Best Spread Betting Brokers in the UK: Reviewed for 2024

With social trading capabilities and a commitment to client education, FXCM is an excellent choice for traders who wish to advance their knowledge on spread betting. Besides extensive guides and analyses studying trading patterns of successful investors, the platform also offers exposure to webinars delivered by financial experts on a weekly basis, discussing the latest market development regarding various securities. Beginners can also benefit from an in-built trade analytics tool, with which they can analyse their trading behaviour, identify mistakes, and ultimately make better-informed decisions.

While the broker has extensive coverage for traders with little experience, it doesn't lack in analysis and algorithmic functionalities; users can access the industry-grade charting tool TradingView and gain access to MetaTrader 4 to automate their trades. It does, though, lack market access compared to its competitors with a reach of 290 markets and products.

Markets.com

Depending on the underlying security, leverages offered by Markets.com can climb up to 300:1 — making the platform among the spread betting platforms offering the highest leverages. It's worth noting that while this can multiply your earnings by 300, it can also magnify losses 300x, which would be truly horrific, and therefore should be used with caution. The outfit also maintains an impressive reach of up to 2,100 investment products, along with a decent collection of educational materials, webinars, guides, and tutorial videos. The outlay of the platform is straightforward and neatly organised, with integrated analysis tools and a news feed for generating investment ideas.

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Pepperstone

Pepperstone is the top choice for the lowest fees trading platform allowing you to get started with the razor minimum spreads, starting from 0.0 pip. This is among the best deals offered by the spread betting brokers and is applicable for many of their major forex pairings. The platform includes advanced order types to ensure risk management but lacks in more sophisticated tools. You can explore spread betting opportunities across various markets including indices, commodities, shares, and forex.

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CMC Markets

CMC Markets offers spread betting on over 12,000 instruments, including shares, commodities, ETFs, treasuries, forex pairs, and indices. It is an award-winning trading platform that allows strategies to be customized and deployed with automation. The outfit is regulated by the FCA, and the FSCS protects customer funds for up to £85,000. Its tight spread and precise charting tools allow traders to improve their trading experience and potentially have a better chance of profiting compared with less advanced brokers.

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A veteran in the spread betting industry with experience spanning six decades, OvalX offers an impressive reach of up to 6000 markets, appealing the most to traders who seek a wide range of trading opportunities and a diversified portfolio. Overall, the platform is more suited for seasoned traders as beginner traders may find the learning curve a bit too steep. Its proprietary ETX TraderPro platform is highly customisable, including an industry-grade charting tool and integration with MetaTrader 4 for those who'd like to automate their trades. Besides being regulated by the FCA, the outfit is also publicly traded on LSE, making it one of the safer options for spread betting.

City Index is our top commodity spread betting platform in the UK due to its impressive reach of over 20 markets, with the most commonly traded assets including gold, silver, oil, metals, and soft commodities. It is competitively priced and the award-winning software ensures quick and reliable trades. The outfit harnesses over four decades of experience and maintains an impeccable industry reputation.

Forex.com

The specialised trading platform includes over 50 currency pairs with very competitive spreads. It's possible to access the execution scorecard, which showcases the quality of their trade executions. According to the data shared, 99.48% of trades are executed in less than 1 second and the average execution speed stands at 0.06 seconds. The far-reaching of forex educational resources on the platform are among the best in the industry, making it a perfect choice for beginners.

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Spreadex

SpreadEX is a spread betting-focused platform that requires no minimum investments to open an account. At first glance, it is easy to confuse it for a sports betting platform, but there is a section of the website that’s dedicated to financials like indices, shares, forex, commodities, and more. The simple UI and lack of other financial products mean traders can quickly find the features they need to execute trades. The pricing structure is among the most transparent across the board, making it easier to compare the platform before making a decision.

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It’s important to find a brokerage platform that is in regulation by top-tier organisations like the Financial Conduct Authority. Regulators ensure that financial companies adhere to scam-free and safe practices, which protect customer funds and promote trust in the industry. As per these regulations, customer accounts need to be segregated from company assets. This ensures that in the event of the firm going insolvent, the customer assets will be protected and not seized to cover the debts. Other popular regulators in the UK that oversee financial services include the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), and The Financial Policy Committee.

