Worked example

Practising on City Index's numbers

This is an exercise sheet, not a review. We are going to take three things that City Index publishes — a spread, a ladder of account types and a list of licences — and turn each of them into something you can do arithmetic with. By the end you should be able to repeat the whole exercise on any firm you come across, which is the actual skill being taught.

The figures we are working from

Nothing below is our estimate. Where a firm has not published something, or we could not read it on a source we trust, the box says so instead of guessing — a habit worth copying when you build your own broker notes.

0.5Published EUR/USD spread, pips

$100Minimum to open, USD

1983Trading since

London, UKHead office

1:30 (UK retail)Retail leverage cap

2Licence lines on file

Exercise one — turn the spread into money

The spread is the gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at, and you pay it the instant you enter. City Index publishes 0.5 pips on EUR/USD. On its own that number means nothing. Here is how it becomes money.

1Fix what one pip is worthOn a one standard lot EUR/USD position — 100,000 units — a one-pip move is worth $10. That is a property of the contract size, not of City Index, and it holds wherever you trade.

2Multiply the spread by the pip value0.5 pips × $10 a pip = $5.00. That is what it costs to open and close one standard lot here, before any commission the account may also charge.

3Scale it down to a size you should actually tradeA beginner has no business trading a standard lot. At 0.01 lots — a micro — every figure divides by a hundred: the same round turn costs $0.05. Small enough to practise with, large enough to be real.

4Ask what the cost buys youA $500 float would be entirely consumed by 100 standard-lot round turns at this spread and nothing else. That is the number that should change how often you click.

Compare this broker's 0.5 pip EUR/USD figure against the "from" number in its own advertising.

Now do it without us

Take the spread of any other firm on the practice index, run the same four steps, and write both figures down — per lot and per micro. When you can do that in your head you have stopped shopping on marketing copy and started shopping on cost. The pip value calculator will check your working on pairs where the pip is not a flat ten dollars.

Exercise two — read the account ladder

Account tiers are a pricing structure dressed as a status ladder. City Index offers 3 rungs. Read them as a question — what does each rung ask of me, and what does it give back? — rather than as a set of prizes to climb towards.

CFDThe entry rung. Whatever the published spread applies to, it is almost always this one — so this is the rung your arithmetic above describes.
Spread bettingA higher rung usually trades a tighter spread for a commission, a larger deposit, or a status test. Convert both pricing models to money per lot before you decide either is cheaper.
ProfessionalA higher rung usually trades a tighter spread for a commission, a larger deposit, or a status test. Convert both pricing models to money per lot before you decide either is cheaper.

Account names as published: CFD, Spread betting, Professional. Platforms listed: City Index Web Trader, MT4, TradingView, AT Pro, Mobile apps.

Exercise three — what this licence list means for you

A long licence list is not automatically a good sign. What matters to a beginner is a narrower question: which entity would hold my money, and who supervises that entity? Those are often not the same as the impressive name at the top of the list. Here are City Index's lines, each with a plain reading.

Regulator	Entity on the register	Number	What that means for a beginner
FCA · UK	StoneX Financial Ltd (trading as City Index)	446717	a top-tier regulator: compensation scheme, capital rules and a public register you can search yourself
ASIC · Australia	StoneX Financial Pty Ltd (trading as City Index)	AFSL 345646	a top-tier regulator: compensation scheme, capital rules and a public register you can search yourself

How to use that table

2 of these lines are top-tier — held by StoneX Financial Ltd (trading as City Index), StoneX Financial Pty Ltd (trading as City Index). If you are onboarded to a different entity than those, the protections attached to the top-tier line are not yours, however prominently the regulator's initials appear in the marketing.

The record behind these numbers

City Index was founded in 1983 as a spread betting firm.
City Index is a trading name of StoneX Financial Ltd, authorised by the FCA under register number 446717.
City Index's parent company is StoneX Group Inc., listed on Nasdaq.
StoneX acquired the City Index brand as part of its 2020 acquisition of GAIN Capital.

What we could not verify

The following are unconfirmed and are deliberately left blank rather than estimated: Minimum deposit (widely reported as $100/£100 but not confirmed on an official page in this research); EUR/USD spread is a 'from' figure. Confidence in this file overall: medium. When you build your own notes on a firm, keep a list like this one — the gaps are more useful than the figures, because they tell you what to go and check.

All worked examples Size a trade with these figures

Run the same exercise on another firm

Admirals (Admiral Markets)0.5 pips published, $5.00 per standard lot.Practise →ADSSSpread not verified — used here for its account ladder.Practise →AlpariSpread not verified — used here for its account ladder.Practise →AMarketsSpread not verified — used here for its account ladder.Practise →Axi0.7 pips published, $7.00 per standard lot.Practise →AxiorySpread not verified — used here for its account ladder.Practise →

PipMentor does not rank brokers, does not award badges and does not tell you where to open an account. This page exists so the arithmetic you learn in the curriculum has real numbers to bite on.