Webull Expert Rating

Yes, on City Index’s trading platform, you can trade more than 13,500 markets, including 40 equity indices, over 10,000 UK and international shares and ETFs, 19 commodities, and 183 FX pairs. This means they offer more markets than most of the other online trading platforms regulated by the FCA in the UK.

Founded in 1983 City Index has a solid and longstanding presence in online trading; its trading platform is a genuine rival to IG and CMC Markets. In major UK markets, City Index pricing is competitive and often market-leading, but can be expensive for Asian markets.

City Index’s free desktop trading platform is web-based, so there is nothing to download you simply log in and trade on your internet browser. You can create and customise your own workspaces and layouts, adding quotes, charts, news and trading signals. However, you can also use City Index’s Market 360 feature to create a top-down view of an instrument in a single click, which contains charts, quotes, news and product information all in one place.

You can trade or place limit orders directly from a chart or you can click on the bid-ask quote at the top of the page in the 360 view. You can instantly access technical analysis, calendars, and newsflow by clicking on the market analysis, but one of the trading platform’s stand-out features is Performance Analytics which provides constantly updated reports on how to improve your trading, based account history.

Overall, the City Index trading platform is very intuitive to use and it has a clean, clearly laid out interface making it suitable for beginners who want a simple platform with trading signals. It is also advanced enough for experienced traders executing large orders and needing post-trade analytics or voice brokerage as backup.

What does the City Index trading platform look like?

FOREX.com won Best Forex Broker in the 2025 Good Money Guide Awards.
Plus, as well as being regulated by the top tier FCA in the UK, FOREX.com is regulated by CySEC, NFA, CIRO, MAS, ASIC, CIMA, and FSA with access to over 7,000 markets, exclusively via CFDs.

24-Hour FOREX.com Test

I took FOREX.com out for a 24-hour test drive, to trade with real money and try out some of the key features on the streets of the City of London. Here’s what happened…

“For FX sake”, I thought to myself when faced with writing a review about a forex broker. Firstly because all these brokers do is offer access to the forex market (or so I believed). Secondly, because I’ve never had much success with forex trading.  I find the nuances of intra-day technical analysis too complicated.

I’m an old-fashioned trader – I like to look at the market and think it’s either overvalued or undervalued and, in my mind anyway, that’s easier when looking at a company’s share price, an index or even a commodity. But for some reason, with forex trading, I’ve never really got the hang of it.

Having said that, I have dealt currency for about 20 years now, but more as a broker rather than as a trader. For instance, I used to do some prime brokerage for institutions that would hedge their currency exposure when buying aeroplanes.

But I was so frustrated with how opaque pricing was in currency trading, that I decided to start up my own currency brokerage specialising in high-value currency transfers (£250,000 upwards) and undercutting everyone. It was called Berry FX, you can still see the demo on YouTube. Basically, personal service with the best rates anywhere ever. But now I just let other currency brokers compete for clients by trying to offer the best exchange rates.

But you want to know what I think of FOREX.com.

24 Hour Test

I took FOREX.com out for a 24-hour test drive around the City of London, putting some real trades on whilst going about my business to see if I could make any money.

I started out at the Bank of England with £10,000 on account at 11:30am. Lunch was a few minutes’ walk from the tube station, so I took the opportunity to put some trades on using FOREX.com’s trading signals. I’ve used these for years; back in 2018, they were known as GetGo and it was a standalone forex trading app. When I reviewed it then, I said these were the future of forex trading signals but are they still?

There are a couple of things that make these signals better than the rest.

• They tell you the success rate.
• The signal is linked to an order ticket.

When I was walking down King William Street to L’Antipasto to meet some contacts for lunch, I put a few trades on. First, I looked at the traders that had a historic success rate of over 50% and followed them. Then I looked at trading signals that had a success rate of less than 50% and traded against them. It’s a pretty simple strategy that generally works (not always, though). I used the classic stop/limit risk/reward ratio, aiming for twice the potential loss as a potential win. Again, simple forex trading strategies. The market is not hard to call, but if you get a trade right, it often pays to let it run for longer, but if it’s wrong, close it sooner.

