Best Spread Betting Platforms 2025

Is City Index a good spread betting broker?

Overall, City Index’s spread betting platform is one of the best around with competitive pricing, a wide range of markets to trade, and some very good added value tools to help traders seek out opportunities and improve their trading strategy.

I would say that overal,l City Index is a better spread betting broker than CMC Markets, especially if you are trading a broad range of shares, particularly smaller cap shares. CMC Markets is more focussed on the most liquid markets like EURGBP and indices and can have tighter pricing. But, for an all-round service, City Index is a better spread betting broker for most UK traders.

Spread bets at City Index are available on 12,000 markets including, 23 equity indices, thousands of UK and international stocks and ETFs, 19 commodities, bonds, and interest rates, and an industry-leading 182 FX pars. City Index also has an options desk for spread betting on index and populare stock options.

When I tested City Index’s spread betting account Performance Analytics really made it stand out which is unique to City Index. Whilst other brokers provide post-trade analysis, When StoneX (City Index’s parent company) acquired Chasing Returns, they were able to exclusively provide a huge amount of data to help their customers stick to a trading plan and provide insights into what can make them a better spread bettor.

As with most spread betting brokers, City Index clients trade via two-way bid-offer prices the difference between the bid and offer representing the spread. These vary by product and contract but in the FTSE 100 index City charges a minimum spread of 1 index point and on the Germany 30 or Dax it charges 1.20 points. You can trade Spread Bets on leading equity indices up to 24 hours per day. For stock trading, spreads of 0.8% for UK and 1.8 cents per share are built into the price.

Is Pepperstone a good spread betting broker?

Overall, Pepperstone is a good choice for clients that want to spread bet on MetaQuotes as it’s MT4 & MT5 package is one of the best around. Plus Pepperstone are one of only two brokers that offers spread betting through TradingView.

Pepperstone operates a tiered approach to spread betting accounts. Newer clients typically joined Pepperstone’s standard accounts; more experienced traders can elect to join the firm’s Razor account. The latter is used mainly for scalping and algorithmic trading. As seen below, Razor accounts have lower spreads than standard accounts in the FX markets but they also incur some commissions.

Pepperstone does not charge an inactivity fee, which is excellent for low-latency traders. The firm has no regular maintenance fee like some investment accounts. There is no minimum deposit either.

In the UK, Pepperstone offers protection on negative balance for retail clients only. This means that should the market swing violently against you and wipe out your risk capital, your account will not go below zero. Professional accounts, however, will be required to post additional equity and can go into negative equity.

For funding, Pepperstone accepts Visa, MasterCard, Paypal or bank transfers.

Most withdrawals are free, although international Telegraphic Transfer (TT) may incur fees by the banks which will be passed on to clients.

Is Capital.com any good for trading?

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.

What is financial spread betting on Spreadex?

Overall, Spreadex is an excellent spread betting broker for those who want personal service and the ability to speculate on financial as well as sports markets.

Based in St Albans, just outside of London Spreadex offers a simple but innovative spread betting platform for trading a wide range of assets. Spreadex has always focused on customer service, winning business from referrals and maintaining long-term relationships with their clients.

It’s a testament to the business that they build their own technology in-house and are reserved with marketing campaigns.

They offer access to over 10,000 markets and recently Spreadex has reduced spreads across the major assets and still offers access to smaller-cap stocks compared to some of the other providers.

The spread betting platform does have some good charting options, such as adding pro trading tools like WVAP and pro trend lines, as well as the usual obligatory technical indicators like Bollinger Bands and Moving Averages. You can see what percentage of clients are long on watchlists and you can quickly go to a specific time point on a chart.

There is also a wide range of ETFs, ETCs and Trackers to spread bet on for sector speculation, and you also have the option to trade political markets.

Is IG a good spread betting platform?

Yes, IG by far has the most comprehensive market access for any spread betting broker. You can trade around 17,000 markets, which is significantly more than the 12,000 or so offered by City Index and CMC Markets. The majority of the extra markets are made up fo smaller cap shares and exotic fx pairs, commodities and indices meaning that there are more opportunities vailable.

However, one downside is that even through IG charges competitive commission (included in the spread) for for spread betting, in some markets brokers like Pepperstone or Spreadex can be cheaper.

IG won “best spread betting broker” in our 2023 and 2022 awards as it continues to be the best spread betting platform. As well as inventing the concept of financial spread betting in 1974, IG also offers access to the most markets, with the most liquidity and are, (by market cap as of April ’22) the biggest spread betting broker valued at over £3.5bn.

Overall, IG is the best spread betting broker is suitable for beginners through to professional high volume and high-frequency traders.

With IG you can spread bet on over 17,000 markets (an industry-leading amount), including 51 forex pairs, 38 commodities, 34 indices and over 10,000 UK and international stocks.

A few key features that make IG’s spread betting platform stand out are the ability to bet on smaller-cap shares, trade IPOs pre-market via their “grey market” and their liquidity. IG’s liquidity can actually be better than the underlying exchange, so you can place and get filled in large orders using IG’s internal liquidity when there might not be the volume on the exchange order book.

Even though IG internalises order flow they do not profit from client losses, instead hedging or matching order flow and operating symmetrical tolerance levels. This means that you also benefit from positive slippage, so if you place a spread bet limit order and the market moves in your favour before it is executed you get a better fill.

When I compared pricing against other spread betting brokers IG spreads are always competitive and often market-leading, especially in the major instruments, but where IG wins business is its ability to continually innovate and add value to its spread betting platform. There are trading signals from Autochartist and PIAfirst, but IG takes it a step further by making executing these signals easier and integrating dealing tickets. IG has a good post-trade analytics feature that can show you where you are profitable or not and they create a huge amount of analysis and research around what their clients are trading based on platform analytics.

Is CMC Markets a good spread betting broker?

Overall, CMC Markets is an exceptional spread betting platform with innovative features suitable to frequent traders wanting to trade on tight spreads.

CMC Market’s spread betting offering has always won business by producing great technology that reduces the cost of trading. By focussing on mobile and online trading, they now see over 70% of spread bets go through on mobile versus online.

I found that CMC Market’s spread betting prices were always tight and hail from the original online platform name (Deal4Free, and slogan “compare the spread”). CMC Markets also invented the concept of the daily cash rolling spread bet so traders no longer need to trade the futures price, reducing trading costs further.

Whilst CMC Markets focus on the major markets, they do actually offer access to quite a large amount of assets, over 12,00 including an industry-leading 338 fx crosses (CMC did start as a forex platform), 124 commodities, 28 indices and hundreds of UK and international stocks.

Two of CMC Market’s very innovative spread betting features are how they break down client sentiment and their share baskets. It’s commonplace for spread betting brokers to display client sentiment, but CMC Markets let you filter that sentiment down to profitable clients so it can become more valuable. They also provide a wide range of weighted share baskets so you can spread bets on sectors like driverless cars, big tech, cyber security and China tech, where ETFs have not yet been created.

What’s the difference between spread betting and CFDs on CMC Markets?

Spread betting is better for UK CMC Markets traders as you do not have to pay capital gains tax on profits. Other than that, spread betting and CFDs with CMC Markets are the same in terms of price and market coverage.