When it comes to making your trading decisions, your CFD provider should be able to offer you continuing education and courses on CFD trading. Here it is worth taking some time reviewing what is available from the various providers you are considering setting up your account with, as the brokers vary significantly in the depth and aspects of services they offer to their trading clients
If you have traded before, you may have a good idea of what you would like to see on the CFD broker’s website, but if you are a beginner then you may be surprised by the amount of information on offer, if you pick your broker carefully. There may be different levels of account or service, depending on how much money you open your account with, and the following are the types of services that you may be able to choose from.
As a beginner, you may be interested in brokers who offer a trading course, often with videos, to their account holders. These are usually of good quality and worth watching, although I wouldn’t recommend anyone to set up an account and start trading solely on the basis of a broker provided course. Trading is a pursuit where you should never stop learning, and a free course can be considered another building block in your career.
While CFD providers are not normally like the full service stockbrokers of old, you will find dealers who offer varying amounts of research and analysis and some may even offer a personal account manager. These can serve to give you trading ideas, and you should find out how often you may expect them. Any information in them was written by or paid for by the CFD provider company, but this need not reduce the significance of the analysis. You should just make sure that you understand and accept the assertions and findings for yourself.
Sometimes there are different tiers of service depending on the size of your trading account, or related to trading volumes. However, even at the lowest level of account, you should be able to call in to the dealing desk for trading concerns, although you should not expect personal advice. With the higher levels of account, you will often be assigned a particular personal adviser who will come to know your preferences and risk profile, and may help you narrow down the promising trades that would suit you.
Take time to view the range of charting tools available from the different providers as this will help you both when starting out and when you get more experienced too. Often there is interactive help to explain the different indicators that are available, and this can be useful even if only as a reminder while you are looking at the chart, as there are hundreds of different technical indicators out there. If you want to try point-and-figure charting for instance, you will want to make sure that this is supported. Most CFD providers’ charting packages include candlesticks, but if your new trading system needs Ichimoku charts, for instance, you had better make sure you can draw them. On the surface, most charting facilities have an overwhelming amount of bells-and-whistles, so you really have to dig deep to find if all the features that you want are really present.
Finally, do make sure to try the trading practice account if your CFD provider offers one. Act as if you had already deposited funds, and do a dry run of how you intend to trade so that you will be able to see how the trading platform actually works. Another thing to check for in a trading practice account is how easy it is to deal and trade. But remember simplicity does not always mean reliability.