Trading Central

On the way to my next meeting, I took a few moments on London Bridge to look at some of the other signals on FOREX.com: Trading Central. Now, Trading Central has been providing technical analysis to brokers for decades and supplies a constant stream of manually and automatically updated trading ideas throughout the day to give traders an indication of where the markets may go.

It’s not as fluid as the trading signals, as you have to put the trades in manually, but still gives you a bit of stimulus. This is great for someone like me because I generally have an idea of what I want to do from eyeballing a chart (I did, after all, run a technical analysis division for 5 years), but it’s nice to get confirmation of your thoughts one way or another.

Execution

When you are actually trading there are some great other features on the app:

• Swipe to trade: a bit like Tinder (so I hear)
• Chart on tickets: with a quick tap, you can bring up a chart when on the order ticket (to double-check)
• Working orders on charts: when looking at a chart, you can see your working orders and positions
• Position potential: as well as seeing what margin is required when placing a trade, you can also see and set your stops and limits as a potential monetary amount instead of pips

Post-Trade Analytics

Once you’ve done a bit of trading, you can review your trading history and see where you do well and where you can improve. This is a great feature as it can break down how well you trade by time of day, markets or volatility.

You can also set up “Play Maker” if you have a trading strategy and want to stick to it. Obviously, you can’t get that sort of data in a 24-hour test drive, so I’ll have to revisit that another time.

Demo Account

FOREX.com has a pretty good demo account. In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between the demo and live trading platform. You get the same functionality and as trades are OTC, the same prices.

However, when I opened a demo account to test it, I already had a real account. So after I got my demo account login details, I clicked through to the “Webtrader” portal and (funny or alarming, depending on how you look at it) my live account details were auto-filled in by Google Chrome.

Now, had I not been checking my email, to ensure that the platform had sent me through my credentials, I might not have noticed that I was logging into a live account. It could have been disastrous if I’d started trading away thinking it was paper money. Even more so as you get £10,000 in demo funds and I’d deposited £10,000 in my live account when I took FOREX.com on a 24-hour trading signal test drive.

It reminded me of when a trader thought that he was trading on a demo account and put $1bn worth of orders through and then sued his broker because it voided his €10m profits.

TradingView & MetaQuotes

I had a good play about with TradingView, as it’s now the go-to destination for traders. TradingView is a sort of social network for traders where you can view charts (they are excellent) and post trading ideas (take with a pinch of salt). As TradingView has grown, it has also become an execution venue, so you can link your FOREX.com trading account and deal straight from the charts. This shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for most traders as the charts on the app and web-based platform are provided by TradingView (which, incidentally, is one of the largest financial-based websites in the world now).

You can also trade on MT4 or MT5 (but only MT5 in the EU), if you are into that sort of thing…

Am I a Forexpert?

I did make money on day one, mainly thanks to putting on a GBP-USD trade that covered most of the losses from some of the other trades. When I used the trading signals 5 years ago, I also made money. Day 2 wasn’t so good. On my way to an investor show, I gave back a few pennies but still ended up on top. But I have to admit my traders were calculated guesses rather than heavily researched positions.

I don’t like holding positions overnight, as day trading reduces not only your margin requirements but also increases the amount of sleep you get because you don’t wake up with cold sweats in the middle of the night worrying about Asian interest rates.

Overall would I recommend forex.com? Yes, if you are going to trade forex and don’t know where to start, as it’s a massive brand with global reach and owned by a listed brokerage with an institutional pedigree. As far as box-ticking is concerned, it ticks the lot. Or should I say pips the lot…

Capital.com has a user friendly and intuitive trading platform and app, that gives access to the most popular financial markets with competitive spreads with the ability to reduce risk by decreasing your leverage. Trading via the app has always been capital.com’s forte, and in 202, it won our award for “best trading app” not in part due to the fact that the company CTO has extensive experience in building engaging apps like Candy Crush.

What makes Capital.com different? Thumbs up, literally

Do you know what one of the most impressive thing about Capital.com is? They put the buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the app.

I don’t mean that in a facetious way, it’s genuinely a brilliant feature.

This may not sound like much but it’s a good example of how Capital.com has integrated decades of analytics, experience, feedback and customer data into creating a very easy-to-use intuitive trading app from scratch.

