the reverse applies with CFDs. Of course most would be traders dont stop to think that they may not actually make any profit at all, and by contrast may loose money, and so there will be nothing there for the state to tax in any event, but rather people aspire to be successful, and so opt for the spread betting route. The term spread betting is however really misleading. Whether what you are doing ends up being gambling rather than trading, is a consequence of whether or not you are actually a successful trader, more so than the generic description of how you get into the market. Assuming therefore that if you use IG, you will be using their spread betting platform, then as I say, IG are the counterparty. They would like you to hear from them that they make their money through the spread. This is not untrue. They clearly do make money through the spread. If I go long on the Dax in cash hours at 10.00pp then they have made 10.00 form me before we start. That said there is no commission and so in a way you can argue its just swings and roundabouts when compared to a pure broker. However thats only how they make some of their money. What they are not as keen to advertise, although obviously a plain fact, is that the real money in it for them when your trade loses. If I do that 10.00 pp long with a 10 point stop, and the trade is successful and I close for +20 points, then they have to shell out 190.00 of their profits to pay me (keeping 10.00 for the spread). If by contrast the trade is not successful, and the stop gets hit, they make 100.00 out of me rather than just the 10.00. In either case no other trader, either person, corporate or robot, at the other side of the world, or indeed a mile down the road from me, is involved. There is no matching your buy with someone elses sell here - you simply trade IGs index.
Thats not to say that IG dont hedge or mirror in the underlying market. They certainly do. They will tell you that rather than doing this with individual trades they mirror or hedge their aggregate position. I have no reason to doubt that. Equally, I am sure for some, their trades do go to the dealing desk, or are individually mirrored, hedged or even placed in the underlying market. This will include extremely successful traders, more so if they are migrating to higher stakes, traders dabbling with spoofing etc, or those with lots of money who go very large stake pp irrespective of whether they know what they are doing or not. But for the vast majority it is likely your trade will just be automated and you should have no problems if you are trading a very liquid market like the Dax, FTSE, S&P etc, during cash hours.
Notwithstanding you are trading index futures, if you stick to cash hours, then I have not seen anything to concern me regarding the price on offer. I have checked on a number of occasions and IGs Dax and FTSE indexes (and I expect the rest of the big ones) follow the underlying market price pretty much to the tenth of a point all day long. Your stop doesnt get hit because IG go hunting for it (although it benefits them if it does), it gets hit because the underlying market hits it. I have never seen IGs index do something different to the underlying market during cash hours. When I started trading and was trading the FTSE I was short with a 20.00 stop and got stopped out on a sudden spike up and back down which turned out to be a fat finger caused by HSBC. IG refused to refund my trade but I could later see myself that this had occurred on the underlying market itself and IGs index had simply tracked the underlying market. HSBC were ultimately to blame (and if recall correctly I think got fined) not IG. Thats a more extreme example however and in terms of the minute to minute movement it does seem to me to track the underlying market fully. If, by contrast, you place a trade at 3.00am in the morning, then it may be a different story. Other than in cases of pronounced fundamentals there is clearly nothing like the same liquidity at these out of hours times. Just to be clear I am not saying I think that IG see out of hours as open season on stops. I personally dont, and I think their reputation, let alone their license, is more important to them in a heavily regulated market like the UK. On the other hand I am a lot less cynical than some other traders I know. Either way however, in my view, you are asking for trouble anyway if you trade seriously out of hours. There is however plenty of liquidity in the 7-8am slot and up until the S&P close after the European cash close.
The reason of course that IGs business model works is human pride. I dont know the exact figures but seemingly something like only 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 retail traders make money (with the rest losing money) and this seems totally believable to me. So for every 10.00 pp winner that IG have pay out they likely have 15 or so losers to gain from. Do the maths, and it becomes clear that and the spread is a nice add on for them, rather than their core profit. However, all the above said, providing you are clear on all that, I dont personally see it as a criticism of IG compared to their competition out there.
In terms of their platform then, I would review as follows. Bear in mind here, as I have said, I am a relatively newish retail trader and I am comparing IG here to their other high street peers, not to the hedge funds or corporate brokers used by the real pros or much bigger ticket or more experienced traders.
There are more pros than cons in my view.
The main positive is the speed of execution. This is particularly important with quick in and out day trading. You can set automatic orders to open and close, and short of any slippage which can happen now and again when the market ticks through a level (which is rare but does happen), these work every time immediately. If you click manually to enter and close ditto. I have had a couple of annoying rejections but generally get filled at the price I click at within the boundaries of technology and speed of the market. When you click you are in instantly. I have tired some other platforms. I recall trading with City Index for example when I first started out. On clicking both on entry and exit you would get a windows type hourglass revolving on your screen and your action was then confirmed say a few seconds after you clicked. IG claim something like that on average a trade is executed in one tenth of a second. I have regularly called up and had them check my own stats and this does appear to be representative. In short, their platform is in a different galaxy to some of the competition out there. They have some sort of rejection policy whereby all trades at one price level are rejected if the resulting price is more than I think two points either way or maybe double this in a very fast moving market. It does not favour larger trades over small ones. I have had rejections on average in about one in fifty trades, which is a small few every month or two, albeit still annoying. However I have encountered some resistance by them to go into finite detail on this policy and thats why I cannot describe it definitively. I see no reason why they cannot be more transparent about this.
