Two FCA brokers worth considering: Eightcap UK, Shares.co.uk

Eightcap UK is a UK-facing brokerage supervised by FCA. It has been in business since 2009 and its pitch to retail traders is straightforward: great tradingview integration. The account is built around MT4, MT5, TradingView, with a minimum funding level of £100 and headline pricing from 0.0 pips.

Shares.co.uk approaches the same market from a different angle. Supervised by FCA and trading since 2019, its strength is social investing community, delivered through Shares app. It asks for £1 to open and quotes from n/a.

Neither firm is trying to be all things to everyone, and that is a good thing. A broker that files itself down to one clear audience tends to price and support that audience properly. The useful question is not which of the two is objectively better, but which one is built around the way you already trade — and whether the thing you value most is cost, platform depth, education or someone answering the phone at four in the afternoon.

Eightcap UK is the longer-established of the pair, trading since 2009. Longevity is not proof of good conduct on its own, but a firm that has run a UK book through several volatility events, kept a clean register entry and paid withdrawals on time throughout has demonstrated something no marketing page can.

It also helps to know what each firm is not. Neither Eightcap UK nor Shares.co.uk is a discretionary manager, a signal service or a place to park long-term savings; both are execution venues for leveraged products, and everything they publish should be read in that light. The account you open is a trading account, the money in it is working capital, and the sensible balance to hold there is the amount you are actively using rather than everything you have.

The practical shortlist test is unglamorous. Open the client agreement for each, find the entity name, find the fee schedule, find the section on how orders are executed, and read those three parts properly. Ten minutes with those documents will tell you more about how a firm behaves under stress than an afternoon spent on either homepage, and it is the same ten minutes whichever of the two you eventually fund.

The advertised spread is only the first of three charges. Eightcap UK quotes from 0.0 pips and Shares.co.uk from n/a, but a raw-spread account adds commission per side while a bundled account buries the same money in a wider quote. Add both together and you have the cost of getting in and out once. Eightcap UK is the cheaper of the two on that measure.

The second charge is overnight financing, and it is the one most traders discover late. Anything held past the daily rollover is financed, and a position carried for a month can quietly pay more in interest than it ever paid in spread. Both firms publish swap tables; check them against your own statement in the first few weeks, because the size of the gap between the two is a fair measure of how straight a broker plays.

The third charge is the one nobody prints: slippage. A quoted spread means very little if your order fills a pip away from the price on screen. We time fills from submission to confirmation at both firms and log slippage in both directions, including through scheduled releases, because a broker that occasionally fills you better than expected is behaving very differently from one that only ever slips against you.

Put together, this is why cost comparisons on headline spread alone mislead. Work out your realistic monthly volume, apply spread plus commission, add the financing you would actually accrue given your holding period, and only then compare. For a short-term trader the spread dominates; for a position trader financing dominates and the headline number barely matters.

Currency conversion is the fourth cost and the quietest of the lot. If your account is denominated in sterling and you trade an instrument priced in dollars, every realised profit and loss is converted, and the rate applied includes a margin. Traders who run a lot of small positions in non-sterling instruments can pay more in conversion over a year than they pay in commission, which is why a base currency that matches what you trade is worth choosing deliberately.

Build a simple monthly model before you commit. Take your realistic volume, apply spread plus commission per round turn, add the financing your average holding period would accrue, and add conversion if it applies. Do it once for Eightcap UK and once for Shares.co.uk. The result rarely matches the ranking implied by the advertised numbers, and it is the only cost comparison that reflects the way you actually trade.

One caution about promotional pricing: introductory spreads, rebates and cashback offers are real but temporary, and they should not decide a multi-year relationship. Price both firms at their standard schedule, treat any promotion as a bonus rather than a reason, and you will not be surprised in month four when the offer lapses. Eightcap UK still holds the lower standard pricing here either way.

Eightcap UK runs MT4, MT5, TradingView. Shares.co.uk runs Shares app. If you depend on expert advisors, imported indicators or third-party signal services, the MetaTrader route is the practical one because the ecosystem around it is enormous. If you would rather have deeper native charting and an order ticket that restates the all-in cost before you confirm, a proprietary platform usually reads better.

Test the mobile app before you depend on it, not after. Alerts should fire on the phone as reliably as on the desktop, a chart you build on one device should appear on the other, and moving a stop should take one hand and a couple of seconds. Plenty of otherwise excellent desktop platforms are paired with a mobile app that was clearly built by a different team.

Execution quality is best judged in the two minutes around a rate decision, when order queues build and weaker infrastructure starts rejecting. Both of these firms fill promptly in calm conditions — almost everyone does — so that tells you nothing. Place small orders through a scheduled release at each and keep the confirmations; that record is worth more than any review, including this one.

Tooling around the platform matters as much as the platform. Check whether you can export a full trade history to a spreadsheet, whether the statement shows spread, commission and financing as separate lines rather than one blended figure, and whether alerts can be set on price and on account level. A broker that makes its own costs easy to audit is telling you something about how it expects to be judged.

Stability is the least visible feature and the one you notice only when it fails. Ask both firms what happens if the platform is unreachable — whether there is a dealing desk you can telephone to flatten a position, what the number is and what the hours are. Every serious broker has an answer to that question; the quality of the answer is a reasonable proxy for the quality of the operation behind it.

Eightcap UK operates under FCA and Shares.co.uk under FCA. Under FCA rules, retail client money is held in segregated accounts at a separate bank, leverage on major currency pairs is capped at 1:30, negative balance protection is contractual rather than discretionary, and firms must publish the percentage of retail accounts that lose money.

