Best Trading Platforms

How I scored the platforms on this list

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The difference between trading and investing

Although the terms ‘trading’ and ‘investing’ are used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Trading involves buying and selling assets for short-term gains. Because of that, today’s price will be what matters. Investors, in contrast, think about long-term potential gains (usually a minimum of five years) and so aren’t so concerned about day-to-day price fluctuations.

If your intention is to trade rather than invest, and you understand the principles and potential pitfalls of trading, then you’ll need to choose a trading platform.

Trading platforms differ from investing platforms in a few important ways – they might not always be obvious at first glance, however. They will likely offer some of the same products (general investment/trading accounts, ISAs and SIPPs) but how you go about using the platforms to attempt to grow your money will be very different.

Traders will need a platform that offers wide-ranging and insightful research tools, a real-time news feed, many different order types, and possibly more complex instruments such as CFDs or options. A good trading platform will be attuned to the distinct needs of a trader.

How to choose the best trading platform for you

In truth, there is no such thing as ‘the best’ trading platform – only the best one for you.

So, how do you find your match?

When it comes to selecting the right trading platform, I suggest you consider the following questions:

• What kind of account you want to open

Why are you trading? What kind of timeframe are you hoping you’ll see results within? Are your goals short, medium or long-term? Do you know the tax advantages of different kinds of accounts?

Answering these questions will determine what kind of product or account you need to open. And it will determine whether you are an investor, or a trader.

It will also determine which platforms are available to you since very few offer all the various different account types.

Ask yourself:

Is your goal to fund your retirement? If so, then you should be looking for a provider that offers a self-invested personal pension (SIPP). There are tax benefits attached to a SIPP that you won’t get by trading through a general trading account. The downside is that you can’t withdraw your money until you’re at least 55 (57 from 2028) unless in exceptional circumstances.

Perhaps you want to build up a nest egg? Are you seeking financial gains that will allow you to fulfil lifestyle goals such as travelling, adjusting your work-life balance, buying your dream home, relocating or starting a business? Perhaps you want to pay for your children’s education? In which case, you might be looking for an ISA. You can take money out of an ISA at any time you want without losing the tax benefits, although you can never invest more than £20k in total per tax year. ISAs will only save you tax, however, if you’re already maxing out your personal allowance – currently £12,570.

Are you saving for your first home? If you’re between the ages of 18 and 40, look at a stocks and shares Lifetime ISA. These ISAs are specifically designed to help you build savings for your first home or later life and, again, come with significant tax benefits.

Are you investing for your child? Junior ISAs allow you to put £9,000 away every year, tax-free, until your child reaches the age of 18 (when the account automatically turns into an ISA). There is a cash Junior ISA, which allows you to save without paying tax on the interest your cash earns, but assuming you’re here because you want to trade, you’ll be looking for a stocks and shares Junior ISA. With this account, yon’t don’t need to pay tax on any capital growth or dividends.

If you want to gift your child financial help far beyond their 16th or 18th birthday, then you may be looking for a Junior SIPP which is a tax-efficient way to build a pension for your child. You can invest up to £3,600 per tax year with a Junior SIPP account.

Are you looking to make quick returns on daily fluctuations in stock prices, or do you want to trade complex instruments such as CFDs or options? Then you will be looking for a general trading account. If you are a trader, rather than an investor, you’ll want a platform that caters to your needs and offers access to more sophisticated tools and advanced research capabilities that most investment platforms won’t offer.

You’ll also want to look at a general trading platform instead of an ISA if you’re not able to use your tax personal allowance.

This table gives a quick overview of which providers offer the different types of account:

As you can see, trading platforms generally have more limited product lines than investment platforms. Interactive Brokers offers a wider selection, however, but you need to be an experienced trader to feel comfortable on the IBKR platform.

• Your feelings about risk

This is important. We’re all different, and your appetite for risk (how much risk you’re comfortable accepting), as well as your tolerance to risk (how much you can afford to lose), will be as individual as you.

The different asset types you invest in will expose you to different amounts of risk, so you should think carefully about how much risk you’re satisfied with. Equities (stocks and shares), for example, are considered higher risk than fixed-income assets such as bonds and gilts. CFDs and spread betting come with a very high level of risk. The vast majority of traders lose money trading with these instruments, so you should consider whether you understand how spread bets and CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.