In terms of formal slippage, by which I dont mean the market moving in that tenth of a second when your trade is in transit from your PC to IG (or more than that sometimes), but I mean where you have a pre-set limit or stop, and that is not fulfilled. For example a long (which fails) with a 10 point stop, which is closed at a loss of -12 instead of the -10 it should have been. Again, this does happen. But again rarely (leaving aside the Swiss thing of course). The most I have been slipped in this way is -4.5 points last month. I have been slipped by a couple of points negatively a few times and twice positively for 2 and 3 respectively. Usually a couple of times a month. On each occasion I have checked (or had them check) the tick by tick chart and this happens where one tick straddled the stop or limit level. So again annoying but no complaints really.
In terms of charting, IGs own chart is good to watch the immediate price action on, and works well in a market where you have decided to enter based on price action, rather than on technical levels. Its feed mirrors the price action and so in that respect it is robust and as such is necessary to have open on one pane at all times. While it does easily allow plotting of basic lines and so on, and has more advanced options too, it is really no good for advanced technical charting as it is too basic. Here IG offer ProRealTimes full package, albeit that it is linked to their own index / prices, and platform. This is offered essentially for free. Technically it is not free and costs 30.00 a month but if you place something like a couple of trades a month you dont pay anything so if you are trading regularly then thats free. This is a very good professional charting package and allows all the technical charting you want.
IG offer a mass of different markets to trade. Although I would caution against trading all sorts of exotic stuff on a market makers platform.
Otherwise the platform is easy to use and operate and as good as anything else out there. Customer service is generally good but not perfect.
IG used to fail to provide a demo account which was a major minus but now they do.
In terms of negatives, there is only one main one in my view, if and once you have accepted that they are a market maker not direct to market interchange. Clearly for some people that is a negative in itself but that is what it is.
The one negative I do have is the amount of IT outages / problems of late. When the platform works it works well, and as above the speed of execution is pretty much second to none in the UK retail market. But I first used IG from 2013. In the first year and a half I can only remember one major and one minor IT outage. By which I mean you cant log on at all, or if you can the platform is down so you cant trade, or if not totally down you cant trade properly because half of it is not working, etc. And thats having been on it pretty much every day in that period. Most people would think that is pretty good stats. Ideally however it should not really ever happen. But once a year I think we can forgive and forget.
However in the last 2-3 months (I am leaving this review May 2015) there have been no less than four further IT outages. For the first the entire platform was simply down for the vast part of the trading day sometime in late March early April. I was lucky in that I made a pile of points from 8.00am to 8.20am and decided to call it day then and had no open positions when it went down at circa 8.30am. It wasnt fully fixed until about 3.00pm, during which time you would not have been able to log on or trade at all and (assuming you could get through in less than 30 minutes in a queue) would have had to phone up to close any trades in progress. A couple of weeks later ProRealTime was down for the whole weekend. While no one is going to trade on a Saturday or a Sunday it is a time when you want to give your main charts a good spring clean and plot and update your channels etc etc and / or do a load of back-testing or other similar non trading stuff. This was out from first thing Saturday morning until late on Sunday. IG can argue that the fault was at ProRealTimes end however I dont really care. It is provided through, linked to and tailored to their own platform and integral to any serious trader who uses them, and they know this and took two days to fix it. I had not even logged my trades from Friday and ended up having to start an hour early on Monday just to be able to trade that day. Then back to IGs own platform a couple of weeks later. Could log on this time and place a trade but not working properly again. No lines appearing on your chart showing your stop level or even entry level and I wasnt even clear if my trades had actually been entered. IG didnt fix this until early afternoon. That was a couple of weeks ago. Today is a Monday and we now have instalment number four. Platform is working in terms of being able to log on, and its not a trading day as multiple public holidays, but once again there are problems. Your saved layout is not working. You are presented with an entirely different screen layout when logging in. Your list of markets is different. You have no chart. And so and so on. I called IG about this at 10.00am and they were aware of it. Despite that the platform says there are no reported problems. So that is simply untrue. Its now 6.00pm and it is still not working. Who knows whether it will be fixed for market open in the morning. Lastly, at various times over the last few weeks, the price feed to the ProRealTime chart seems to be lagging IGs own chart and feed, by a about a second, and this has persisted on and off for the last month or so. It is not always present and manifests itself more so when the market gets into high gear. ProRealTime shows exactly the same price action, just lags by a second getting there. The problem here is that many traders like me will have both charts open at once. IGs chart totally keeps up and looking at that is fine. But you have your support and resistance levels and lines and so on, on the PRT chart. If you are long and propose closing the split second it hits that strong resistance, and are at that time watching the PRT chart alone, you can see the problem here. Again IG have told me they are acutely aware of this and are working to sort it as a priority, but I am not sure sorting it out is happening at breakneck speed, if indeed at all.
This IT issues trend is starting to seriously worry me. I have no idea what is behind it. IG obviously dont want this to happen as when it does, at worst no one can and thus will trade with them and they will lose a whole days business. At best it will frustrate their client base. Each time you jump up and down on the phone and determine to leave a negative review, but once it is fixed you move on and dont have time. However it is now becoming too much of a regular occurrence to ignore. IG lost a significant amount of profit when the SNB made their appalling announcement in January (along of course with anyone who was long with them on that market at the time probably losing their whole account). Those cynics I know wonder whether they have made a cut to their very large IT department to cut costs. I have no idea. This may just be coincidence which may go away. But no matter how good their platform is when it works, if it is down every couple of weeks then its time to start having a look elsewhere.
For now thats not my intention. IG is simply too good in terms of execution to as a retail platform for me to move at the moment. But I am going to keep a close eye on these ongoing IT issues in the coming weeks and may well review that if things dont improve.


