Note: This is NOT a sponsored post - I just saw this on a newspaper ad (below), looked into the promo, and thought it was worth sharing as a way to get “free” money by taking advantage of the generous promotion since I know most of you guys love free sign up benefits (cash, miles, travel suitcases) 
The relevant newspaper ad regarding IG’s 45th anniversary sign up promotion on The Straits Times
A few days ago, I was flipping through the newspaper (yes I know i’m very old school…) when I chanced upon this above ad featuring IG’s 45th anniversary sign up promotion, IG being one of the major trading/CFD platforms available to Singaporeans.
Normally I don’t take notice of ads, but this one made me take a second look because of the Krisflyer logo on it, and the claim that “you’ll earn up to 45,000 Krisflyer miles just by trading with us” - if you know me I’m a sucker for free miles so I HAD to take a closer look at this promotion.
Is this promotion worth looking at?
As part of their 45th anniversary sign up promotion, IG launched two benefits for new sign ups:
- You get $288 in cash for doing the basics of setting up an account with them
- You can get up to another 45,000 Krisflyer miles based on your trading activity
Benefit 1: Three steps to get $288
Screenshot from the IG campaign webpage
Getting the $288 signup bonus is easy enough - you just need to open an IG account (which can be done with MyInfo where they automatically pull the relevant information from your SingPass), fund it with S$10,000, and make at least one trade of any value - you can make the smallest possible trade and close it immediately for basically no risk.
After that, they will credit the $288 to your IG account, whereupon you can withdraw your entire $10,288 from IG and start thinking about how to spend the $288 that you just “earned” - a pair of AirPods, the new Nintendo Switch Lite (with some extra money), a nice restaurant treat for the family, or just keep in your bank and collect interest on it.
Benefit 2: Additional Krisflyer miles based on your trading activity
Screenshot from the IG campaign webpage
While the $288 is relatively to get, the 45,000 miles is a completely different ballgame. Instead of a one-off award, the advertised 45,000 miles is actually from accumulating 12 months of bonus miles awarded based on the monthly aggregated contract value traded on the IG platform. To get 45,000 miles, you need to maintain a monthly aggregated contract value (USD) of >$25,000,000 every month for a period of 12 months.
That is the correct number of zeroes - for the highest tier monthly Krisflyer miles award rate you need to have monthly aggregated contracts worth US$25 million (!!!) each month. Even at 50:1 leverage for Forex transactions, that is a whopping US$500,000 of capital.
For those of our readers who are already big-time traders, you may be able to take advantage of this to get some extra miles, but for everyone else who doesn’t trade (or only do regular equity trading), it is definitely not worth risking that much of your money in exchange for so little miles
Summary
The $288 sign up bonus is definitely worth considering since you can do it with almost no costs and earn $288 for “free”. The 45,000 Krisflyer miles (while it got me to actually look at the ad) is not worth going for unless you are already a big-time CFD trader.
I would highly recommend anyone to sign up for an IG account and go through the steps to get the $288 even if you have no interest in CFD trading (like me). I personally applied for an IG account some years ago, taking advantage of the referral program then to earn an easy $250 (and another $250 for my referring friend) with the same easy steps:
- Register for an account
- Fund it with some money
- Make one (tiny and no-risk) trade
- Get the sign up bonus credited
- Withdraw all the money from the account, leave the account for dead/close it
On the other hand, the 45,000 Krisflyer miles involves way too much trading risk and is really only worth it if you are already an active existing trader and don’t mind moving from your current platform to IG - probably not really worth it either if you are already all setup somewhere else.
You can check out the promotion at the IG site here, and for those of you who are interested you can also read the detailed T&Cs of this promotion.
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