Commission-free US shares

CFD share trading (otherwise known as ‘equities’ or ‘stocks') means buying and selling CFDs on the shares of companies listed on a stock exchange. CFDs allow traders to speculate on the price of shares without directly owning the share and without the responsibility of being a direct shareholder.

Share CFDs are available for a wide variety of industries — so you can tap into your knowledge of specific businesses or diversify your portfolio.

Investing in shares allows you to take partial ownership of a company. With CFDs, you are speculating on the movements of a share price without owning the underlying asset.

When investing in shares you can only go long (buy) and you can only buy whole shares. Trading CFDs allows you to both go short (sell) and go long (buy), which means you can potentially capture profits on both rising and falling prices. At Equiti, we also allow you to trade fractions of a share as a CFD, meaning you can buy or sell 0.1 share when you trade online.

Buying shares directly requires 100% of the money up front, while trading CFDs you can use leverage. At Equiti, our margins start as low as 5% (leverage of 1:20) which means that you’ll only need 5% of the cash up front or that you can trade 20 times the number of shares with the same deposit amount. However, it’s important to always remember that when both risk and rewards are equally multiplied by using leverage.

Arguably the most popular tool for reducing risk, stop loss orders are designed to limit loss on a position that’s made an unfavourable move. When you place a stop loss order with a broker, you’re requesting to close the position once the instrument reaches a certain price. This is helpful as it means your trades need less monitoring and can help to limit losses, particularly in volatile markets.

Please also note that a stop loss is by no means a guarantee; positions may be affected by price gaps over market closures, data release or other economic factors.

Trading CFDs is based on the speculation that the value of one asset will increase relative to another, which creates potential to maximise returns. However, there’s no guaranteed strategy or market that will always deliver profit. If your current broker says otherwise, check if they’re regulated!

Investing in global markets by purchasing forex, commodities, ETFs or other CFD products will free up your capital and give you the opportunity to profit - but we always encourage our clients to risk only what they can afford to lose. Markets are known to be unpredictable and adding leverage means both losses and profits can equally increase.