Use of Leverage
The main difference is that leverage is used with CFD trading, while on Invest leverage is not applied. Leverage allows you to trade more units than your initial deposit allows.
When you use the Invest account, you can buy and sell equities without applying leverage to your available funds. Additionally, you will be able to trade with fractional shares of companies if your capital is lower than the value of a whole share from your desired company.
Instrument Categories
The categories which you can trade CFDs with are - FOREX, Stocks, Commodities, Indices, and ETFs. CFD units of these instrument categories do not represent underlying assets, rather they are meant to allow you to speculate.
Conversely, our Invest portfolio consists of Stocks (UK, US, DE, NL, and many others) and ETFs. When buying or selling stocks and ETFs, you can use quantity or value orders for an exact monetary value. You can take a look at our list of instruments by clicking here.
*All price feeds in Invest accounts and ISAs are strictly indicative.
Shorting
When you trade with CFDs you are allowed to speculate with the fluctuations in the price of a given instrument. This way, you have two different types of positions to go for - long and short.
Our Invest platform lets you trade real stocks and wait for their value to increase before you sell them.
You can find more about the general difference between the two types of accounts by clicking here.