Where a firm is FCA-authorised, eligible claims are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme up to £85,000 per person, per firm, if the broker itself fails. That cover is about insolvency, not about losing money on a trade — no scheme anywhere protects you from a bad position.

Check which legal entity you are being onboarded to. Large groups run several entities under different licences, and the protections described on a UK page may not extend to an offshore arm of the same brand. The entity name appears on the client agreement, not on the marketing page, and it is the single most important line in the document.

Complaints handling is part of the regulatory picture and rarely discussed. A UK-authorised firm must operate a formal complaints procedure and respond within defined timeframes, and if you remain unsatisfied the Financial Ombudsman Service can consider eligible cases at no cost to you. That route exists for both Eightcap UK and Shares.co.uk and is worth knowing about before you need it.

Read the risk disclosure rather than skipping it. Authorised firms publish the percentage of retail accounts that lose money, and the figure is typically high across the whole industry. It is not a judgement on either of these two brokers; it is a statement about leveraged trading in general, and it is the single most useful number on either website.

Eightcap UK makes most sense if great tradingview integration describes your priority. The combination of 0.0 pips pricing, a £100 entry point and MT4, MT5, TradingView points at a particular kind of trader, and if that is you the fit is good.

Shares.co.uk is the better home if social investing community matters more. Starting at £1, quoting from n/a and running Shares app, it suits someone with a different set of priorities entirely.

Shares.co.uk is the gentler start for anyone new, purely because £1 lets you learn on real money at a size that cannot hurt. Demo accounts teach mechanics but not discipline; the smallest live position available teaches both.

And if you genuinely cannot separate them, do not. Open both with small balances, run identical trades for a month and compare the statements. Two statements settle the argument faster than any amount of reading.

Think in terms of the next twelve months rather than the next twelve days. The features that matter to a beginner — a low minimum, clear education, a forgiving order ticket — are not the features that matter to the same person a year later, when cost per round turn and execution quality start to dominate. Shares.co.uk is the softer landing today; that does not make it the permanent answer, and moving later is routine rather than dramatic.

There is also nothing wrong with running both accounts permanently. Traders frequently keep one firm for the instruments and pricing it handles best and another for the platform or research they prefer, and the administrative cost of doing so is a second statement to reconcile each month. If your shortlist ends with both names still on it, that is a legitimate outcome rather than an unfinished decision.

Applications at both firms are online and normally take under fifteen minutes, followed by identity and source-of-funds checks. Have a passport or driving licence and a recent utility bill or bank statement ready; the delays people complain about are almost always a document that does not match the name on the application.

Fund the minimum first. There is no advantage to depositing a large balance before you have tested a withdrawal, and a first withdrawal is the single most informative test you can run on any broker. Request it early, note how long it takes and whether the amount arrives whole.

Set your risk rules before your first trade, not after your first loss. A fixed percentage of the account per position, a stop placed at entry rather than added later, and a hard daily loss limit will do more for your outcome than the difference in spread between these two firms ever will.

Keep records from day one. Every position, the reason for it, the cost you paid and what happened. After a couple of months that log will tell you whether your broker choice is actually costing you anything — which is the only version of this comparison that matters.

Expect a short appropriateness assessment during onboarding. UK firms must check that you understand leveraged products before granting access, and the questions cover margin, stop losses and how losses can exceed deposits. Answer honestly — the assessment exists for your protection, and a firm that waves it through is not doing you a favour.

Turn on every security control on day one: two-factor authentication, withdrawal confirmations to a verified account and login alerts. It takes five minutes and it removes the most common way trading accounts are compromised, which is not a sophisticated attack but a reused password.

The first is choosing on headline spread alone. A quoted 0.0 pip spread with commission attached can easily be dearer than a wider bundled quote once your size and frequency are applied. Model the total, not the number in the advertisement.

The second is ignoring how you actually trade. Someone holding positions for weeks should be reading swap tables, not spread tables. Someone scalping the open should care about fill speed and rejection rates far more than about education libraries.

The third is over-leveraging simply because leverage is available. The cap is a ceiling, not a target, and the fastest way to lose an account at either of these firms is to trade at a size where a normal adverse move becomes a margin call.

The fourth is treating a demo account as preparation. Demo trading teaches the platform and nothing about how you behave when the money is real. Move to the smallest live size early, accept that the first months are tuition, and keep the size down until the log shows something worth scaling.

A fifth mistake is switching brokers to solve a problem the broker did not cause. If a strategy is unprofitable, moving it to a venue with a marginally tighter spread changes the arithmetic slightly and the outcome not at all. Fix the approach first; the cost of execution is a rounding error next to the cost of a poor edge, and no amount of platform-hopping substitutes for a tested plan.

Eightcap UK scores higher across our overall framework at 4.3 out of 5, Eightcap UK is cheaper on headline pricing from 0.0 pips, and Shares.co.uk is the easier account to start at £1. Those three facts point in slightly different directions, which is exactly why a single ranking would be misleading.

If cost decides everything because your edge is thin, take Eightcap UK. If you would rather pay a fraction more for a more consistent all-round experience across platform, execution and support, take Eightcap UK. If you are starting out and want the smallest possible barrier, start at Shares.co.uk and revisit the question in six months when you know what you actually need.

Whichever way you go, CFDs and spread bets are leveraged products and the majority of retail accounts lose money trading them. Nothing on this page is personal advice, and no broker choice turns an unprofitable approach into a profitable one — it only changes how much the attempt costs.

Whatever you decide, write the reason down. The value of a shortlist like this one is that it forces the criteria into the open — cost, platform, protection, support, fit — and a decision made against stated criteria can be reviewed sensibly in six months. A decision made on a homepage impression cannot, because there is nothing to review it against.