Spread Betting Demo Account for New Traders Entering the Marketplace

LONDON, March 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Learning about the financial markets and familiarising yourself with a professional trading platform is made possible through a free spread betting demo account available to traders choosing City Index.

 An ideal way to build trading confidence with zero risk, with a demo trading account that enables you to trade in real time using the City Index trading platform with a virtual cash balance of £2,500.

Below, we consider the advantages and disadvantages of practicing through a demo spread betting account and how City Index helps traders to increase their financial market knowledge, trading confidence and trading potential before committing to a live City Index spread betting account.

What is Spread Betting?

Spread betting offers an easy entry level into over 12,000 financial markets due to its low margin, high leverage feature requiring only a small percentage of the underlying instrument's value as an intial deposit.

Such features, amongst others, make spread betting a popular choice for traders looking to enter the marketplace, whilst also presenting a high level of risk.

Traders can benefit from going both long and short on trades, offering the potential to profit from a market which falls as well as rises.

As mentioned above, features such as low margin are a double-edged sword in the sense that the potential for significant profits are equal to the potential for significant losses.

Trades are placed on a market's price movements, meaning that a trader does not have ownership of the underlying instrument.

With this in mind, it is imperative for new traders to educate themselves and understand the risks that come with spread betting.

Spread Betting Demo Account

Traders could educate themselves through City Index's education offering which includes seminars, webinars, a 4-week 'Learn to Trade' programme and their demo trading account.

In addition to the information above, a spread betting demo account provides traders the ability to trade over 12,000 markets - in real time - whilst viewing detailed market information and news; follow tick charts; place trades; all at zero risk to their capital.

Free to all users, the City Index demo trading account provides unlimited access to markets such as indices, shares, currencies and commodities over a two-week period.

In addition to traders familiarising themselves with the platform layout, they can also learn how to fully utilise and ultimately benefit from the suite of professional trading tools and indicators.

Although there is zero risk involved, traders should be conscious to trade in the same way as they would do with a live trading account and their own money to fully benefit and learn from their mistakes.

With this in mind, traders should remember to put in place the relevant risk management tools such as entry orders, stop losses, limit orders and so on.

Traders following this strategy will potentially gain a better and more realistic understanding of how leverage magnifies both profits and losses; an essential part of risk management that is imperative to their education process.

Summary

Whilst a spread betting demo account is a fantastic tool for learning how to trade with zero risk whilst familiarizing yourself with a professional trading platform, it is important that traders remember to trade in the same way they would do if the potential for losses was present.

This will help them achieve a greater, more realistic, understanding of spread betting.

Open a spread betting demo account: http://www.cityindex.co.uk/learn-to-trade/demo-account.aspx

Spread betting and CFD trading are leveraged products which can result in losses greater than your initial deposit. Ensure you fully understand the risks.

About City Index:

Today more and more individual traders are discovering the benefits of derivatives, and many of them are discovering them through a City Index trading platform.

As a group, we transact in excess of 1.5 million trades every month in over 50 countries worldwide. We provide access to a wide range of instruments including margined foreign exchange, CFD trading and, in the UK, financial spread betting.