Is CFD Trading an Effective Alternative Financial instrument?
A CFD (Contract for Difference) is an arrangement between two investors to trade on the difference between the start price and finish price of a contract at the end of an agreed timescale without either party needing to buy the shares themselves. Although sounding complicated, it isn’t. Institutions and hedge funds have utilised CFD Trading for over ten years now within the UK stock markert as an alternative to traditional sharedealing. CFDs have much in common with spreadbetting in that both are margined products so you can gear yourself up or take a position that is a multiple of your available funds.
So if you take the margin on a firm youre interested in was 10%, establishing a position of £100,000 would really only require a deposit of £10,000. Any running profits you make can be used as margin to establish new positions but any running losses would have to be made good by reducing your position or providing additional funds.
While the stamp duty of 0.5% on all UK share purchases has in the opinion of some traders reduced the cost effectiveness of ‘day-trading’ traditional stocks and shares, both CFDs and spread betting are exempt and this has added to their appeal. CFDs are liable to capital gains tax whereas spread bets are tax free, but losses incurred from spread bets are gone for good while CFD losses can be offset against future profits for tax purposes. When you actually trade in CFDs you purchase those contracts in nearly the same way you buy shares. Let’s say you wished to invest on a thousand shares in a business - with CFD trading you would need to sell 1,000 units at eg 494p per share, whereas with spread betting you would just place a bet of £10 per point to get an equivalent return.
The other difference between the two instruments lies in the flexibility in the bid-offer spread. With CFD you are the cost maker, which is why hedge funds tend to use CFDs rather than spread betting. CFDs do not wrap the costs of financing a position within the spread (as does spread betting) but charge those costs and commissions on an individual basis. With CFDs the charges and commissions involved in a trade are not part of the spread, which is the case with financial spread betting. Because of this, the CFD spread quote will forever be very close to the underlying price of the share or commodity that you are following. CFDs also mimic nearly every aspect of owning the underlying share or market, so if you hold a position for a long enough time period you will recieve the benefit from any dividends being paid on the shares.
Ultimately there is no hard and fast rule as to whether CFDs or Spread Bets are ‘better’ - you just need to understand the differences as each will be suited to different investing styles. Although they should not be regarded as substitutes for long term investment or saving, as more people seek to take control of their financial destiny, theres been a growing realisation that going short is a legitimate means of trading in market thats become increasingly difficult to profit from in a traditional sense.