UPDATE 3 July 2015
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.
I dont intend to update this with every little niggle I have with IG. That would designate this review as out of control and too unwieldy. However, any updates now are likely to be negative, as I will just concentrate on any further problems. I think that is OK though, as I have left a balanced review above, and indeed if anything the main review is a lot more positive than negative. I dont think therefore any further criticism loses its power, which it might do if all I was saying was wall to wall negative in the first place. By contrast it is important to follow up to make sure this commentary on IG remains up to date. I will therefore just update from here with any further problems in the short term.
And in that vein then, Tuesday 30thJune, and here we go again
IGs platform went down bang on market cash open at 8.00am (UK time) on the morning of Tuesday 30thJune 2015, and was offline for about 30 minutes. People logged in lost connection and anyone not logged in, and trying to, couldnt until when it was fixed about 8.30am. While only half an hour, this is another bad example of ongoing IG IT problems, albeit the first issue since I left the original review above. This is because 8.00am to 8.30 am is a pretty key time. Dax cash opens 8.00am UK time as does FTSE cash. Obviously the first part of your trading day is history if you cant even log on for the first half an hour of the trading day, let alone trade. And this is totally unacceptable.
I mentioned above that some other traders I know are more cynical than me, and one I know commented that IG always seems to go down when there is the potential for a large market drop. The thinking behind this is apparently that they dont want people getting the early short on, when the market has potential to seriously tank. And of course fuel is added to that fire here, for anyone claiming its all a big conspiracy, will readily point out that Tuesday 30thJune was the second trading day after Greece had announced the referendum, the Dax had already gapped down a not unexpected, but still eye watering, 500.00 or so points, or 4-5%, on Sunday night IG futures open, from the Friday night close, and this Tuesday was the last trading of the quarter, not just the month, where there can sometimes be a bit of a sell off. I continue to be of a more reasoned mind, and personally dont subscribe to these sort of conspiracy theories. However, IG can simply avoid such rumours and comments circulating in the public domain in the first place, by sorting out their repeated and ongoing IT problems, and I have no sympathy with IG until they can provide an unbroken trading service, which they are currently continuing to fail to do.
Anyway I digress, but what is clear, is that this is now instalment number five, in half as many months, of further major IT problems for IG. I still dont change my overall view, that IG can be recommended, but a further episode of this, or something similar, and I will be starting to have a look around elsewhere.
I will post any further major problems in a future update.
UPDATE 16 DECEMBER 2015 8.00PM GMT (YEP FOMC RATE DECISION TIME)
I'll keep this update short. Doubt anyone on here reading this will not be aware, but for helpfulness when people are looking at this in the future, this is slap bang in the middle of the December 2015 FOMC rate rise.
IG's entire charting system went down (actually to be technically correct didnt go down but simply froze the price - no candlestick movement and no price change for about the last hour, on any chart, on any market), at approximately 7.05pm GMT, about 5 mins after the rate decision and 25 mins before Yellen's press conference at 7.30pm GMT. Its now 8.00pm and still down.
I wont even bother giving any commentary on this as I think it speaks for itself.
Have lowered my rating to 6 out of 10.

