Placing your first trade

Let's take a closer look at how to trade CFDs

Select your product

Choose from our wide range of instruments, including commodities, currencies, indices, treasuries and companies. Find the product you’re interested in trading on using the search and filter tool in the product library within the trading platform.

Decide if you want to buy or sell

If you think the price will go up, click on the buy price with the aim of selling it later at a higher price. If you think the price will fall, click on the sell price with the aim of buying it back later at a lower price. When you click on the buy or sell price the platform will open up an order ticket.

Choose the units or amount you want to trade

Within the order ticket, enter the number of units you want to buy or sell, or enter an amount in pounds.

Choose how much margin you want to trade on

Simply use the slider within the order ticket to choose the amount of financing you want to take on for your position. You can fund the whole position yourself or borrow up to the maximum amount for that instrument.

Set your risk level

When you open a new position our trading platform will automatically set a stop loss for that bet, equal to the margin. This useful risk management feature is known as transaction based stop loss. You can adjust the stop loss before you place your trade, or you can change it after your position has been opened. Or, if you prefer not to use the transaction based stop loss feature, simply turn it off in your account preferences. If you’re new to CFD trading, we recommend using this feature.
You can also set a take profit level at this point. A take profit level is a point at which you would like the platform to take your profits and close your position. If the price of your instrument reaches this level, the platform will automatically do this for you.

Monitor your positions

As soon as your trade is opened you can monitor your profit or loss in real time. You can view the price movements of your product on a chart and you can adjust your stop loss and take profit levels at any time right on the chart.
Click here to find out more about our trading platform.