Use of Leverage
The differences between CFD and Invest are several, and the main one is in fact the use of leverage with CFD trading. It allows you to trade a larger amount of units than your initially deposited capital would allow you to.
If you are using the Invest account, you will be buying and selling equities without the use of leverage applied to your available funds. On the 'Invest' platform, 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 with which you can trade CFDs are - FOREX, Stocks, Commodities, Indices, and ETFs. Trading CFD units of these instrument categories will not mean that you hold any underlying assets, but in fact that you are speculating with the price movement of these markets.
The 'Invest' account, allows you to buy and sell a number of equities, or buy and sell with an exact monetary value of the equity. Our Invest portfolio consists of Stocks (UK, US, DE, NL, and many others) and ETFs. 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.
On our Invest platform, you are trading with real equities and you buy a number of shares primarily and you wait for their value to increase in order to sell them and make a profit.
You can find more about the general difference between the two types of accounts by clicking here.