Not the same problem for italian customers

I read so many negative comments, but I have never had problems with this broker. Although I admit that is not what we use most, and i didn't invest huge sums, which is perhaps why I haven't suffered from the same issues listed in the reviews here. Customer service is pretty quick, at least over here for Italian customers. As for the trading conditions (se here for IG trading condition for italian markets), you have always been respected. Here we IG is considered among the top 10 brokers on almost all the sites in the industry.

laughable

the truth is IG has the biggest spreads in the business, and it's no surprise your order is executed immediately as a result. coupled with them skewing the prices so in a worse case scenario you have to find the spread plus two points all multiplied by two. a 6 point spread quickly becomes a 16 point spread.

their software is more intuitive than deal4free's and their support is fine, but then again you would expect this as they are slowly fleecing you of your hard earned money.

if you love risk and losing money then this company will suit you perfectly.

IG INDEX

I have been using IG Index for just over a year now, i'am convinced their trading platform is one of the most user friendly systems around.

It provides a great deal of variety in quoting prices for various markets but the charting package provided is quite limited, good for checking historical price movements but does not have the facility to add various studies such as bollinger bands, moving averages etc. Although the RSI volatility is available. The charts are limited to UK & US shares and indices. The trading platform would be best used in conjunction with another charting source to met individual requirements.

In terms of quotations, what you see is what you get. But in comparison the real cash market for the Dow or FTSE their prices are a bit out of the ball park. The SPOT FX quotations are inline with interbank market. The commodities prices are not too bad either.

I deal on a controlled risk basis which requires a stop loss on every single trade i make, the occasional times i do get stopped out, is always at the pre-determined price. There is the facility to change the stop loss level when the position is still open.

The spread is always charged on opening a new position, current FTSE in market hours 6 points, Dow an extortionate 11 points, SPOT FX 9 points.

Overall i rate this broker 7.5/10

How to get a Account with IG Index.

They only Give accounts to people who are employed and have over total annual income of 25,000 - 49,999 and total savings 50,000 - 149,999. If that is not true then they have scammed me. as I am not far off those figures.

Robbed

I placed a position with IG Gold in 1 hour it showed a profit $6250 then started to go down so I took a profit $$5250-5150+/- the position closed the next day on my statement said this never happened it closed out and I lost 250+/- sterling could not belevie it anyone eles had problems like this?

