Low Spread Brokers UK Comparison

Pepperstone is a solid pick if you want low spreads with MetaTrader 4 while having access to an overall excellent trading experience. The broker provides lower-than-industry average spreads on its Standard and RAW trading accounts. Moreover, I was impressed it could maintain a zero-pip spread on EUR/USD 100% of the time when testing.

Spreads with Pepperstone

Our research into the spreads with Pepperstone showed that the broker advertises spreads averaging 1.12 pips on EUR/USD for its standard account and 0.1 pips on its Razor Account account. Our analyst Ross Collins tested the spreads himself and found the spreads to be close to the advertised average for the Standard account, being 1.21 pips and 0.19 pips for the Razor account.

Low spreads save on your trading costs and with Pepperstone’s Razor account in particular, we think the broker has the lowest spreads of all FCA-regulated brokers. Tests by Ross Collins show Pepperstone to have superior spreads to similar brokers like Eightcap, Admirals and ThinkMarkets who all average worse than 0.19 pips for the EUR/USD pair.

RAW Spreads Tested By Ross Collins	EUR/USD AUD/USD GBP/USD USD/JPY USD/CAD USD/SGD	EUR/USD AUD/USD GBP/USD USD/JPY USD/CAD USD/SGD	EUR/USD AUD/USD GBP/USD USD/JPY USD/CAD USD/SGD	EUR/USD AUD/USD GBP/USD USD/JPY USD/CAD USD/SGD	EUR/USD AUD/USD GBP/USD USD/JPY USD/CAD USD/SGD
	0.19	0.19	0.41	0.36	0.61
	0.22	0.23	0.17	0.27	0.16
	0.15	0.37	0.59	0.67	0.50
	0.22	0.42	0.62	0.25	0.56
	0.21	0.70	0.73	0.58	1.46
	0.43	0.67	0.95	0.64	0.74
	0.44	0.68	0.90	0.64	0.75

Avg. spreads are taken from each broker's website and updated monthly. Last update on 04/01/2024

Pepperstone Has Zero Pips Spreads

Pepperstone’s Razor account has low spreads because certain current pairs are often 0.0 pips. Based on our tests, Pepperstone impressed us by offering its 0.0 spreads 100% of the time (outside rollover), not just on EUR/USD but also on other major pairs like USD/JPY, AUD/USD and GBP/USD. No other UK broker matched this in our tests, solidifying Pepperstone’s place as our best low-spread broker.

Pepperstone Trading Platforms

When looking into Pepperstone, we found they let you choose between 4 of the most popular trading platforms in the market. These platforms are:

1. TradingView which is great for charting and technical indicators
2. cTrader which is popular for scalping
3. MetaTrader 4 – The most popular of all trading platforms and does everything well including automation with Expert Advisors.
4. MetaTrader 5 – Much the same as MetaTrader 4 but with more advanced features.

What stood out for us is that Pepperstone provides a decent range of trading tools for its MetaTrader 4 platform. These include 9 Expert Advisors, of these EAs, we like the correlation matrix Expert Advisors which shows which pairs correlate positively or negatively so you can confirm market trends. For example, if you think the market will rise higher, you can confirm this with a strongly correlated asset by checking if it is also rising.

Pepperstone ReviewVisit Pepperstone

OANDA is an excellent choice if you are a beginner, thanks to its tight spreads and user-friendly approach. They have a Standard account with spread-only fees and no commission on trades, providing a simple fee structure to forex trading.

The broker has tight spreads, with the EUR/USD averaging 0.6 pips, which helps keep your trading costs down while starting to trade forex.

Spreads With OANDA

OANDA only offers a spread-only trading account with no commissions, which we think makes the broker ideal if you are a beginner. Compared to RAW pricing, Standard accounts are more straightforward with their pricing structure, as you don’t pay commission.

We collected the average spreads of the majors from OANDA, compared them with other brokers with spread-only accounts, and found that OANDA had the lowest spreads, averaging 0.7 pips.

The lowest average spreads are EUR/USD and USD/JPY, averaging 0.6 pips, and the highest being 0.9 pips on GBP/USD. These spreads are still cheaper than its competitor’s, making it a prime candidate for trading forex.

OANDA Trade Has Nice Features

While OANDA trade also offers MetaTrader 4 and TradingView, we like their OANDA Trade platform. When testing the OANDA Trade platform, one feature we really like is that they let you trade smaller trade sizes than the standard micro-lot. You can access this through the deal ticket on the platform, allowing you to enter however many units you want to trade and can go as low as one unit.

