Depends. ESMA here in the EU enforces CFD providers to provide protection against negative account balances. Then AFAIK UK residents have tax reasons although I haven't needed to remember the details. Add that to say e.g. IG have a quite wide range of tradable stuff on a semi-decent platform and it can be more simple than some of the alternatives. And Oanda makes having small accounts quite easy given small units (i.e. where else can you go long 1 EUR/USD). Overall thought the downsides are pretty bad, even for the best CFD platforms. The worst ones are obviously pure scams. When you look at how money accounts lose money (ESMA forces that to be published) the reason isn't necessarily that the platform sucks, the primary cause I would expect is that people are provided with way more leverage than they can handle. Even long only index trading on too high leverage will have negative expectancy. There's a reason say IB offers max 2/4 leverage to unsophisticated clients.