Whatever level of risk you’re comfortable with, diversifying your portfolio (making sure you don’t have all your eggs in one basket) is sensible. You might have picked up a hot tip you’re convinced is going to result in a huge payout and is, therefore, worth the risk. But if you’ve invested everything in a stock that doesn’t live up to the hype, or wider economic conditions see the stock market suddenly nosedive, you could be left with nothing. Spreading the risk between different markets and different asset classes reduces the risk that your investment could be wiped out because not all asset classes and markets respond the same way to events.

Thinking long-term also helps to mitigate some element of risk. While past results are certainly no guarantee of future returns, historical data does suggest that, if you leave your money in long enough, you’re likely to see positive returns. Hence the old adage that ‘it’s time in the market, not timing the market’ that leads to good results. Remember, however, that all investing involves some risk, including the risk of the value of your original investment falling, not rising.

If you don’t like the thought of exposing your hard-earned money to any risk, then investing might not be for you, and a cash ISA might be a better match. A cash ISA will simply allow you to deposit cash and the interest is tax-free. As with other types of ISA, you’ll have a limit of £20k per year.

Although some platforms will help you figure out what kind of risk profile you have, you may need to seek independent, professional advice to identify the kind of risk level you should be looking for with your goals and needs.

• Your experience level

Some trading platforms are tailored to the needs of those just starting out, while others are no-go-zones for beginners. I’ve grouped the platforms into the appropriate categories here:

When we talk about platforms being geared towards less experienced investors vs highly experienced investors, we’re usually talking about how easy or complex the user interfaces are to navigate, the number of tools and advanced features available, the number of different trading platforms available, and the provider’s education offering.
This is just a guide, however. You may feel your skillset in other areas of your life equips you to tackle a more advanced platform from the start. Equally, I know of very experienced traders who use platforms aimed at less experienced traders because of cost. So, it’s horses for courses.

• The assets and instruments you want to trade

As a rule of thumb, the more sophisticated the trading experience, the greater the number and range of assets and instruments available.

This comparison table gives some sense of the size of different platforms’ market offerings for retail traders. (Some instruments are available for professional traders only, in which case I haven’t included them here).

It might also be important to you that you have access to fractional shares. If so, your shortlist can immediately be narrowed down to the following platforms:

Interactive Brokers
Trading 212
eToro

• Whether you want to manage your investments yourself or pay to have them managed for you

If you’re an active trader, or looking to become an active trader, then you’ll most likely want to pick and choose your own assets to trade. However, if you’re new to trading/investing, or you don’t feel you’ll have the time to research and keep on top of the management of your investments, then a product like a fully managed ISA could appeal. You’ll need to pay for the additional service (visit our Best stocks and shares ISA page to see cost comparisons if it’s an ISA you’re interested in), but it can free up your time and give you some reassurance that your investments are being managed by the professionals.

If you do choose the managed route, pay particular attention to the performance of each providers’ funds. While it’s important to remember that past performance does not guarantee future performance, you’ll see that there are big differences in the investment strategies used by different companies, which have resulted in very different returns for customers over the last few years. We’ve undertaken independent analysis on past performance data which you can view here.

Once you’ve asked yourself these five questions, you’re ready to choose a provider. And your thoughts are bound to turn to cost. So how do the platforms compare on fees?

Which trading platform offers the lowest fees?

Coming up with straightforward cost comparisons for trading platforms isn’t easy. While most platforms charge via some combination of platform fees, commission/spreads, and FX fees, costs can vary hugely depending on the size of your portfolio, the type of account you have, and the instrument or asset you’re trading.

So, to come to solid conclusions on which platforms offer the lower costs, I’ve compared fees for a few specific examples. As you can see, it shows a pattern around which are the most expensive, and which are the cheapest to trade with.

Scenario 1: I want to trade stocks within an ISA…

In this table, I’ve illustrated how we got to each calculation and provided the figure you’d end up paying for each provider. Although they’re strictly speaking investment platforms rather than trading platforms, I’ve included Hargreaves Lansdown, AJ Bell and Freetrade to demonstrate how costs compare across the different types of platforms that offer stocks and shares ISAs.

As you can see, it’s the trading platforms that work out the cheapest. Within our featured trading platforms, IG works out as being the most expensive, then Saxo, Interactive Brokers and, cheapest of all in this scenario, Trading 212. (eToro isn’t included in this table as it doesn’t offer an ISA of its own – customers use Moneyfarm’s instead.)