We like this feature because it allows you to control how much you risk without being forced to trade in pre-defined lot sizes. We think this provides a bridge for beginners to transition from demo trading to live trading, especially if you have a small account and want to take it slow.

As you can see in the image below, the one-unit size has a trade value of 0.85p and requires a margin of 0.03p to open.

Other features we really like is that you can use a Guaranteed Stop-Loss Order (GSLO). This features ensures you will never lose more than you are willing to lose when trading. We also thought it was great that charts are provided with tradingView meaning you get over 100 indicators, 50 drawing tools, 9 timeframes and 11 chart types.

Eightcap is an excellent choice for zero pip spreads, which will particularly benefit you if you want to scalp the markets. The RAW account impressed me in that it managed to maintain zero pip spreads on EUR/USD for 98% of the trading day during our testing, which is above average.

So if you scalp the EUR/USD, you’ll just be paying the commission (£4.50 per lot round-turn) 98% of the time, reducing your trading costs further.

Using TradingView With Eightcap

While reviewing Eightcap, we found the spreads to be competitive. The broker has an average spread of 1.0 pips for EUR/USD with no commissions, which is right on the average and in our opinion makes Eightcap a very acceptable choice.

We also like that the broker provides TradingView as its default platform. When testing this platform we found it comes with 100+ technical indicators, 17 chart types, and the ability to program custom indicators. With more trading tools than most other trading platforms, we think TradingView is the top choice for charting and technical analysis.

One feature that stood out for us when we tried TradingView is the built-in asset screener. This tool allows you to set criteria for the screener to find markets that match your criteria.

For example, we set a screener to show all forex pairs trading below an RSI level of 49 while the 50-day moving average is below the price. When it returned the results, you could click on the asset, which loaded the chart.

We think this is an excellent tool as it can save you time. The scanner will automatically refresh every second to find markets that match your criteria, so all you’ll have to do is validate the trade with your technical analysis.

Through TradingView, we found that Eightcap offers 56 currency pairs, 580+ stocks, 16 indices, and five commodities.

CMC Markets is an excellent choice if you are a forex trader who wants to speculate on a wider range of currency markets to find more trading opportunities. The average spread on CMC Markets for EUR/USD is just 1.12 pips so you can lower your trading costs on the forex markets.

The NGEN platform is also a top addition; as a forex trader, you’ll benefit from the market screeners that can find potential trading ideas from the 338 currency pairs available.

Commissions With CMC Markets

In our live account review, CMC Markets impressed us with its focus on low-cost forex trading with its FX Active trading account. This account has tight spreads from 0.0 pips with a $2.50 per lot traded commission, which is cheap compared to brokers like IC Markets, which charge $3.50.

We found that the average spread for EUR/USD was 0.5 pips, 55% lower than its standard account price of 1.12 pips from our live testing.

Trading Products With CMC Markets

CMC Markets also has one of the largest choices of markets available, covering 9000+ stocks, 15+ commodities, 82+ indices, and 338 forex pairs. This is the most available from any broker we’ve reviewed, even more than its nearest competitor, IG Group, which has 100 FX pairs.

CMC NGEN Trading Platform

Apart from its FX pairs, another feature that stood out for us is its NGEN trading platform, which has 85+ indicators, 13 chart types, and extra tools such as chart pattern screeners. We found the chart pattern screener easy to use, as it tells you whether the market is bullish or bearish, what timeframe, and what pattern was found.

Plus, when you click on the idea, it takes you straight to the charts to see the pattern and decide whether you want to get involved.

AvaTrade is a top choice for day trading with its low fixed spreads of 0.9 pips on EUR/USD. This is impressive, considering most fixed spread brokers tend to be around 1.8 pips on average.

For a day trader, fixed spreads allow your trading costs to remain consistent, even during spikes in market volatility, allowing you to enter your trades without worrying about spreads widening.

AvaTrade Has Fixed Spreads

In our testing, we found AvaTrade’s fixed spreads to be as competitive as the variable spreads from the rest of the industry. For example, the fixed spreads of EUR/USD were 0.9 pips, AUD/USD 1.1 pips, and USD/JPY 1 pip. This surprised us as we’d expect fixed spreads to be higher, considering they absorb the costs during volatile times.

These fixed spreads align AvaTrade with standard accounts for variable spread brokers like Eightcap and Fusion Markets; both offer spreads around the 1.0 pip mark.

