Professional trading

Not a problem – you can trade as a retail client with us. You’ll have access to the same powerful platforms and great customer service we offer our professional clients. Legally, as a retail client, that also means you’ll receive negative balance protection (see more in the next FAQ).

With an IG trading account, you’ll need to hold more margin to cover your positions than an IG professional client would. Your account will also have negative balance protection, meaning that the balance on your account can’t go below zero. Therefore, due to Dubai regulation, we’re obliged to bring your funds back up to zero (if they drop below) at no extra charge to you.

There are a few protections afforded to retail clients that professional clients don’t receive.

• Negative balance protections are only a regulatory requirement for retail traders and don’t apply to professional clients, who have an obligation to make additional payments if their account falls into a negative balance.
• We need to use clear language when talking to retail clients, but we can use more sophisticated language when talking to our professional clients.
• We may assume a level of knowledge and experience when assessing whether our products are appropriate for professional clients.
• We owe our clients a duty of best execution when executing orders. For retail clients we must prioritise overall prices and cost of a transaction in doing this. For professional clients we may prioritise other factors such as speed and likelihood of execution, if we determine they are equally or more important than overall price. In practice, it won’t change the way we execute your orders

If you’d like, you can request that your account be reclassified as ‘professional’, by following the prompts in My IG. To check whether you could be eligible, see if you can answer ‘yes’ to these two questions.

The Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) imposed a range of leverage restrictions aimed at retail traders towards the end of 2021, to try to increase conduct standards across the industry and improve outcomes for investors.

A ‘financial instrument portfolio’ includes:

• Cash
• Stock portfolios
• Stocks and shares ISAs
• Trading accounts
• Mutual funds
• SIPPs (excluding non-financial instruments)

It does not include:

• Company pensions
• Non-tradeable assets
• Property