Spread Betting Guardian

Great news for the Spread Betting Guardian community, we partner with Capital Spreads, the leading financial spread betting and CFD trading firm. The company was founded by Simon Denham in 2003 and is a brand of the parent company, London Capital Group Holdings plc. If you know a bull market from a bear market and fancy yourself as a budding Warren Buffett, then check out our review beneath.

When comparing Capital Spreads to a number of other financial spread betting operators, we were pleased to find out that they offer tight spreads and good value. We were even able to trade on UK 100 shares at just a 0.1% spread and also on Rolling Daily Currencies at a point spread of between 1 & 2. Happy Days, if the Fonz was a day trader, he would be loving it.

The margin requirements across the majority of markets on the Capital Spreads website are reasonable, so we were able to test the water on a number of different financial markets, without having to deposit a small fortune. Another good feature of Capital Spreads is that if you are new to financial spread betting, then you can rest easy, as they have implemented automatic stop losses that apply to every trade. Naturally, this can be removed upon request, however for the relative novices at Spread Betting Guardian, we decided to keep the stabilizers on for the time being.

One of the great features of Capital Spreads if you are a beginner in the world of financial spread betting, is their “Learn Centre”. We were instantly greeted by a friendly, suited and booted Irish lady, who is on hand to take us through all of the basics that we need to get started including topics such as: What is Financial Spread Betting, Why Capital Spreads and a number of other Educational Videos to give you all the fundamental information required to kick on with getting involved in the action. The Learn Centre is also tied in to the registration and use of a demo account, which allowed us to trade on markets and test the action without having to spend a penny. Great news, because financial spread betting can be costly, especially as a novice. In-fact we were impressed that Capital Spreads actively encourages users to participate in the demo account before risking capital, as this proves that they offer responsible financial spread betting and respect the fact that traders must be educated before moving onto trading live markets for real money.

Let’s move onto the software and user experience. Registering for an account with Capital Spreads was simple. We initially had to fill in details regarding our income & occupation due to the fact that financial spread betting is FSA regulated, however getting up and running was not too much more difficult than opening up a regular betting account. When we contacted the support team at Capital Spreads via telephone to ask about attending one of their trading seminar days, the chap on the phone was extremely helpful and also informed us of the “Demo Account” option for first time users. A good start!

The software is pretty intuitive, even for novice spread bettors. The home page is populated by a list of the most popular markets to trade on and you can easily start trading by clicking on the “order” button next to your chosen market. The “new order” slip is easy to use, just decide to buy or sell, enter your stake in “size”, click the level, decide on any stop losses and then hit “submit”. Easy as pie, we have just gone long on the UK 100 Rolling Daily for a stake of £1 per point @ 5897.7.

We can check on our open positions, trade history, order book and any other account transactions at the bottom of the page. For individual markets, simply click on one of five alternatives, including Forex and Indices, then scroll down and click through to see the live bid & ask prices for your grouped choice of markets.

One of the features that we particularly liked about Capital Spreads is their “Trading Tools” area. This part of he site contains loads of interesting information, from details about events in the economic calendar, through to some nifty weekly market analysis videos, where the Capital Spreads Head of Sales (Angus Campbell) and Head of Dealing (Zahid Mahmood) throw down a presentation of the latest market movements. All useful stuff and nice to put a face to the name!

Overall, Capital Spreads offer tight spreads, fair margin requirements and a robust trading platform that is intuitive to use. We enjoyed using the software and found the level of support to be good; this coupled with a choice of over 2500 financial betting markets means that Capital Spreads comes highly recommended from the Spread Betting Guardian team.