When Capital.com first became authorised by the FCA back in 2018, I visited their offices in London to have a chat about what they offer. The two main things we discussed were button placement and AI.

Trading App

But anyway, if you’ve updated your iPhone to the latest iOS you’ll notice that Apple has started moving things to the bottom of the screen, the search bar for instance. This is because, phones are getting bigger, and your thumb can’t reach the top of the screen if you are holding it with one hand. This is something that Capital.com figured out would make trading easier 5 years ago. I’ve just been through a bunch of other trading apps on my phone and still, amazingly enough, none of the other brokers have done this yet.

Capital.com was also the first to integrate artificial intelligence to help you improve your trading, they say, based on the Martingale theory. When I spoke to Chris Demetriou, the head of sales in the UK, he said that the system should give you prompts based on your previous trades. So for example, if you are about to do a trade that is similar to ones you have constantly lost on before, you should get a “are you sure you want to do this” notification.

Leverage Control

Everybody knows, that one of the main reasons people lose money when trading is overleverage. This could be either from not having enough free cash on account to give your position breathing space, or simply putting on trades that are too risky. One really good feature is that you can change your leverage based on asset class. The default leverage is the max that retail traders in the UK are permitted, but you can change this to 1:1 so you need to fully pay up for positions. A sensible thing to do if you are just getting started, which can help reduce excessive losses. As your experience grows you can increase your leverage accordingly.

Hedging

You can also set the platform to put on hedging positions, so you can be long and short the same thing at the same time. Why you ask? Well, it can help you run longer-term positions and short-term hedges. This in fact is the very point of CFDs. They were originally hedging tools, and still a good way to protect your long-term investment portfolio against short-term market corrections without having to close off your positions.

Customer Support

Customer support is pretty good too, you can get in touch via the chat widget on the platform, whatsapp or telegram. When I tested it I got a response within a minute and the issue I had was dealt with quickly (uploading ID to verify my account if you must know).

TradingView

You can’t trade from the charts, but when you have open positions they are overlayed along with your stops and limits, which you can move by dragging and dropping. But, if charting is your thing, you can join the other 78,000 Capital.com customers using and trading from TradingView.

Proprietory Tech

One thing I quite like though is that instead of relying on third-party software, the Capital.com trading platform is built in-house, and if you want something you can ask for it. For example, previously on the app you could see where an asset is as a percentage relative to the daily range. But, a customer asked, if you could see it in points too. So, that was quickly integrated so that you can now toggle between percentages and points. A small thing, but indicative of a broker that can do things and does do things, rather than just logging a helpdesk ticket.

Refinitiv

There are no trading signals on the platform or app, but you do get access to Refinitiv reports on US stocks, which give you a good overview of historic and potential future financial health. A good feature for those looking at slightly longer-term positions.

Overnight funding

Talking of long positions, or longer long positions, Capital.com also display quite clearly what your overnight financing rates are going to be on a daily basis. I’m sure this is a regulatory obligation anyway, but it’s done in a way that you can actually see what the price is, rather than an opaque formula. It gives a bit more transparency about how much a position is going to cost you.

Investmate

If you are new to trading, they have a stand-alone app called Investmate, which puts you through a series of bitesize courses that explain the financial markets. Capital.com also own currency.com if you fancy a punt on crypto, and shares.com so we can expect to see more comprehensive physical investing options soon.

Yes, Plus500’s trading platform has evolved nicely over the years from a simple interface to an intuitive execution venue for CFDs on the major markets and stocks.

1. Submit some documents to the company (identification, residence verification, etc.)
2. Read through several documents and complete a questionnaire
3. To be able to trade, you will need to fund your account (in the UK, the minimum initial deposit is £100).

Pricing: It’s dynamic so moves with the market for minimum spreads.

Plus500 does not charge any trading commissions when you place a CFD trade. However, there are some fees you need to be aware of including:

• Overnight funding fees – This is either added to or subtracted from your account when holding a position after a certain time
• Currency conversion fee – There is a fee (0.7%) for all trades on instruments denominated in a currency different to the currency of your account
• Guaranteed stop-loss order fees – If you request a guaranteed stop loss on a trade, there will be a small fee
• Inactivity fees – If you do not log in to your trading account for three months, a fee of up to USD $10 per month will be applied to your account.