Besides regulatory compliance, brokers also employ industry-standard security measures like data encryption, two-factor authentication, secure payment processing, and anti-fraud measures.

The platform's reliability and stability are important to execute trades quickly and avoid large amounts of slippage. Traders who want to execute a trade at a specific price point would be frustrated if they miss out on the opportunity because of technical problems. We recommend that users use small amounts of money or a demo version to test out a broker before increasing the size of their investments. Also, reading customer reviews on review aggregators like Trustpilot gives you an idea about customer feedback.

It’s important to use risk management tools to rescue the risk associated with spread betting. Without security features, the losses could be bigger than what’s available in your account.

Hence, risk management tools help you set up parameters for when to exit trades. Now let’s take a closer look at the different risk management tools available when spread betting:

• Stop Loss: This feature protects traders from unexpected market movements, so you can stop the trade when the market reaches a predefined price point. There are 4 stop loss features, including equity stop, volatility stop, chart stop, and margin stop.

• Take Profit to Secure Profits: This tool, as the name suggests, allows you to stop the trade when a specific amount of profit is reached. Therefore, you can finish the trade in profit instead of running the risk of losing money.

• Trading Calculator: Various trading calculators allow you to determine the amount you should trade- given the size of your portfolio and risk tolerance.

Check out the customer support quality before registering an account with a UK spread betting broker. That’s because you’ll eventually run into problems and receiving adequate support is important to avoid getting frustrated and missing out on money-making trades. The customer support communication channels should be available 24/7 and include multiple channels such as live chat, phone, and email.

Understanding the trading fees is important for traders to calculate the profit potential and compare investment platforms to find competitively priced ones. Here is a list of multiple fee types you can expect with spread betting:

• Spread: It is expressed as points. It is the difference between the bid and ask price. The spread is varied based on each security, so you’ll need to start trading to have an idea of what spread fees to expect.

• Commission: Some spread betting platforms might charge a commission, but many competitively priced brokers are commission-free. Instead, they rely on the spread to profit from spread betting trades.

• Overnight Funding: Leveraged trades that are faded with the broker’s funds will lead to overnight funding fees for long-term trades.

• Inactivity Fee: Accounts that have a positive balance and did not execute a trade for an extended period might incur an inactivity fee, which is usually charged monthly.

• Deposit/withdrawals: Platforms might charge you for depositing and withdrawing funds. This amount depends on the payment processor and can include currency conversion fees.

• Extra Service Charges: You might get charged for using extra services like VIP customer support, added trading features, and live data feeds.

Spread betting works by taking a position on an underlying asset without taking ownership of the said asset. You’ll need to understand some concepts, most notably going long and short: going long refers to predicting that the price of the asset will increase, whereas going short is predicting that the asset will go down in price. The practice is fairly common across the UK, with the majority of trading platforms including it within their service line.

The trade is broken up into points, which is the interval that the asset can move. The bet size is the amount you want to bet per point. So if you bet £10 per point, and the asset moves 10 points in your predicted direction, then you’d make a profit of £100. Furthermore, you can take advantage of leverage to increase the risk and potential reward of your spread betting. Brokerage platforms may provide leverage of up to 10-30 times your margin, which is the number of funds you’ve deposited into the margin account. Leverage can also be expressed as the amount of margin required. For example, if the margin requirement is 5%, then it means that the leverage is 20x.

Spread Betting Vs CFDs: Both of these are leveraged derivative products where the value is derived from the underlying asset. Also, investors have no ownership of the assets for these trade types. Yet, there are key differences: spread betting has a fixed expiration date, whereas CFDs don’t, and spread betting is completed via OTC (over-the-counter), and CFD trades are done directly within a market.

Spread Betting Vs Futures Contracts: The major difference between these two is that the price of spread betting is determined by the brokers, whereas futures brokers remain impartial, the prices are set by the supply and demand of the users instead. Therefore, spread betting is created for private investors with smaller sums of money, and futures contracts are more suited for hedge funds with large resources.