Great Selection of markets run by rookies.

I can't help it. Their platform is great to look at. Their range of products is extensive and generally their fills are great until now.

It's a great platform and i will always have an account with them and it is my main broker for trading currently, but recently i don't know whether they changed their dealing system, but recently i've been rejected quite alot more when the market moves as little as 0.1 of a tick on 10 a point even on FX. It's just frustrating, because most of the time i don't care what the price is and i just want to be filled.

I think i am blacklisted though with them, so i don't know if everyone is experiencing this. It's still a great platform.

The problem with IG is that, there are like the clever kid in class who doesn't work hard and always gets C for effort but A for attainment. They are still the best and theres no real reason for them to reject trades.

Had a trade deleted today. No call, no email, no nothing. Shocking service. You can't expect much from them, given their terrible overpaid staff.

Poor

I found ig easy to use and simple but thats where the positives stop.

There spreads are massive and executions rubbish especially on a quick moving price.

My advice is stay well clear IG index.

Maybe not the smartest choice

Before setting an account I did a lot of research about different brokers. About IG most of the reviews on different websites bring out more positive features than problems. On the other hand forums have mainly negative feedback. I didn't had issues with account registration, but as soon as I got problems (delays) regarding deal closing I started to look alternatives. Depending on the strategy it may be even a good broker to choose (for wide choice of investments), but regarding Binaries where execution time is crucial it is not a very good solution. Now I have focused my time to eToro (in my opinion the most comprehensive review about that broker is at [Link Removed]. If you google this broker you'll find a lot of information and feedback. Bad thing is that US traders are not allowed. Otherwise seems to be a fair platform and I really like the feature of copying professional traders.

Ig...be careful

As others have stated I think IG's trading platform is excellent, in fact, probably the best. However watch these guys. I built my trading account up to 21,500. The markets have shown some srength in recent days and with confidence opened a 200pp position on the germany 30 at 5596. I imagine many traders would have opened similar positions on the euros strongets economy to show some strength after hitting a prior support. So....IG decided to push the price down to take out all the stops, even when my account was significantly down, the strength in the german index was sufficient to allow the rade to continue. Anyway, IG pushed the price down so much, it wiped out the account.....now look where the german index is. Needless to say the account would now be showing 50,000 plus at the time of writing. IG knew they would be paying out alot of money on this index, so took the price down to take out all the stops. Be careful with this company.

Disappointed

All I need to say is I am disappointed. Didn't realise how good my previous broker was.

THEY NEVER CHANGE!

THEY MOVE THE GOAL POSTS..THEY WILL NEVER CHANGE..

Be careful

I have no dought but they run against you .If you place a stop, they run to the stop.
Like a casino when you start you win, then everything changes , and you are taken to the clener .

Most of those ganecy and broker they use the same software all linked to eachother, they run super computer software that ordinary person does not know .
They can run the price down until all traders are clened up ! They earn commission for this , two commission, yor money and the bank stock money !

Those firms they appear to be regulated, yes we know they are regulated by crooks !

Of course any casino has his winner otherwise no one would want to go there ! its the same here ,

on 100 traded tickets going long , 97 % of them the rpice go down . It shows how verything its very well rigged against .

Save your money !

Where Amateur Traders Go To Die

The amateurs who roll up with 5-10K accounts are hoovered up in no time, in fact if you can't afford an account manager then 'forget about it'. My advice is, take your 10k to Vegas and lose it there, at least they will give you free drinks on the way down. There's a reason you don't pay taxes on Spread Bet accounts, it's because the Inland Revenue is to busy laughing from behind the sofa.

Will let you down when you need them the most

Take 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.

Passing market losses to their clients

It appears that they are simply betting against their clients in every way possible, hiding behind their terms & conditions. IG seems to treat their clients in any way they like. If they are losing money in their market positions or something just doesn't work out for them, it seems that they can simply pass the losses onto their customers. If they make money, well, it is good trading on their part and naturally keep the profits for themselves. They don't execute your limit orders when the market goes to your limit order (by showing wide prices) or give you any improvement (if market quickly moves through your limit order), but they would happily pass you an unlimited slippage on your stop order when it suits them... They are not really providing a trading service, they simply appear to be chasing your cash. Stay away...!!