Withdrawals are free of charge no matter how many you make per month.

Deposits are also free of charge.

Market Access: Very good, Plus500 are always first to try new asset classes

With Plus500, you can trade CFDs on a range of assets and instruments including:

• Shares (e.g. Lloyds Bank, Tesla, Apple)
• Currencies/forex (e.g. GBP/USD)
• Commodities (e.g. gold, oil)
• Options (exchange-traded options)
• Exchange-traded funds (ETFs)
• Indices (e.g. FTSE 100, S&P 500, ESG indices)

Overall, there are over 2,800 assets you can trade with CFDs.

The maximum amount of leverage you can use with Plus500 varies depending on the asset class as shown in the table below. If you are trading forex, you can potentially borrow up to 30 times your own money. For shares, you can only borrow up to five times your own capital.

Plus500 margin rates:

• Shares – 1:5
• Forex – 1:30
• Commodities – 1:20
• Indices – 1:20
• Options – 1:5
• ETFs – 1:5

Platform & Apps: Basic execution, but it does the job well

Plus500 trading apps and platform also offers several tools to help traders manage risk including:

• Stop-loss orders – Traders can use these orders to automatically close out a losing position at a specific level
• Guaranteed stop-loss orders – A guaranteed stop-loss puts an absolute limit on your potential loss from a losing trade
• Trailing stop-loss orders – This type of stop loss moves upwards as the price of the security being traded rises
• Take profit orders – Traders can use these orders to automatically close out a winning position at a specific level.

Customer Service: Plus500 doesn’t have a phone option, but its live chat is sufficient

Plus500’s customer service options are limited to online chat, email and WhatsApp. So, you can’t contact the company by telephone. However, don’t let that put you off. We contacted the company via online chat and were very impressed with the service and support offered. 

It’s worth noting that support is available 24/7. This is a big plus – some other CFD providers only provide support during the week.

If you are a larger or professional trader you can get access to Plus500’s Premium Service Package which includes:

• A dedicated premium service client manager.
• Periodic emails containing expert analysis of upcoming trading events.
• External trading webinars.
• A premium service customer support team.

The premium service is invitation only. To become a premium customer, you must have a real-money trading account.

However, if you want better margin rates but are not interested in the premium package you can upgrade to a professional account. The Plus500 professional account is an account designed for professional traders. With this account, you have access to higher levels of leverage (e.g. 1:20 for shares).

To be eligible for a professional account, you must meet two of the following three criteria:

• You’ve performed an average of at least 10 transactions per quarter, of significant size, over the previous four quarters on the relevant market (with Plus500 and/or other providers)
• You have a portfolio worth more than €500,000 (including cash savings and financial instruments)
• You have worked in the financial sector for at least a year in a professional position that requires knowledge of the related transactions or services.

Research & Analysis: Some sentiment, but limited education and analysis. Plus500 offers a range of additional features designed to help traders make money, including:

• Charting tools – Plus500’s platform offers charts with a wide range of indicators and drawing tools to help traders identify and capitalise on patterns and trends (there 13 charting tools and over 100 indicators)
• Market news – On its website, there is a section dedicated to news and market insights
• Alerts – With Plus500, you can set up real-time email, SMS, and push notifications for trade alerts (e.g. price alerts or % change alerts)
• An economic calendar – The economic calendar is designed to help traders prepare for important economic data (e.g. inflation data, retail sales data, job reports, PMI data)
• +Insights – This is a feature that allows Plus500 users learn more about market trends based on the company’s internal data (e.g. most bought stocks, most sold stocks)
• Watchlists – Users can manage multiple watchlists.
• Trading Academy – Plus500’s Trading Academy offers a range of educational products including eBooks, videos, and FAQs
• Webinars – Plus500 offers regular webinars to its professional clients
• A free unlimited demo account – With the demo account, novice traders can learn to trade CFDs without risking real money.

Pepperstone does have it’s own in the UK but traders mainly use cTrader and MT5/MT5 but is building their own trading platform. This is mainly due to the unreliability of third-party platforms, specifically MT4 app being withdrawn from the App store.

Pepperstone has launched a proprietary trading platform in Australia. Historically, traders have only been able to use MT4, MT5 and cTrader. Both are great platform, but this means that Pepperstone can be more connected to its customers and adapt the platform to their specific needs.

