In 1974, Stuart Wheeler founded Investors Gold Index. The purpose was to create a trading platform to trade gold more easily and to avoid the large costs of trading the commodity itself. Very soon, the name was shortened to IG Index, and the product offer start being expanded. The success led to the introduction of online trading in 1998 and the company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000, under the name IG Group. During all these years, the group has been offering spread betting and CFD’s trading to retail investors, and it is currently spread all over the world with offices in UK, Australia, Europe, Singapore, Japan and US.
Markets in which you can trade
IG Index runs the group spread betting operations in the UK, and it is the market leader in terms of clients. The range of markets offered is wide. You can place a bet in Forex, shares, commodities, stock indices, interest rates, options, binary bets, and some specialty markets. Inside each of those categories, there is also a large variety of markets to trade on. You can place bets not only in major currencies but also in more exotic cross rates; you can bet in hundreds of shares across the globe, bet in house prices, guess if the market will go down or up in the next 20 minutes, buy Russel 2000 index, sell Gold, and bet in UK sectors. The list is so large that almost every trader will find exactly what he wants to trade. And if you are not satisfied you can still create your own bet. IG offers a product named custom bets that allows you to choose a market, a time interval and a type of bet and create your own bet to fit exactly in your needs.
Bid-Ask Spread
A successful trader is not only concerned with the product offer but also, and mainly, with the spread. Traders need tight spreads to make a profit. They can’t afford to pay 1 or 2% for a round trip. At IG Index, the average spread for cable (GBP/USD) is 2.60 pips and 1.60 for the fiber (EUR/USD) in the Forex market. In terms of stock index spreads, FTSE100 trades at 1-point, S&P500 at 0.5 and Japan 225 at 8 points. For major shares the spread is just 0.1% on daily bets and 0.2% on near quarter ones. Gold spot price trades with 0.5 point spread and brent and crude oil with 4 points. Basically, IG Index offers competitive spreads across all markets, which are much lower than what you will face at traditional brokers, and at many other spread betting companies.
Software and extra features
IG Index offers a simple but fully featured and fast dealing platform. Market orders are instantly executed and there is usually no slippage in stop orders. The software presents all basic features that are expected in a trading platform: product list, search feature, real-time prices, portfolio activity, and account history. IG Index also offers some additional tools that are very valuable for traders as is the case of live charts, a chart pattern recognition tool, news feed and fundamental data from Reuters, and third-party research.
But remember, no matter how good your spread betting company is, you can only make a profit if you have a successful strategy – whether that is based on day trading, technical analysis, fundamentals or something more exotic. IG Index offers what a trader really needs to be successful at spread betting: fast execution, reliability, tight spreads, a large product offering, and some extra functionality that will be very useful to help with your trading decisions. It is no coincidence that 60% of all active spread betting clients in the UK have an account with IG.
