Author: Nilsa Blumer

Most of us are familiar with the stock market – whereby investors buy shares in a company and then make or lose money depending on the company’s performance as well as other factors such as the economic situation. There are many ways of using the stock market to get a return on your money, the most familiar and traditional of which is share-trading. This is where you buy shares (or get a broker to do so on your behalf) then sell them when – hopefully – their value has gone up.   Two less familiar ways of making money on the stock market are CFD trading (‘Contract for Difference’) and spread-betting. Because the two have many similarities, one of which is relative complexity when compared to share-trading, we’ve written this straightforward guide which should help you decide which one is right for you. Both CFDs and spread-betting allow you to invest in the movement of a stock without actually buying shares. They are very useful when the market’s volatile as the more movement there is, the more potential profit for traders. You can earn when the market goes down as well as when it goes up. With CFDs, you can gain access to the profit-making potential of many more shares than you could afford to buy outright.   However, they also expose you to much greater losses. Although the...