We can expect to see Pepperstone’s proprietary platform rolled out globally shortly.

Overall, Pepperstone’s MT4 is a good option for traders that want to automate their trading or want a basic account with very low costs.

What does Pepperstone’s trading platform look like?

I’ve been using Spreadex now for at least 20 years now. I’ve worked with them professionally and know them socially. So in my updated 2024 review of Spreadex, I’m going to highlight what sort of broker they are and what type of traders will get the most from their trading platform and service.

There are two types of broker in the derivatives world, those who spot a gap in the market and try to exploit it, and those that are in it for the love of the business. With my broker’s hat on, and in my expert opinion, they are the latter. You can tell by the quality and turnover of their staff, the fact that Spreadex generates the majority of their business from referrals rather than a massive digital market budget and the longevity of their service, that if you are going to trade, they are a broker worth putting your business through.

Market access

First off, what can you trade? Spreadex started off offering financial spread betting, which (as I hope you’ll know if you are reading this review) is a tax-free way to trade the financial markets. Trades are structured as bets so you don’t have to pay capital gains tax on your profits. However, as the appeal of trading with a UK-based broker (for regulatory and financial security purposes) has increased, Spreadex introduced CFD trading for non-UK residents a few years ago.

You can trade over 10,000 markets with Spreadex, so, if you are more adventurous than most who just seem to want to tap away on Tesla and Netflix these days, they also have a huge range of smaller-cap shares to trade. A lot of brokers don’t offer these, as the majority of clients stick to the top ten traded instruments and tend to add markets when clients request them. However, going back to my point earlier about service, Spreadex has a huge range of markets available to trade, before you need them, not after you ask for them.

They also have a very good range of indices, with access to Asian and European markets, as well as the major UK and US markets. Options trading is fairly limited – you can only trade on the FTSE 100 (UK100) and DAX 40 (German 40), but you can write options (go short) with Spreadex, whereas some brokers only allow you to buy options.

You can trade the usual commodities, currencies, bonds and fixed-income markets (I don’t know why I still find the phrase Bund, Bobl and Shatz funny when looking at treasuries watchlists after all these years). If you want to have a punt on themes rather than individual assets Spreadex has a wide range of ETFs for placing sector bets on things like Healthcare, Cannabis, CyberSecurity and so on so you don’t have to buy a load of individual shares.

However, most of the ETFs are US based, there are not that many UK or European ETFs which can be traded in the morning without having to wait for the Americans to get out of bed. There are also a few ETFs, that track markets like Saudia Arabia (where an outright index isn’t always available).

Spreadex Pricing, Charges & Fees

There isn’t much to say about pricing when it comes to reviewing decent brokers these days because they are all about the same, and that is to say, very competitive. Spreadex earns money by widening the spread from the bid/offer price and including commission in that. For UK stocks, this is 0.1%, so for example, if you buy 10,000 Lloyds shares with Spreadex, the spread will be 49.21/49.33 instead of 49.26/49.28. So £10,000 worth of Lloyds would cost you £4,933 instead of £4,928. So a £5k trade will cost you £5, a £10k trade will cost you £10, a £100,000 trade will cost you £100, and so.

With US stocks Spreadex have also recently capped the spread on larger stocks at $3.5 to make trading the US market cheaper. For example, they mark up spreads by 0.15% for stocks like Tesla, but the spread is capped at 3.5. So, if Tesla shares are $16922.5 offered, then if they were marked up by 0.15% the Spreadex offer price would be $16948 (rounded). But because spreads are capped at $3.5, you would buy at $16926. So if you are trading at £1 per point as a spread bet that is a saving of £22 on roughly a £17k trade versus a broker who charges the same but hasn’t capped their spreads.

If you are holding positions in the slightly longer term Spreadex charge 3% over under SONIA, which is not quite the cheapest, but still very low compared to other brokers like eToro for example, that charges 6.4% over/under SONIA. To put that in perspective, if you have £10,000 exposure with eToro with SONIA at 4% for a year, it would cost you £1,400 in overnight funding, but with Spreadex only £650.

For the major FX, commodity, and index markets, Spreadex are pretty much inline with everyone else.