Scenario 2: I want to trade GBP/USD forex…

For the next two scenarios, we’ve not included figures for the total you’d pay as figures are impossible without knowing the exact spread, and spreads change as the market moves. We’ve therefore given examples of the average added spreads/commission quoted by providers for the currency pair GBP/USD.

What’s interesting is that the same pattern forms in terms of which platforms’ fees are highest/lowest cost from our list:

Scenario 3: I want to trade CFDs…

Once again, fees are cheapest with Trading 212 and Interactive Brokers, with eToro and IG at the more expensive end of the spectrum.

It’s important to remember that low cost doesn’t equate to best platform. There are many more criteria which can play into a decision about what’s right for you, your risk profile, trading proficiency level and your trading strategy, than just keeping costs as low as possible.

Which platform is best for day trading?

Day trading is a short-term trading strategy that, as the name suggests, involves frequent buying and selling of securities during the day. Instead of waiting for the price of assets to rise over a long period of time, and benefiting from compound interest, the goal for day traders is to beat the market and generate immediate profits. Day traders attempt to do this by anticipating price changes that could happen within the trading day. Ideally, day traders want to have exited all their trades by the end of the day so they aren’t holding securities overnight (something which usually incurs an ‘overnight charge’).

This might sound like an exhilarating way to make a living – and for some people it certainly is – but day trading comes with high potential risks. For that reason, it takes someone with the appropriate appetite for risk as well as sufficient tolerance for risk, to make it work. It’s also a strategy that requires considerable experience and skill to master.

In the past, if you weren’t a professional trader you’d need to put a call into the dealing desk of your chosen brokerage to make a trade. Now, online trading platforms, and all the data we can consume at our fingertips, makes it possible for retail traders to execute trades themselves from the comfort of their own homes.

Interactive Brokers, Saxo Markets, IG, Trading 212 and eToro all offer excellent day trading experiences at reasonable prices. However, the platform you choose should be largely dictated by your experience level: less experienced traders will find eToro and Trading 212 offer a more gentle introduction with a great deal of support in the form of social trading features, copy trading options and a more user-friendly interface. The trade-off (excuse the pun) is that you’ll not have access to quite the scope of assets, tools and advanced trading features you’ll find on those platforms designed with the advanced and professional trader in mind, namely Saxo and Interactive Brokers. These two offer a serious trader greater possibilities and advantages, within platforms that may be too overwhelming for those still learning their craft.

IG is rare in that it offers something for both groups. It has an exceptional educational offering in the IG Academy and an emphasis on helping traders to grow their skills, but also world-class research and trading tools that mean you’ll never feel like you’re languishing on the nursery slopes.

Trading safely

At Investing Insiders, we make every effort to only recommend providers which have met stringent criteria set out by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to keep consumers safe. That means we only recommend providers that are authorised and regulated by the FCA.

The FCA is tasked with the responsibility of ensuring trading and investment platforms adhere to specific marketing and advertising rules about financial promotions, and that they conduct their business in accordance with regulatory standards.

It's important to note that while being regulated by the FCA can ensure you are protected against bad practices, there is no protection available for poorly performing investments. Therefore, it is always possible to lose some or all of
your money when trading.

You should also be aware that some trading instruments come with exceptional, added risk. CFDs, for example, and spread betting, are particularly risky as you will be trading with leverage, which increases the amount of capital you can lose. All FCA-authorised trading platforms must advertise the percentage of customers who lose money when trading risky instruments with them. It’s not uncommon to see figures in the high 70-percent range.

What is trading with leverage?

Leverage is using borrowed money to gain exposure to larger trading positions. You’ll sometimes hear it referred to as ‘margin trading’. By trading with leverage you don’t need to pay the entire trade value upfront but can potentially make larger sums back on a trade. This is what makes it attractive. However, what makes it far more risky than trading without leverage is that, while gains can be magnified with leverage, so can losses.

Leverage is usually offered with certain derivative products such as CFDs, spread bets and rolling spot foreign exchange (FX), and can be used across a variety of different financial markets including forex, indices, stocks, commodities, and ETFs.

You’ll find that leverage is calculated as a ratio. The maximum ratio UK providers are permitted to offer retail traders is 30:1. That’s a limit, though; you can also choose to trade with lower ratios of leverage if you wish to lower your risk level.