ThinkMarkets Spread Betting Review

How We Scored ThinkMarkets

Our overall score for ThinkMarkets is 84 out of 100. Below is the assessment behind it: ThinkMarkets marked on each of the criteria we score every account against, each one out of 10.

These marks do not add up to the score above, and they are not meant to.The criteria are weighted rather than totalled. We tested whether any set of weights reproduces our published scores from these marks alone, and none does. The table tells you the shape of the assessment rather than its arithmetic. The one figure on this page you can rebuild yourself is the spread average, from the nine rows in the cost table.

The same six criteria are scored on every account we rank, so a mark here means the same thing as the mark on any other review. Our scoring methodology sets out what each criterion covers, where the data behind it comes from, and which parts of an account we assess rather than test.

For ThinkMarkets specifically, the strongest mark is Trading Cost and the weakest is Trading Platform. That gap is the useful part of the table. Two accounts on the same overall score can be strong in completely different places. The one that suits you is the one scoring well on what you care about.

What The Marks Say About This Account

ThinkMarkets’ strongest mark is for cost and its weakest is for the platform, and the two together describe the account better than the total does. It is a cheap place to put a position on. It is not the most polished place to manage one.

That trade is worth taking for some readers and not for others. Somebody who knows the platforms already, and whose decision comes down to what a trade costs, is the reader this account is built for. Somebody who wants the software to do the work will find better elsewhere in our ranking.

Who You Are Actually Contracting With

The brand and the authorised company share no word, and this is the section to read before you fund anything. Spread bets at ThinkMarkets are placed with TF Global Markets (UK) Limited (FRN 629628).

ThinkMarkets: the brand appears nowhere in the authorised name. The firm on the register is TF Global Markets (UK) Limited under FRN 629628, and a register search for the brand returns nothing that looks like it. The name in your account terms is the one to match.

Nothing about that is a warning sign in itself. Plenty of firms trade under a name other than the one on their licence, and our regulation guide lists every provider we track where a register search returns something unexpected. The point is narrower. A search that comes back empty tells you nothing about whether the firm is authorised, and a reader who concludes otherwise has drawn the wrong lesson from a naming decision.

Client money at an FCA-authorised firm is held separately from the firm’s own, and negative balance protection applies to retail accounts. The FSCS and the Financial Ombudsman Service are open to you. Our guide to FCA regulation of spread betting publishes the authorised entity and reference number for every provider we track. Our spread betting broker reviews directory covers every brand on this site.

ThinkMarkets Spread Betting Costs

ThinkMarkets prices below the industry average on six of the nine pairs and above it on three. Its nine-pair average of 1.29 points sits under the 1.74-point industry row.

Where That Average Comes From

This account leads our cost table and it does not lead every row of it. It prices above the industry row on three of the pairs above, and every one of them is a major that plenty of people trade daily.

Its lead is built somewhere else. Where the field is expensive, this account is dramatically cheaper, and those gaps are large enough to carry the average on their own. That is the opposite shape from an account that shaves a fraction off the majors and matches the field elsewhere.

Which of those suits you is a question about your book rather than about the broker. If your trading sits in the majors, read the top rows rather than the total. Our spread betting statistics page publishes the whole harvest, every pair against every account we collect.

Guaranteed Stops At ThinkMarkets

Guaranteed stop-loss orders are available at ThinkMarkets. A guaranteed stop closes your trade at the level you set even when the market gaps straight through it. An ordinary stop cannot promise that, and every provider charges a premium for the difference.

ThinkMarkets added guaranteed stops on 11 Feb 2026, on its own ThinkTrader platform, enabled from the order screen.

We have not confirmed how ThinkMarkets charges the premium. It may be taken when the order is placed, or only when the order fires, and that difference decides what the protection costs across a year of trades. We would rather leave it unstated than guess it.

Our guide to stop-loss orders in spread betting covers how the order type behaves in a gapping market.

Why The Date Matters

A dated start explains a contradiction a reader is likely to hit. Reviews of this account written before that date say it offers no guaranteed stop, and they were right when they were published. Ours said the same until this rebuild.

The practical point is about what to trust. A comparison table that has not been re-read since last year is describing an account that no longer exists in that form. This feature is the clearest example of that on this broker. Our guide to stop-loss orders in spread betting covers what the order type does when a market gaps.

What You Trade On

ThinkMarkets runs its own platform alongside third-party software, and the list on our summary table below is the set we have confirmed carries the spread betting account. The guaranteed stop is on its own platform rather than across all of them, which is worth knowing if you were planning to trade this account elsewhere.

ThinkMarkets recorded a median fill of 237ms in our timed testing, across 15 live orders placed between 18 and 27 August 2026. Fill speed is the one exception, and it is measured: a claim about execution speed or app responsiveness needs a dated test with a recorded device and method behind it, and we now publish one for fill speed, timed on live funded accounts and released with its raw rows.

Our app test counts rather than times. It records the taps from a cold launch to a placed order, whether price alerts fire, and whether a guaranteed stop can be placed in the app. We drove both store builds on 22 and 23 August 2026, using an iPhone 15 Pro running iOS 18.6 and a Google Pixel 8 running Android 15. It measures no speed, so no app here carries a responsiveness verdict.

On ThinkMarkets it took five taps to get from a cold launch to a placed order. Price alerts fired on both builds, and a guaranteed stop can be placed in the app itself. We logged one issue across the two builds: Android: chart redraw stalled twice on the FTSE 100 tick chart, no crash.

Our comparison page lists the fourteen spread betting platforms ranked by score on the attributes we can evidence. Our guide to MetaTrader 4 spread betting covers what that platform does and does not do for a spread bettor.

What Our ThinkMarkets Service Tests Found

ThinkMarkets took 7 minutes to resolve our live chat query on 25 August 2026. The account, opened on 12 August 2026, took 22 hours to approve. A withdrawal on 27 August 2026 cost £0 and arrived on 29 August 2026.

ThinkMarkets resolved the question on that contact. All three tests ran on the same live funded account we opened ourselves, and the withdrawal came out of it.

ThinkMarkets At A Glance

Every row below is a value we read on ThinkMarkets’ own UK site or hold in our broker data with a source and a date beside it. An attribute ThinkMarkets does not publish has no row here, because the alternative is a number we would be guessing.

What You Can Bet On

Every figure in this list is our own count rather than a total ThinkMarkets publishes, because ThinkMarkets publishes no total for these. The note under the list says how and when we made them.

• Forex pairs: 14 †
• Indices: 18 †
• Commodities: 3 †

† Our own count, made on 25 Aug 2026 from the instrument list ThinkMarkets publishes on its own site. ThinkMarkets states no total for these markets, so the figure moves whenever it adds an instrument and we have not counted again. We re-count these on the monthly refresh; the date above is the last count, not today.

The Market Counts We Are Not Publishing

ThinkMarkets sets out its full instrument list on its own spread betting contract-specification page. That is the correctly scoped place to read a count for a spread betting account, and better evidence than most providers give us.

We publish no figure from it, because the counts we took from it have not cleared our own verification rule. That is our process rather than a gap in ThinkMarkets’ disclosure, and the honest version of it is to say so. Our guide to spread betting markets covers what an instrument count does and does not tell you about an account.

ThinkMarkets Pros And Cons

Each line is a field in our broker data with a source and a date behind it, not an impression. Where ThinkMarkets does not publish an attribute, that absence is listed as a cost rather than left blank.