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THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESSFUL TRADING

There's no fixed formula for dealing on the financial markets, but having the right elements in place can help you make the most of opportunities as they arise.

Click a square to find out more.

KEY

IG

IG is the world’s No.1 spread betting and CFD provider

1

IG

Has offices in

16 countries

3

IG

IG has over 1000 employees around the world, including over 300 in-house IT developers

14

IG

IG has 136,063

active clients

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IG

IG has invested £17 million in IT resources over the last two years

43

IG

IG, the world's first financial spread betting company, was founded by Stuart Wheeler in a London flat in 1974

61

IG

The name IG comes from ‘Investors Gold’ – the company was originally founded to enable people to trade the price of gold as an index rather than dealing in the commodity itself

79

SB

Spread betting is a tax-free way to take a position on whether you think a market will rise or fall, without having to buy the underlying asset

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SB

92,000 people placed spread bets in the UK last year – that's 4,000 more than the year before

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SB

44% of UK spread bettors

have an IG account

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SB

UK spread bettors are most likely to be male professionals living in Dublin or London

44

SB

Approximately 90% of spread bets are ‘buy’
(or long) positions

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SB

In 1982 IG became the first UK company to offer spread betting on the FT30

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CFD

Contracts for difference allow you to open a contract for the difference in price of an asset, from the point of opening to when you close

5

CFD

25,000 people traded CFDs in the UK last year

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CFD

More than 1 in 3 UK CFD traders have an IG account

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CFD

In 2002 IG markets became Australia’s first CFD provider

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CFD

You can trade share CFDs with IG from 0.1% commission and 5% margin

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CFD

Unlike spread bets, most CFDs don’t have expiry dates

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FX

The foreign exchange market, also called forex or FX, is a global decentralised market for trading currencies

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FX

Last year there was a 6% increase in the number of people trading forex

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FX

61% of UK spread bettors

deal on forex

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FX

Over 40% of UK retail forex traders are IG clients, making IG the UK’s largest retail forex provider

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FX

There are 182 official currencies used in the United Nations member states

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FX

IG offers markets on over

80 currency pairs

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FX

GBP/USD is known as ‘cable’ because London and New York used to conduct trades via a cable under the Atlantic Ocean

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FX

Currency pair nicknames include the Chunnel (EUR/GBP), Loonie (USD/CAD) and Aussie (AUD/USD)

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FX

The US dollar is involved in nearly 90% of all forex transactions

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FX

The three major forex trading countries are the UK, US and Japan

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FX

The most commonly traded currencies are the USD, JPY, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD and CHF

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In

With IG you can take a position on the indices, including the FTSE 100, plus major industry sectors

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In

76% of UK spread bettors

deal on indices

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In

IG offers access to more than

35 sectors of the FTSE 350

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In

Global stock indices are influenced by many factors including non-farm payrolls, the monthly US employment update

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In

The FTSE 100 began at a base level of 1000 in 1984 and reached an all-time high of 6950.6 in December 1999

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In

The oldest continuous index in the UK is the FT 30, which was established in 1935

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Sh

You can trade over

6000 global shares with IG

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Sh

In 1995 IG became the first UK company to allow spread betting on individual shares

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Sh

Facebook’s initial public offering was held in May 2012, with a peak market capitalisation of over $104 billion

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Sh

The company with the biggest market capitalisation is Apple – it held this position all of last year too

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Co

Commodities are any raw materials or agricultural products that can be bought and sold

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Co

You can take a position on a wide range of commodities with IG, from soya beans to silver

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Co

Over 41,000 IG clients around the world trade commodities

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Co

56% of IG’s UK clients

trade commodities

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Co

50% of IG’s Australian clients trade commodities, compared to just 13% of Japanese clients

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Co

174,100 tonnes of gold have been mined in human history

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Co

In 1980 silver hit an all-time high of $49.45 per troy ounce (that’s around $138 in today’s money)

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Bi

Binaries are bets and trades based around a single question, like whether an underlying market will reach a certain point before a fixed time and date

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Bi

48% of the binary deals placed with IG last year were on five-minute markets

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Bi

Over 2.5 million binary trades were made with IG in the first half this year

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Bi

12% of IG clients

have traded binaries

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Web

You can access over 10,000 different financial markets using IG’s dealing platform

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Web

41,000 people use IG’s

dealing platform each day

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Web

Over 5.7 million orders are accepted via IG’s platform each month

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Web

IG’s platform experiences

less than 0.1% downtime

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Web

99.51% of IG trades are

executed in 0.1 seconds

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Web

IG’s ‘tear-off’ prices, tickets and charts mean you can still view them even when you close the main platform

