There’s no cost when opening a live spread betting account. You can also view prices and use tools such as charts, Reuters news or Morningstar quantitative equity reports free of charge. You will need to deposit funds in your account to place a trade. View the full list of shares on the platform →

When you spread bet on a share on our platform, you don’t buy or sell the underlying share. Instead, you’re taking a position on whether you think the company’s share price will go up or down.

With spread betting, you buy or sell an amount per point movement for the share instrument you are trading, such as £5 per point. This is known as your stake. For every point that the price moves in your favour, you gain multiples of your stake, and vice versa.

As an example, say you wanted to buy £1,300 worth of Lloyds shares at £65 per share. For the spread betting equivalent of this trade, you would specify a stake size of £20 per point to get the same exposure as you would if you bought 20 Lloyds shares at £65 through traditional share dealing. Due to the leverage available with spread betting (5:1 in this case), you would be able to enter this position with an initial outlay of £260, instead of £1,300. However, remember that your profits and losses are based on the full value of the trade (£1,300). You will never lose more than the amount in your account.

When a stock goes ex-dividend, the value of that stock effectively falls by the dividend amount. This means if you hold a spread bet on a company and that company announces a dividend, your account will be credited or debited on the day the stock goes ex-dividend.

If you were long (holding a buy position), you would have been disadvantaged by the drop in the market caused by the pay out of the dividend, so we would credit your account with the dividend amount, less any applicable dividend withholding taxes. If you were short, you would benefit from the drop in the price, so the equivalent amount would be deducted. So, overall, you don't lose or gain anything from the adjustment. There are no withholding taxes on short positions. The dividend will appear as a 'Price Adjustment' in your account history within the platform.

Spread betting allows you to trade tax-free* on a wide range of financial markets 24 hours a day, from Sunday nights through to Friday nights. Trade on your phone, tablet, PC or Mac on a wide range of instruments using leverage.

One of the advantages of spread betting is that you only need to deposit a percentage of the full value of your position to open a trade, known as trading on leverage. Remember, trading on leverage can also amplify losses, so it’s important to manage your risk.

Access thousands of shares including all the big-name, high-growth tech stocks like Apple, Netflix, Uber, Amazon and Google, plus other household names such as Lloyds, Rio Tinto, BP and Tesco. We also offer our ‘US Fang Plus’ index, which lets you trade on a basket of the following shares: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Alibaba, Baidu, NVIDIA, Tesla and Twitter.

You can also trade a wide range of cash and forward instruments across these additional asset classes:

300+ forex pairs – EUR/GBP, EUR/USD, AUD/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY and more
90+ indices – UK 100, Germany 30, US 30, US SPX 500, Australia 200 and more
80+ commodities – including Gold, Brent and West Texas crude oil, Silver, Natural Gas
8,000+ shares – Apple, Netflix, Lloyds, Rio Tinto, BP, Tesco, Amazon, Google and more
12 cryptocurrencies – bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, litecoin, ripple and more
40+ treasuries – including UK Gilt, Euro Bund, Euribor, US T-Bond, US T-Note 10 YR

View the full list on the platform →

If you want to try trading via a risk-free demo CFD trading account, you can open a demo account now with just your email address and a password.

There are a number of costs to consider when spread betting, including spread costs, holding costs (for trades held overnight – this is essentially a fee for the funds we ‘lend you’ to cover the leveraged portion of the trade) and guaranteed stop-loss order charges (if you use this risk-management tool).

The spread is the key cost involved in spread betting, and is the difference between the buy and sell price of an instrument. The narrower the spread, the better value you receive, because the market only has to move slightly in your favour to offer the possibility of a profit on your spread bet.

Share trades held open past the end of the trading day (5pm, New York time) are subject to holding costs, which can be positive or negative depending on your trade direction and the applicable holding rate. Holding costs for shares are based on the underlying interbank rate for the instrument, plus 2.5% on buy positions or minus 2.5% on sell positions.

You can add a guaranteed stop-loss order (GSLO) to your trade, which guarantees to close you out at your specified level, regardless of market volatility or gapping. A cost is applied for using a GSLO, but if it's not triggered we'll refund 100% of the original GSLO charge. The charge, or ‘premium’, is calculated by multiplying the premium rate by the bet size.

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Our automated pricing engine collates and checks thousands of prices per second streamed from our liquidity providers. The best and most representative price is then used to create the quotes on our platform. Learn more →