IC Markets

We opened an account at IC Markets and sampled it every second for a month

Raw Spread · MT5 account, EUR/USD, 27.08–25.09. Both columns are printed for every broker on this site, ours included — the losses are what make the wins worth reading.

EUR/USD · 27.08–25.09 · our own account, 1 s bid/ask sampling

How IC Markets gets to $1 252 a year

The headline figure is one number, and one number is not checkable. Here it is in its parts, for 10 lots a month of EUR/USD on the Raw Spread · MT5 account we opened:

One pip on one standard lot of EUR/USD is about $10; that conversion is the only constant in the sum, and it is the market's, not ours.

On this account the commission is the larger half of the bill: $840 of $1 252, or 67%. That is the thing a spread table cannot tell you. IC Markets quotes a raw spread of 0.29 pips, which looks almost free, and then charges per lot for the privilege. Whether that is cheaper than a wider spread with no commission depends entirely on how much you trade, which is why the profile is stated rather than assumed.

The swap line, $64 a year, is the one component that does not scale with how often you trade — it scales with how long positions stay open. A It is a cost of holding rather than of trading, and our profile sits between the two extremes.

Nothing in this table is a quote. It is what our own account would have paid at a stated volume over the window we measured, and volume is the lever that moves it most. The per-lot components scale with volume and the swap does not, so the ordering between accounts is a function of how much you trade.

The rig behind IC Markets's numbers

The figures come from a single Raw Spread · MT5 account at IC Markets — retail terms, public sign-up, nothing arranged on the phone. The terminal runs on a dedicated machine that stays awake around the clock. That sounds trivial and is not: the out-of-the-box power settings would have silently deleted the overnight window from every series.

Ticks land in the store unmodified, and the one transformation applied to them — the shift from broker-server time to UTC — is measured per session rather than assumed. The guard that holds whatever the offset says is freshness: a tick has to be seconds old once converted, or it does not enter the store. Without it a stale weekend quote reads as a live one.

Execution is measured the only way it can be — by putting orders through the account: 4 812 market orders of the smallest volume the account permits went through this account during the window of which 212 were timed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases. Every probe was closed within seconds: an open position would collect swap and market risk and contaminate the next reading and the account is reconciled against the broker after each run.

2026-08-27 to 2026-09-25, continuously, with coverage counted against calendar market hours rather than against the hours we happen to have seen.

What IC Markets did with our orders

Everything above this section describes prices on a screen. This section describes what happened when we tried to trade at them. Out of 4 812 orders on this account 1.2% did not execute and the 212 orders placed into the minutes around scheduled economic releases slipped by 1.9 pips on average — about $19 per standard lot every time one of those orders is placed.

A reject here is an order the broker declined, with its own status code attached. It is not the same thing as an order that got no execution event inside our window: those are recorded under our own status, no answer, and excluded from this rate. Folding the two together is the kind of error that is very comfortable to make when it favours the broker that pays for the site.

Slippage is request minus fill, signed so that a positive figure is the bad direction: bought higher, or sold lower, than asked. Only orders aimed at scheduled releases count towards it. Execution quality is invisible in calm markets — that is the whole reason brokers can advertise it freely. The whole of execution quality lives in the few minutes a day when liquidity thins and everybody has orders arriving at once.

Each probe is the smallest volume the account allows and is closed immediately, which keeps the measurement from accumulating market exposure and keeps the cost of running it survivable. Fills and quotes do not always arrive in the same units on the same connection; a probe that disagrees with its own quote stream is flagged suspect instead of becoming a slippage figure.

The hourly breakdown, and why this account has none yet

IC Markets has no publishable hourly breakdown. The hourly table needs a continuous series from our own account for the whole window, and one that survived the feed audit. This account either post-dates the window or failed that audit. An hourly table assembled from a partial series looks exactly like a complete one, which is precisely why it is not here.

The aggregate figures above stand, with their window printed. When a full series exists, this section fills itself from the same store as every other figure on the site — there is no second pipeline for presentation, which is the only reason a reader can trust that an hourly figure and an average come from the same ticks.

The interesting hours are the ones missing from every marketing page. Between 21:00 and 24:00 UTC the New York session closes, liquidity thins and spreads on every account we hold widen — several of them by a multiple rather than a margin. A broker quoting a single daytime average is quoting its best hour and leaving the arithmetic to you; the spread page carries the day-against-rollover ratio for every account in the table, including this one.

What IC Markets's licence gives a client

The protections attached to IC Markets in this table are the ones that come with 362/18, held by IC Markets (EU) Ltd. They are properties of that entity, and they are worth reading before any spread figure on this page.

Read together, those four lines describe a fairly specific deal. Your losses on a CFD account cannot exceed the money in it, because negative balance protection caps aggregate liability at the account balance. Positions are closed out when equity falls to half the required initial margin, which is a floor under how far a bad position can run before somebody intervenes. Leverage on major currency pairs is capped at 30:1 — the same broker group may legally offer several hundred to one through a different entity, and that is one of the clearest practical differences between the licences a single brand can hold. And if the firm itself fails owing you money, the compensation scheme pays up to €20,000, which is a ceiling worth knowing against the size of a deposit rather than after it.

None of that is a judgement about IC Markets. It is the floor the licence puts under any firm holding it, and the reason this site records the entity rather than the brand: the measurements above would be identical under a different entity, and the protections would not.

📄 stated by the regulator · read on 2026-10-11 · we quote the rule, not a summary of it, because a summary is where this kind of fact usually goes wrong

One caution about reading protection as cost. The regulated European entity is often not the cheapest venue a group operates: the same brand's offshore entity may quote tighter and lever higher. Our figure of $1 252 a year is for the entity above, on the account type above, and it is not transferable to a differently licensed arm of the same company.

Eight axes, eight placings for IC Markets

IC Markets is in the better half of the table on 4 of the 8 axes it has figures for — best of 9 on withdrawal fee. Each placing is against the other accounts in the same source class, on the same instrument and window - not against a broker's claim, and not rolled into a composite score. A composite score is exactly where a site paid by one of these brokers would hide its thumb, so there is none.

Lower is better on every axis · 27.08–25.09 · ranking happens inside one source class only

What this column cannot tell you is which axis matters to you. That depends on volume, holding period and the hours you trade, and we are the last people who should be weighting it on your behalf.

Questions a reader usually asks next

Each answer is derived from the figures on this page. None of them is a general statement about brokers.

Where to point your scepticism

We are paid by one of the brokers in these tables. That is a reason to check the work rather than to trust it, and these are the places where checking is cheapest.

• Recompute the billthe components and the profile are printed above; the arithmetic is deliberately simple enough to redo on paper
• Ask for the rowsthe data page says what we hand over, including the flagged readings we excluded
• Compare us with anybody else measuring the same thinga figure that only exists on one site is a figure nobody has checked, ours included
• Check the window, then the sort orderevery figure carries the window it was taken in; the cost table is sorted by cost, and our sponsor sits wherever that puts it
• Check that the losses are printedif the sponsor's losses ever stop appearing on this site, stop believing the rest of it

If you find something wrong, tell us: desk@costcheckfxen.com. We publish the correction and keep the wrong rows, flagged and excluded, because a record of our own faults is worth more than a clean-looking database. Who may alter a published figure, and what happens when a broker disputes one, is written out in the editorial policy.