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Web

IG launched the UK’s first online financial spread betting platform in 1998

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Mb

IG has a range of free mobile apps to support iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry

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Mb

36% of UK spread bettors

deal from their iPhones

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Mb

30,000 people access IG

on their mobiles each day

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Mb

1,271,131 deals are placed with IG each month using mobiles – that’s more than 25% of IG’s total deals

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Tb

IG has free tablet apps for iPad and Android, with Windows coming soon

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Tb

11,000 UK spread bettors

deal from their iPads

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Tb

20% of UK spread bettors intend to start dealing from an iPad in the near future

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Tb

IG clients placed 2,280,621 deals using iPads in the last year

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Tb

Since the start of 2012, over 3 million deals have been placed with IG using iPads

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MT4

MetaTrader 4 is a popular third-party platform – it’s now available with IG so you can combine the benefits of MT4 with an established provider and advanced execution systems

2

MT4

More than 166,100 traders

around the world use MT4

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MT4

Around 32% of UK traders

use MetaTrader

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MT4

60% of forex traders use MetaTrader in the US, 53% in Singapore and 49% in Germany

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MT4

Forex traders can use IG’s MT4 service to trade 34 currency pairs

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MT4

Over 300 brokers and

banks worldwide use MT4

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MT4

You can benefit from leverage of up to 400:1 when using MT4 with IG

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MT4

With MT4 you can use Expert Advisors (EAs) to trade automatically

110

AT

Automated trading is when algorithmic computer programs are used to identify trends then trade automatically

6

AT

30% of MT4 forex traders

use automated trading

17

AT

37% of UK spread bettors think it’s useful to have access to automated trading

35

Pi

IG’s price improvement technology means that if a better price becomes available as you click to deal, we can give you that price

7

Pi

IG’s price improvement technology saved clients over £10 million between January and December 2012

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Pi

IG’s multi-venue technology sources share prices from Chi-X and BATS, two of Europe’s leading exchanges

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DMA

DMA stands for direct market access – DMA trades are executed extremely quickly, allowing traders to take advantage of short-lived opportunities

8

DMA

Using IG’s FIX API you can trade directly into the order books of global stock exchanges

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DMA

When you use IG’s DMA platforms, the Smart Order Router technology connects to multiple trading venues and dark pools to ensure the best execution

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Cb

With IG’s extension for the Google Chrome browser, you can open deals from any page on the web

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Cb

The IG Dealing Chrome browser extension is optimised for 22 key financial and news websites, including Bloomberg, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal

20

Cb

To date, 2362 users have installed the IG Dealing Chrome browser extension

38

RN

Reuters is an international news agency with headquarters in New York

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RN

Reuters was

established in 1851

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RN

Reuters operates in more than 200 cities in 94 countries

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RN

Reuters is available

in around 20 languages

108

Mi

The market insight pages at IG.com are open to everyone, and include news, analysis and data for over 7,000 markets

101

Mi

65% of UK spread bettors use technical analysis when planning their positions

102

Mi

2 in 5 UK spread bettors rely on their instincts (that’s double the proportion of CFD traders in Germany)

103

Mi

Just under half of UK spread bettors use business and economic news to research positions

104

Ch

IG charts are free to all clients, and anyone can access them via the market insight pages at IG.com

10

Ch

11.5% of IG clients place

deals directly from charts

21

Ch

47% of IG clients in Austria open positions from charts, compared to only 5% in Russia

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Ch

The most popular IG chart resolutions are the 5 minute and 1 day views, followed closely by the 1 hour and 15 minute views

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Ch

‘Candle stick’ charts are the most popular, with 76% of people viewing IG charts in this setting

22

Ch

60% of people use at least one indicator when looking at IG charts

40

Ch

The most popular indicators for IG charts are Moving Average, MACD and RSI

12

Ch

The top 3 annotation tools used on IG charts are the horizontal line, trend line and Fibonacci tool

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L2

L2 Dealer is IG’s own downloadable DMA platform, designed for advanced traders

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L2

34,641 deals were placed over IG's L2 Dealer platform last year

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L2

Originally developed for IG’s own traders, L2 Dealer is now continually updated based on client feedback

94

PRT

ProRealTime is the leading web-based advanced charting package, available free to IG clients

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PRT

ProRealTime lets you view market events from the last 20 minutes up to the last 30 years

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PRT

Nearly 38% of IG clients who deal from the web-based platform also deal from ProRealTime charts

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PRT

ProRealTime has over 100 indicators, covering everything from price to volatility

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