Trading USA Stocks from the UK

I am with a few brokers in the UK but none of them let me trade on the smaller USA companies. An e-mail that I got from one broker (IG Index) says:

 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Do you know of any UK brokers that will let me trade on USA companies which have a market cap of under $500 million?

 

Or do you know of any USA brokers that will let me register with them? All the ones I have tried so far will not accept people resident in the UK.

 

Thanks.

Just a quick update on this.

 

 

I have contacted a number of UK based brokers and haven't found any that offer a good solution.

 

For UK shares I think I will stick with IG Index (Spreadbetting) and IG Markets (CFD's) as they have really good trading software (web and mobile). Both have a minumum Market Cap for US shares of $500m which is way too high for most of what I want to trade.

 

For US shares, I might need to use MF Global. They allow trading of US shares of: Spreadbetting > $100m, CFD's >$10m. However I really don't like the MF Global trading software and they don't have a mobile platform. Plus their customer support has been hit and miss.

 

Whichever broker I end up using with, they won't have all of the US companies that I want to trade with listed, although will probably add most of them for me (MF Global have added some for me). If anyone here has a list of companies that are commonly traded on here, please let me know! If not, I have already started to compile one.

 

I'll update this post again soon :-)