Why trade indices with CMC Markets?

Our lowest ever index spreads

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Our lowest ever Index margins

With CMC Markets you can now trade from just 0.25% minimum margin requirement (400:1 leverage) across our major indices. For example, with £100 as initial margin, you could open up a much larger £40,000 index trading position, using our minimum margin requirement. You should remember that when you trade using maximum leverage (minimum margin requirement) your losses can be greater too . When using margin, losses can exceed the initial amount deposited (margin) to open the position. In volatile market conditions using lower margin levels can result in your position being closed out much quicker (as only a small movement is required) where the market moves against you, so it is important to ensure you monitor your positions carefully to ensure you’ve deposited enough funds to keep your account value above close out level.

Customisable margin

The customisable margin feature on our CFD trading platform gives you the option to choose your own margin requirements for each trade, which helps you manage your risk and financing costs. By increasing the amount of margin deposited it is less likely your position will be closed out by small movements in volatile market conditions. From a financing perspective, if you decided to fund 50% of the trade and use 50% margin, you would only pay financing fees on your net borrowings (in this case 50% of the total trade), if the position is held open overnight.

Traditionally, most companies have fixed margin requirements and you have to pay financing on the total position size regardless of your margin. At CMC Markets we believe customisable margin (the ability to use more of your own money to fund the position) is a cost effective way for our customers to manage their financing costs.

By using customisable margin you have more control over risk and financing costs during volatile markets to try and avoid a quick liquidation of your positions if the market rapidly moves against you. This enables you to balance your risk profile against your borrowing requirements. There is a simple to use financing slider in the order ticket that allows you to move margins up or down.

Fractional trading means no minimum trade sizes

Our Next Generation CFD platform allows us to offer you the unique ability to trade indices at a fraction of any amount. This effectively means that you are now no longer limited to trading in whole units when trading index CFDs.

If you were to trade the UK 100 with a traditional CFD provider you would have to take out a minimum trade size of one CFD. With CMC Markets you can take out as little as 1/10,000th of a CFD (called a unit), so you can let the amount you want to put down determine your trade size, instead of the other way around And remember there is no minimum commission charge so you can do whatever trade size you feel comfortable with and you just pay for what you have bought.

Extra quote precision for full transparency

With precision pricing you can expect a higher level of pricing accuracy; in some cases our prices are as precise as 100th of a point. By launching precision pricing we are offering you a higher level of execution through pricing accuracy.

With CMC Markets, you will see index prices quoted up to 2 decimal places, so there will be no price rounding. By offering this level of price precision you have a greater transparency on our market prices. We are so confident in our pricing structure that, if you view charts for the indices you want to trade, you will see a real-time tick data chart of our dealing spreads throughout the day.

Advanced trading platforms

Our platform is unique. We have created a trading platform that is simple, intuitive and easy to use yet packed with powerful tools and features. Our trading platform gives you access to the financial markets from anywhere in the world, whether you’re at home or on the move. You can access our platform through any browser on your computer, or you can trade on the go using our mobile trading apps for the iPad and iPhone.

Not only have we invested in the user interface of our platform, we’ve also invested heavily in the hardware and infrastructure that supports them. Our back-end systems can handle over one million prices per second, so you can be confident that even during the most turbulent market sessions our platform will continue to deliver the service you expect.

Transaction based stop loss

Whenever you open a trade our Next Generation platform will automatically suggest a stop loss based on the margin requirement for your trade (this feature can be disabled in the Preferences section of the platform). This will be done every time you trade if transaction based stop loss is enabled. If you customise your margin the stop loss will be aligned to your new margin requirements automatically.

You can also have the platform automatically suggest a take profit order at a percentage of the market price. So if the stop loss is set at 5% you could have the take profit level automatically set at 10% to create a 2 to 1 risk-to-reward ratio. You can enable this feature in Preferences.