Trade with a non market maker broker, they take a commission, nothing more, or at least, trade with a broker that will not try to take 100 or 200 times the money you can afford to lose.

IG Markets is market maker on his the CFD.
So, they manage their prices on their products.

IG Markets chases negatives balances of their client. In 5 minutes, they can claim you 100 or 200 times the money you can afford to lose.

Without stop loss, you take an enormous risk to finally lose (potentially 100 or 200 times your balance account), it's obvious.

With stop loss :
When you win, you can see on forums many people complaining about stop orders executed, while the real underlying only went several points away !!

When you lose, they will not execute your stop order if they cannot trade a hedge on their side !! For example, the EUR/CHF quoted more than 1.17 one minute (which already is a very long time) after the PEG removal, but they finally executed the orders at 0.925 !!
And after this "treatment" of your positions, they will go after you to take the negative balance on your account (potentially 100 or 200 times the initial balance of your account), which is : the loss they managed (by not executing your stop order) !!!

My advice : Trade with a non market maker broker, they take a commission, nothing more, or at least, trade with a broker that will not try to take 100 or 200 times the money you can afford to lose.

This last point is very easy, just see the list of brokers that forgave negative balances of their clients after the EUR/CHF PEG removal.

They treat clients like wolves kill sheep

They treat clients like wolves kill sheep - I remember the first time that Twitter released a trading update warning on 05/02/2014 and Twitter went down by some 20% - my stake was GBP10 per point. They spiked my stop and instead of winning some 20k I ended up some 5k underwater because they closed the trade on the pre-opening before any trading had taken place. I complained and when their dealer called me I could hear him chuckling and rubbing his hands in glee and in the most arrogant manner he told me 'I was unlucky! Yeah right!!!!!'
I find IG arrogant and having had business dealings with them I can say they are arrogant with a false sense of self-importance; sadly as in most of the City ethics don't come first in their business dealings. Steer clear.

Andy

rock solid track-record and policies in 'swiftly' bankrupting their clients

Like no other company IG bankrupts their clients/victims with 'swift' action, in the most cold-blooded way.
Their track record in doing so is without comparison in the industry: http://www.smh.com.au/business/when-brokers-are-the-enemy-20100827-13w40.html
In case the link does not work google: When brokers are the enemy - Sydney Morning Herald
Personally, I was robbed of a six figure sum - and earned cynical comments from their Credit department - the abyss is so unbelievably deep, there is only one advise for retail traiders: RUN AWAY, spend your money on something nice, treat yourself, be good to yourself

IG are a sly Market Maker - continually changing the goalposts

I wish I could say something nice about IG Markets, but I can't... maybe I can say a few things.
I have been trading full time now for over 5 years. The first broker I used was IG. They were a very good platform to learn on due to the very small contract sizes. The prorealtime charts are also excellent. Once I started making money I openned an account with MF Global. They were great until they went under. Having lost most of my trading capital I went back to trading with IG Markets, afraid of putting my money into another broker and I perpetuated with them for too long.
I have had many instances where trades have been rejected.... almost all of them highly profitable trades. Speaking with the staff at the help desk they came to the conclusion that it might have been a "flash error". Ok, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. So my solution to the "flash error" was to write my own trading application built on top of their REST API. Using this, I thought great... no more errors in getting my trades submitted. But guess what happened??? you guessed it, rejected trades. I rang up to find out why the trade was rejected and the reason was: "The markets were too volatile, so we turned off the ability to trade in the API". "You what" I said... You have got to be kidding me. IG has cost me at least $20000 in missed trading opportunities where I pressed the button... most of them were very profitable within 5 minutes. If I traded the real futures then every single one of them would have gone through.
It seems to me that the moment they detect that there is a situation where they are going to lose money, then they attempt to stitch it up. This kind of behaviour I find intolerable... so off I go to a real broker, not a broker that has no interest in me winning my trades.
So if you are considering IG Markets, my advice to you is, train yourself up with very small amounts of money... and once you start making money consistently then stop using them.