How to spread bet

You can search the product library before creating an account by visiting our instruments pages. These come with live price charts and detailed information about margin rates, trading hours and holding costs for each individual instrument.

Share baskets in particular are exclusive products to CMC Markets and they mirror a stock index in the way that they are constructed and traded. You can spread bet on thematic share baskets that contain a number of stocks within a particular industry, such as renewable energy, software as a service and oil and gas. These help to diversify your trading portfolio and also come with lower holding costs and zero commission fees. Learn more about thematic investing​​.

You can choose your order type between market, limit and stop-entry orders. You can specify the exact price that you would like a trade to be executed at with limit orders, whereas market orders execute the trade immediately at the prevailing price. The latter is the most common type of execution.

When you place a spread bet order, the ticket will provide you with more details of the trade. As shown above, you must enter a price per point, which will tell you the full value of the position. As spread betting requires trading on margin​​, this will also tell you the amount of capital that will be required to open a position. This is your deposit for the trade. Margin and leverage come with many risks, so it’s important that you understand the consequences of spread betting before entering the market. The ticket also highlights spread costs and potential overnight fees.

These can also help you to make new trading decisions. For example, if a particular share price has dropped due to a poor earnings report, this may encourage you to buy the share while it is on discount, or short sell the stock for which you already have an open spread bet position in order to avoid long-term losses.

On our platform, it is possible to create your own watchlists that can be populated with instruments from any asset class. This helps you to monitor price movements for the particular shares or currency pairs, for example, that you are wanting to spread bet on. As shown below, our stock watchlist shows the overall trend that the asset is heading in, along with its change in price and other technicals. Learn how to create customisable watchlists.

It can be difficult to know whether to place a buy or sell order, which is why we have created a tool to reflect market sentiment on our platform. Our client sentiment indicator​​ shows the percentage of traders that are buying and selling the asset, which can help aid your trading decisions when going to place a spread bet order.

All of these unique features can help you to make trading decisions within the financial markets, whether it be related to shares through Morningstar reports, or the forex, commodity and index markets through all other platform features.

1. Open a spread betting account. You will automatically get access to our demo trading account, which allows you to spread bet with £10,000 worth of virtual funds beforehand. When you are ready, you can deposit funds into a live account and start trading the live markets.
2. Consult our spread betting courses​. There are many short and long-term strategies that you can use with spread bets, such as day trading, swing trading and position trading. These guides cover each strategy with examples of how they can be applied to the financial markets.
3. Read more about our trading fees. Although spread betting is tax-free and you don’t need to pay stamp duty, capital gains tax or commission charges, you may still be subject to holding costs if carrying positions overnight. When spread betting shares, there is also an additional cost built into the spread, so you should ensure that you have sufficient capital to cover your account.

Read more spread betting examples​​.