Spreadex Platform & Apps

Way back when I first opened my account, I remember being sent a VHS video of a very charming curly-haired man standing on Primrose Hill (I think) with the City as a backdrop explaining the pros and cons of spread betting. But Spreadex has come a long way from just providing voice brokerage to having one of the best trading platforms out there.

One thing I particularly like about the Spreadex trading platform is that it has been built and innovated inhouse. For example, they have added the ability to overlay Pro Trend Lines. This automatically adds support and resistance levels, which takes a bit of the guesswork out of potential entry and exit points. You can also, overlay the VWAP, a price point, particularly useful, as it’s what hedge funds use for working daily orders that are well above the normal market size.

A nice feature of the Spreadex app is that you can change the columns from just change, to monthly and yearly high and low. Plus, should you, for some reason, want to do technical analysis on your phone instead of a proper computer, you can add indicators, free draw and overlay indicators like Fibonacci ranges whilst out and about.

There is a huge amount of technical indicators for advanced traders, but for beginners, Spreadex has all the usual range of risk management tools like stops, guaranteed stops (which protect you if the market gaps), trailing stops (so you can lock in profits the more profitable a position gets) and price alerts. More relevantly, though, if you are a beginner, and you don’t understand something, instead of having to wade through a quagmire of online educational resources, you can pick up the phone and ask for something to be explained.

Spreadex is really a very good all-round trading platform that can cater for large customers as well as beginners. It’s simple, and modular so you can create your own desktop environment (if you’re trading on multiple screens). Plus, along with the rest of the world, Spreadex is now integrated with TradingView.

Research & Analysis

There is also enough news flow to keep you informed and up-to-date with market news without getting overloaded. Through the app and web platform, you get access to the economic calendar of market-moving events, news filtered by product from Thomson Reuters, and trading updates from Spreadex dealers, highlighting the day’s key factors, and what traders should be aware of.

Customer Service At Spreadex

One thing that has driven me mad over the past few years is that trading platforms seem to have become massively self-serving. In that, they are only interested in getting more customers, and onboarding traders, so that they can say they have seen massive growth and a race to the bottom for pricing. What this means, of course, is that there is too much emphasis on the platform and not enough on the client. For example, if you try and phone up most brokers, you can’t actually get through to anyone to ask a simple question from someone who knows what they are talking about.

But, when writing this review, I needed clarification on a couple of points. First I used the chat box on the Spreadex trading platform and got through to someone almost immediately, without even a whiff of an automated chatbot. Then, when I phoned the dealing desk for something else, the phone was picked by one of their dealers, who was very helpful and sent all the info I needed via email a few minutes later. For retail traders, you don’t really get that anywhere else.

Yes, it’s a great all-round trading platform. Here’s five things that I think make it stand out.

1 – Tax free profits

IG’s main web-based trading platform is used by CFD and Spread Betting clients, although clients can also download MT4, ProRealtime and L2 Dealer. The platform is developed in-house and is suitable for most traders where you can access 17,000 markets to trade as a CFD or financial spread bet. The trading platform also provides access to non-leveraged trading accounts for physical shares dealing and ETF investing with SIPP and ISA options.

2 – Automated trading strategies on MT4 and IG Markets

There are a few limitations to the main platform though, for example, there is no facility for automated trading strategies. However, IG offers two alternative platforms (MT4 & 5) for those clients who use Algos and trading bots. However, for most users, IG’s in-house platform will be more than sufficient for their needs.

3 – Trading signals

Some stand-out features of the trading platform are how Autochartist and PIA trading signals are copied straight to order tickets and their ability to constantly innovate features such as adding logarithmic charting and creating news and research around what traders are looking at on the platform.

4 – Competative pricing

Compared to other online trading platforms IG’s pricing is always competitive, they are by no means the cheapest broker, but they are not expensive. IG tends to win business based on market range, service, and liquidity and keeps spreads to the lower end of the industry standard.  Whilst pricing is an important factor when choosing a trading platform, with IG, you get what you pay for and that is a fairly priced excellent all-round service.

5 – Deep liquidity

On some of the major traded indices and FX pairs, IG’s CEO told me that their internal liquidity can be better than the on-exchange order book. Which means for larger traders trading popular markets, you can potentially get better fills than trading with DMA.

