Monday 19 May 2008

CFD trading platforms

I use CMC Markets for trading Forex, but there are many different CFD trading platforms out there. One of the CFD Providers available to those wishing to trade contracts for difference in the UK is One Financial. This online stock market trading broker provides all the major CFD markets, and has good coverage of energy, forex, hard and soft currencies, international indices, stocks and ETFs.

They claim to have some of the tightest spreads, lowest margins and fastest execution available in the market for trading CFDs with their award winning browser-based trading software. It provides free charting, news, and analytics. And users can access 24 hour customer support via chat, phone or email.

The easiest way to compare stock trading programs is to take them for a test drive. So it's nice to be able to sign up for a demo trading account in a few seconds with minimal information. The email with my demo account login and password hadn't arrived after an hour, so there is probably some human vetting of demo account requests involved. I requested a demo account with the minimum $10,000 balance, as that is similar to the amount (A$5,000) I trade for real. "Paper trading" is a good way to get used to the tools and practice implementing your trading plan (eg. stop and limit settings, trade size compared to total margin), but it's not the same a trading money for real. By using a demo account balance close to reality you can get a better impression of the potential gains and losses you may experience during trading CFDs. If nothing else it's good fun to experiment with CFD trading strategies using a demo account - when my demo account email arrives I think I'll let DS1 have a play with the account and learn about charting, calculating profits, and the various trading markets.

Subscribe to Enough Wealth. Copyright 2006-2008

3 comments:

mOOm said...

Do you mean "in the UK"? That's where thewebsite says to contact them. I did think CFDs were illegal in the US. (Of course equity swaps for big players are not).

enoughwealth@yahoo.com said...

Good pickup. Yes, they are UK, not US, based. BTW, the email with my demo account login arrived about 2 hrs after I registered online. Unfortunately the demo account is only valid for 14 days, so it won't be as much fun for DS1 to play with as I thought.

mOOm said...

City Index are handing out $250 to those who attended the seminar if we open an account in a week. Might be worth signing up for one of their Sydney seminars :) They also have free Aussie stock CFD trades for all of June - size unlimited!