Open up a canadian account Take the Canadian Securities Course and you get around the need to be an accredited investor. Not sure what laws (if any ) are in place to keep out foreigners in the trading of CFDs.
On the tax issue, I thought that stamp duty (regardless of what an earner it is) was a legal charge to verify a change of ownership. Stamping contracts when moving house, for example, or on the change of ownership of physical shares. Because the CFD is a synthetic vehicle, there is no actual change of ownership. Consequently there would have to be a new tax to cover them. Instead, CFDs are subject to capital gains and, as AK correctly stated, the broking operations are subject to corporation tax & income tax of employees. Certainly as they increase in popularity, so they will become a target for greater taxation, but I'd be surprised if stamp duty was introduced on CFD trading. However, watch the situation with interest! Oh, by the way, I've managed to reduce my comms to 0.3% with Blue Index for my advisory account, and they are still performing very well for me. Jem, what %age moves do you look for in your trading? My new comms need less than 1% move to cover costs. Seeing as I target between 2-3% before thinking about exiting, it works well for me! Spud54
I've just opened a CFD account, just to play around with, more leverage = more fun From what I can see the spreads are a 'little' tighter then with spread betting.
I have opened an account with eTrade in the uk. The cfd service they provide is ok, but it's the only one i have used. As for spread betting i've never done it, but the spreads in spread betting are way too big. The spreads on CFDs are ok, i mean i guess you have to take into account that they offer 10x margin so they need to make money somewhere too. I'm just using this for swing/very speculative trading, i use my direct access broker for my main trading. The cfd platform from etrade is ok, it has almost all the shares in europe for trading and a lot US ones too not just S&P 500/Nasdaq 100. Also has Oz and New Zeland and they are talking about Japan and Hong Kong being added soon too.
Good advice if some questions can be answered honestly : * How can one trade with IB by short selling ? Currently uptick rule is a real problem. Also is there any real chance for accounts less than 10 k with holding 6 positions simultaneously on combined short selling and long positions ? How about overnight charges on both short and long holding positions ?