well, they've got vanilla type as well now, but maybe not at the time you were using IG http://www.igmarkets.com/content/sites/igm/en_GB/cd_daily_options.html am not too hot on binaries... could change of course, but not yet...
I am afraid that is wrong. As I said I got PWC (one of, if not the largest accountancy firms) to clarify this and I had to pay income tax on all trades. As a result I trade via a limited company set up.
Agreed Lon Eagle, I've been told exactly the same by both PWC and KPMG, and in the absence of a better solution, also now run through a Ltd company. Which has decent advantages if you involve close family members. The Inland Revenue won't care if you have a £3k account, but at £300k there's much more incentive to disprove you're 'just betting'. I certainly won't be doing it again.
Its a waste of time mixing spread betting and real trading as you lose the tax free status of the spread bets. However if you were to just spread bet fulltime it would be tax free and theres nothing the inland revenue could do about it. But tax benefits are only for swing and long term traders really. The savings in tax for a day trader just about make up for the extra dealing costs and slippage when spread betting.
all things considered i am not gonna use any of this stuff, nor Saxo / Ikon... rip off... if anyone knows an ok retail broker with reasonable spreads and good functionality on daily / weekly etc FX Options - ideally a UBS or BarX White Label if there are any - appreciate if you could point me in the right direction tia