What does the IG trading platform look like?

Overall, IG has one of the most comprehensive trading platforms around. And after 46 years of offering margin products to retail customers, IG knows what works and what customers expect from their broker, namely, reliable pricing, technology and customer service.

Yes, one of the stand-out features of CMC Markets’ main trading platform is the client sentiment indicators. Whilst most trading platforms provide this information, where you can see what percentage of the client base is long or short an asset, with CMC Markets you can break sentiment down by time frame and profitable clients. This, essentially, gives you an indication of where the smart money is going.

Out-of-hours post and pre market trading (24/5)

Starting Tuesday, 17 June 2025, traders will be able to spread bet and trade CFDs 24 hours a day, five days a week (24/5) on over 60 major US stocks, including the ‘Magnificent Seven’ (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla). Trading opens at 1am (UK time) on Mondays and runs continuously until 10pm on Fridays.

Share Baskets

Another key feature I liked when testing the platform was the share baskets. CMC has created its own sectors on popular themes like driverless cars, cannabis and cyber security. These give traders the ability to quickly speculate on themes through share baskets which are quicker to build than ETFs, meaning as a trader you can take advantage of sector moves quicker than on other trading platforms.

Market Access

CMC Markets’ trading platform has one of the widest market ranges for CFD and spread betting clients: you can trade over 12,000 instruments including an industry-leading 338 forex pairs, 124 commodities, and over 1,000 ETFs. However, CMC Markets doesn’t offer as many UK shares (745) and US stocks (4,968) as some other platforms, instead focussing on the most heavily traded and liquid companies.

What Does the CMC Markets Trading Platform Look Like?

Compared to IG, the CMC Markets trading platform feels a bit more professional: it has a classic black background, more flashing lights and a slightly more urgent trading ticket. As such, it is more suitable for more active traders trading intra-day.

Yes, XTB’s trading platform offers access to the usual markets and pricing is fairly standard, but what sets it apart from other brokers is some of the trading platform’s unique functionality.

Most brokers offer it now but XTB was actually one of the first brokers to offer post-trade analysis, where the trading platform will show you where you are profitable and where you lose money.

One nice feature is the ability to close all of your positions in one go. A time saver if you are a day trader and want to be flat at the end of the day, or if you want out of the market in a hurry.

XTB produce their own market news, which is constantly updated throughout the day, which you can filter by asset class. If you combine this with the heatmap feature, stock scanner, sentiment indicators and automatically updated “hot” watchlist that shows where the order flow is going you can hunt out trading ideas

Overall, XTB is a very good trading platform that offers a lot more than just vanilla trading, suitable for new traders or more experienced investors wanting to create and hedge their own markets.

Interactive Brokers won “best trading platform” in our 2024 and 2023 awards as they offer an exceptionally advanced platform for advanced traders, but also a very simple interface for beginners. They also scored very highly in our annual survey for pricing and market range.

We rank Interactive Brokers as the best online trading platform as it is exceptionally good for sophisticated trading. It offers by far the most access to the most markets through DMA futures, options, physical shares and CFDs. it also has the most advanced execution tools for retail traders, including complex order types such as VWAP, pairs trading, iceberg, and algorithmic trading.

When I was testing the trading platform, one thing that is immediately obvious though is that the desktop version is almost too good for retail traders and most will only use a small percentage of its capabilities. However, new traders should not be put off by its institutional-grade offering. The heavy-duty Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation is available as a download on PC, but there is also a simplified web-based version that is very simple to use called Portal.

On the web-based Portal trading platform, you can execute trades as physical deals, CFDs, futures and options (on the widest range of stocks). There are lots of webinars (with the founder Thomas Peterffy and his team) that cover trading strategy. You can also evaluate your portfolio based on how ethical your positions are. There are stock scanners, fund scanners, bond scanners, a fundamentals explorer for hunting out undervalued stocks and you can convert currency at some of the best exchange rates around.

IBKR also gives you more control over your currency exposure. Most other trading platforms automatically convert currency when you trade instruments outside your base currency but IBKR lets you do it manually on a per-trade or ad hoc basis.

What does Interactive Brokers trading platform look like?