The main difference between CFD and Invest accounts is that in Invest, you buy and sell actual shares, whereas, in CFD, you speculate with the current market price of CFD-based instruments.
Use of Leverage
Another difference is that CFD trading uses leverage, while Invest does not. Leverage allows you to trade more units than your initial deposit allows. When using the Invest account, you can buy and sell equities without applying leverage to your available funds. Additionally, you can trade with fractional shares of companies if your capital is lower than the value of a whole share from your desired company.
Instrument Categories
You can trade CFDs in categories such as FOREX, Stocks, Commodities, Indices, and ETFs. However, CFD units of these instrument categories do not represent underlying assets. 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.
Note: All price feeds in Invest accounts and ISAs are strictly indicative.
Shorting
When trading with CFDs, you can speculate on the fluctuations in the price of a given instrument, allowing you to take long and short positions. Our Invest platform lets you trade real stocks and wait for their value to increase before selling them.
You can find more about the general difference between the two types of accounts by clicking 👉 here.