Financial Ombudsman CFD and Spread Betting Complaints Explained

You can take a complaint about a UK-authorised CFD or spread betting broker to the Financial Ombudsman Service, free of charge. First you must complain to the broker in writing. The firm then has eight weeks to send a final response. If it rejects your complaint, offers too little or misses the deadline, you have six months from the date of the final response to refer the case to the Ombudsman. For complaints referred on or after 1 April 2026 about events on or after 1 April 2019, the Ombudsman can award up to £455,000.

What it will not do is refund money you lost because the market went against you. The complaints that succeed are about how the firm behaved: prices, execution, close-outs, classification and whether it followed FCA rules. This article explains which is which, and how to build a case that gets taken seriously.

Who the Ombudsman can help

The Ombudsman handles complaints against businesses regulated by the FCA, about activities carried on from the UK. If your broker is FCA-authorised and your client agreement names that UK company, you are almost certainly in scope. An offshore broker, or the overseas affiliate of a UK-looking brand, is out of scope, and no amount of evidence changes that; our piece on IC Markets and the Ombudsman shows how that plays out for one offshore brand. Check the entity in your agreement against the FCA Register before you start. Our Register walkthrough shows how.

Individuals trading for themselves usually keep access to the Ombudsman even if the firm classified them as an elective professional client, because what counts is whether you were acting as a consumer. That matters for one of the most important complaint types, covered below.

Step by step: from complaint to decision

1. Write to the broker. Use its published complaints procedure, usually an email address or form. Say clearly that you are making a formal complaint, what happened, the trades or dates involved, and what you want: a refund of a specific amount, a re-pricing, or a reclassification.
2. Wait up to eight weeks. The firm must acknowledge the complaint and send a final response within eight weeks. Many reply sooner. Keep all correspondence.
3. Read the final response. It must tell you about your right to go to the Ombudsman and the six-month deadline. Some firms make an offer; you can reject it and still refer the case.
4. Refer the case to the Ombudsman online or by phone within six months. Attach the final response and your evidence.
5. Investigator’s view. An investigator looks at both sides and gives an initial view. Either party can disagree.
6. Ombudsman’s final decision. If either side disagrees, an ombudsman reviews the case and makes a final decision. Accept it and it binds the firm; reject it and you keep your right to go to court.

The outer limits are six years from the event you are complaining about, or three years from when you knew (or should have known) you had cause to complain, if later. A late case can still be considered where exceptional circumstances caused the delay, but do not count on it.

Complaints that tend to succeed

The Ombudsman decides what is fair and reasonable, looking at the law, FCA rules and guidance, good industry practice and the firm’s own terms. In CFD and spread betting cases, its published approach points to these kinds of complaint as the ones with a real chance:

• Unfair close-outs. A position closed when your account was above the 50% margin close-out level, or closed at a price that the market never traded at.
• Execution errors and platform faults. Orders filled at wrong prices, stops that were not triggered, or trades blocked during an outage the firm is responsible for.
• Voided trades without a clear error. A firm can cancel a trade for a manifest error, but the Ombudsman’s test is whether it would have been obvious to a reasonable person that the price was wrong. It is unlikely to let a firm void a trade you placed in good faith otherwise.
• Wrong classification as a professional. If you were opted up without meeting at least two of the three tests, or without proper warnings, you may have lost leverage limits and negative balance protection you were entitled to.
• Unsuitable opt-ups or poor appropriateness checks. The Ombudsman looks at whether the firm assessed your knowledge and experience of leveraged products and warned you properly.
• Charges not disclosed. Costs you could not have understood from the firm’s documents. The FCA’s November 2025 review criticised poor disclosure of overnight funding and charging funding on both legs of hedged positions.

Complaints about the 2019 retail rules themselves also land well when a firm plainly broke them: a UK retail client who was given a deposit bonus, allowed leverage above the caps, or left with a negative balance after a gap.

Slippage that only ever goes one way

Slippage is the gap between the price you asked for and the price you got. It happens to every broker in fast markets, and on its own it is rarely grounds for a complaint. What the Ombudsman looks at is whether the firm treats it evenly. Its guidance on spread betting and CFD complaints says that if a firm "kept the profits when trades were carried out at a better price" but "passed losses on to you when trades happened at a worse price", it would probably say the business acted unfairly.

In practice that means comparing your fills. A stop on GBP/USD that fills 4 pips worse after a data release, while your limit orders never fill better than requested, is the pattern to look for. Pull a few months of trade confirmations, note the requested and executed price for each order, and see whether the differences ever run in your favour. Read the order execution policy too: the Ombudsman says it is unlikely to uphold a complaint where the firm made clear it could not stop gapping or slippage, so your case rests on unequal treatment, not on slippage existing at all.

Complaints that usually fail

• Market losses, however painful, where the firm executed correctly.
• Normal slippage or gapping within the firm’s terms, such as a stop filled at a worse price after a weekend gap or a surprise data release.
• Spread widening where the firm can show a reasonable cause, such as increased volatility, and its prices tracked the underlying market.
• Margin close-outs carried out in line with the contract and FCA rules, even if you meant to add funds.
• Trade reversals where the firm’s terms banned a strategy, such as exploiting price latency, and your trading history shows you did it.

An honest self-check helps. If your complaint amounts to "I lost money and I wish I had not traded", it will probably fail unless the firm also failed to check whether the product was appropriate for you. Where it amounts to "the firm did something its own terms or the FCA rules do not allow", you have a case worth making.

The evidence to gather

The Ombudsman decides on the balance of probabilities, so documents beat recollection. Collect these before you write your first complaint:

• Account statements and trade confirmations for the dates involved, including order IDs and timestamps.
• Screenshots or screen recordings of any platform fault, with the time and your internet connection noted.
• Price data from an independent source for the same moment, to show where the market traded.
• Your client agreement, order execution policy and costs disclosures as they stood at the time.
• Any professional client application, the firm’s warnings and your confirmation, plus emails or call notes where you were encouraged to opt up.
• Live chat transcripts and emails with the firm.

How to write the complaint

Keep it short, factual and specific. State your account number, the trades concerned with dates and times in UK time, what you expected to happen under the firm’s terms or the FCA rules, what happened instead and the financial loss, with your working. Ask for a specific remedy. Avoid threats and emotional language; the person reading it is more likely to settle a clear, reasonable complaint.

You do not need a claims management company. The service is free to you, and firms pay a case fee. If you use a representative, any fee they take comes out of your award. Be wary of firms that cold-call promising to recover trading losses for an upfront fee, a pattern covered in our scams and Report Fraud guide. For more on the protections behind these complaints, read our guides to margin close-out and negative balance protection and FSCS cover.

Frequently asked

Related reading

• FSCS protection for trading accounts
• Margin close-out and negative balance protection
• Professional client status in the UK
• How to check a broker on the FCA Register
• The FCA’s 2026 CFD crackdown