Trading Platforms With AvaTrade

The broker offers a selection of trading platforms, including MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, AvaTradeGO and AvaTrade Web Trader. Of these platforms, we like the AvaTradeGO platform, which provides a fully-fledged trading platform on your phone, including 90+ built-in technical indicators, three chart types, and access to AvaTrade’s trading signals.

One highlight that stood out with AvaTradeGo is the Market Trends tool, which monitors social trends from the AvaTrade community, helping you see what is popular to trade.

You can set it to monitor the markets based on the last trading day, week, month or even year. A tool like this is helpful if you day trade so you can generate new trading ideas based on where there is potential volatility.

City Index is our top pick if you want tight spreads with no commissions because they offer tight spreads averaging 0.7 pips on EUR/USD. This was lower than the industry average we tested, and with no commission, it makes City Index one of the lowest-spread brokers we’ve tested this year.

This, combined with its range of 4,400+ markets from forex to stocks and access to popular trading platforms like TradingView and MetaTrader 4, makes it an easy pick.

Spreads With City Index

During our live testing of City Index, we were impressed with its low trading fees, with EUR/USD averaging 0.7 pips commission-free. Surprisingly, we found that City Index’s lowest spreads were on USD/JPY, which averaged 0.6 pips, while other majors like GBP/USD averaged 1.1 pips, all of which were below the industry averages.

Overall we found the choice of markets from City Index to be solid. The broker has 84 forex pairs, 4500+ stocks, 20 indices, 30+ commodities, and 11 bonds, giving you plenty of markets to trade.

City Index Web Platforms

City Index offers MetaTrader 4, TradingView, and City Index Web Trader, their flagship platform, which gives you access to all the markets. Plus, the broker offers guaranteed-stop loss orders to protect against slippage, which can cost you dearly in volatile markets.

The City Index Web Platform leverages the charts from TradingView, so you get all the built-in 100+ indicators, 15+ chart types and tools like Trading Central for technical insights. We found it easy to set up and use Trading Central on the Web Trader as it is built into the platform, something not many brokers do.

We liked that you can filter the Trading Central technical insights by:

• Chart patterns,
• Candlestick & bar patterns,
• Indicators,
• Oscillators.

Trading Central helps you find trading ideas that are particular to your criteria and saves you time researching markets that don’t fit your needs.

If you want to utilise the expertise of more experienced traders, then eToro is the best for copy trading with low spreads. You can benefit from copy trading with average spreads of 1.3 pips across the top five currency pairs, making it just as cost-effective as trading yourself (without the hard work).

The CopyTrader platform is an excellent platform that makes copy trading simple with an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to find traders that meet your criteria to copy. You’ll find that there are experts in different areas of the markets that you can use to diversify your portfolio, as eToro offers markets in stocks, forex, commodities, and indices.

The eToro Trading Platforms Features

Considering eToro’s primary focus is on copy trading, the spreads offered are competitive, averaging 1.0 pip with EUR/USD and 1.0 pip with USD/JPY. In fact, we found that eToro was better than the industry average for all the major pairs apart from GBP/USD, which offered spreads of 2.0 pips, above the average of 1.57 pips.

Since eToro is famous for its CopyTrader platform, we opened an account to see how easy the platform is and how low the spreads are compared to other UK brokers. The CopyTrader platform is web-based, so you only need access to a modern browser like Chrome.

The CopyTrader platform is essentially a search engine designed to help find an experienced trader to copy based on many metrics. We think the filter system is certainly needed as there are over 20,000,000 traders on eToro, so this feature helps you narrow that number down based on your criteria.

We like that eToro offers a risk score calculated based on the trader’s risk, market volatility, profit, and frequency of trades. This score gives you a glimpse of how risky the trader is, and you can use this as a metric to filter out high-risk or low-risk traders, depending on your strategy.

For spread betting, Spreadex is our best broker with low spreads from 0.8 pips, letting you benefit from spread betting’s tax-free exemption with low-cost trading. Spreadex also offers an impressive range of markets to spread bet with, where you can choose from over 11,000 markets – all are exempt from taxes.

Spreads With SpreadEx

SpreadEx offers both CFDs and spread betting like most FCA-regulated brokers. We found that the broker offers its spreads on EUR/USD averaging 0.8 pips, putting it on par with City Index (0.7 pips) and Fusion Markets (0.93 pips).

We were surprised to find their spreads similar to their CFD pricing, which is excellent considering spread betting’s major benefit is its tax-exemption status. This combination could lower your trading costs by reducing capital gains tax and spreads if you choose to spread bet.

CFD Trading Products With SpreadEx

While testing the broker, SpreadEx offered a good range of markets, which included:

• 1000+ stocks,
• 60 FX pairs,
• 30+ indices,
• 5+ commodities,
• 19+ bond and interest rate markets,
• 200+ exchange-traded funds.

We like that all the CFD markets are available as spread betting products, allowing you to benefit from tax exemptions and low spreads without sacrificing market choice.

An interesting feature we liked was the weekly technical analysis provided by SpreadEx analysts that gives you focal points for the coming week. They don’t analyse everything but provide a snapshot of major markets like FTSE 100, gold, and forex majors – which we feel is enough to get you primed for the week.

The choice of trading platforms is also decent, with TradingView and their SpreadEx platform offering 23+ technical indicators and 4+ chart types, including OHLC, candlesticks, line, and bar charts.

BlackBull Markets impressed me with their fast execution speed, scoring top marks in our tests for limit order and market order execution times at 72ms and 90ms, respectively. These speeds placed BlackBull Markets number one in our comparison tests, making them the top broker for fast execution.

I was impressed with its range of markets, covering over 26,000 financial instruments to trade, with the majority being shares, but you can also trade forex, indices, and commodities. With tight spreads and the fastest execution speeds, you can take advantage of these markets as a scalper, improving your profitability by reducing slippage and high spread fees.

BlackBull Markets Has 0 pips Spreads

BlackBull Markets offers its RAW pricing spreads from 0.0 pips on EUR/USD, essentially meaning you only pay the commission to trade. However, in our testing, we found they offered these spreads 86.96% of the time and offered an average spread of 0.23 pips on EUR/USD instead. These spreads are still relatively low, considering other brokers like Axi and CMC Markets offer spreads above 0.4 pips.

BlackBull Markers Has Fast Execution Speed

In our live tests, we used our BlackBull Markets account to compare the execution speeds of the top brokers in the UK. Our analyst, Ross Collins, tested the speed of 19 brokers on the MetaTrader 4 platform to get the average limit order speed and find out which was the fastest.

BlackBull Markets came in first place with an average execution speed of 72ms, which was blistering fast compared to the rest of the brokers he tested. For example, other brokers like FxPro achieved speeds of 151ms, which took over double the time to execute compared to BlackBull Markets.

We think this is important as it can help reduce the likelihood of you suffering from negative slippage, which are hidden costs when trading during volatile markets.

Along with fast execution speeds, the broker provides a solid choice of markets, including 49 forex pairs, 23,000+ shares, 15 indices, and 23 commodities.

Fusion Markets takes the top spot for the best RAW account spreads we’ve tested. The broker’s spreads averaged 0.22 pips for the EUR/USD, which was better than its peers and lower than the industry average.

They offer the best average RAW spreads and kept their spreads for EUR/USD at zero pips for 98.55% of the time we tested. This makes Fusion Markets a solid choice if you scalp or automate your trades, as you’ll get the lowest spreads on major markets – lowering your trading fees.

Fusion Markets Has Good Raw Spreads

We tested Fusion Markets’ RAW spread trading account to see how it faired against the top brokers in the UK. In this test, our analyst, Ross Collins, used a demo trading account to test the average RAW spreads of EUR/USD through the MT4 platform across 15 brokers.

He found that Fusion Markets had an average of 0.22 pips on EUR/USD, which not only placed it in the first place but was also 50% lower than the industry average. Out of all the brokers, only Pepperstone’s spreads challenged them with an average of 0.36 pips.

Fusion Markets Has Low Commissions

Fusion Markets also had the lowest commissions we’ve reviewed at $2.25 per lot traded, much lower than the industry average of $3.48. These commissions make Fusion Markets the lowest-cost broker, which contributed to us giving them an 82/100 in our initial review. Since you pay a commission for every lot you buy and sell when trading, these costs can up over time making them a major cost of your trade.

We also like that the broker offers three trading platforms: MetaTrader 4, MetaTrader 5, and cTrader. cTrader offers advanced charting with 70 indicators, 26 timeframes, and 9+ chart types, plus advanced tools like depth of market, showing you the order books of the liquidity provider.

If you are a scalper, we think cTrader’s charting with Fusion Markets’ low trading costs makes it a top combination to maximise profits.