City Index CFD Trading Expert Review – Live Trading test

Is City Index good for CFD trading?

For my latest review of CFD trading on City Index I thought I’d short some Tesla shares, as when I did “How to buy Tesla shares” explainer video on Youtube the other day, someone called me a “bellend” in the comments.

Fair enough, as Tesla is a bit of a political hot potato at the moment. But you can’t argue with sentiment right? Well, you can actually, because that’s what I did. Before trading, I checked out City Index’s sentiment indicators, which are provided by Trading Central and give a really good overview of what stocks are being talked about.  Obviously, Tesla is the most popular because people love to hate, but what was odd was that sentiment towards Tesla was generally positive. So being a contrarian investor (sometimes) I’ve gone against the crowd, because I often think that when people are most bullish, that’s when a reversal may appear.

Anyway, that was last night and because of the clocks have not changed yet, I missed the main US trading session so had to short Tesla via City Index’s after-hours contracts that let you trade CFDs when the main market is closed. It’s a little more expensive, but liquidity in Tesla is still good, so the spread was still tight.

One thing you can’t see from the screen shots below is that if you click on the little chart in the far bottom right, you get a chart overlayed with your opening price, stops and limits. Which gives you a really good visualisation of where your CFD positions sit from a technical analysis point of view.

Is City Index CFD Trading DMA (Direct Market Access)?

City Index is an OTC CFD Broker, which means it does not offer DMA CFD trading, you can only trade as an OTC CFD or as a financial spread bet. If you want direct market access to exchanges for equities trading you can compare DMA brokers here. However, City Index CFD pricing is tight enough for the majority of traders who do not want to work orders inside the bid/offer spread. The other advantage of trading CFDs “over-the-counter” is that commission is included in the quote as opposed to DMA brokers like Saxo Markets who add commission after you trade.

Charges and commissions are included in the spread for CFD trading and are very competitive including 0.5 pips for EURUSD, 1 point spreads on the FTSE (UK100 CFDs), 0.8% on UK shares and 1.8 cents per share on USD stocks (2 cents per share being industry standard).

Performance Analytics is a great tool for traders that can help traders improve their CFD profitability. Performance Analytics looks at your CFD trading history and shows you where you do well and when you do not. The idea is to make you a better trader by encouraging you to stick to a trading plan and gives you guidance on when your plan is working and what markets, times and conditions suit your trading style the most.

As well as offering a CFD trading platform and mobile app City Index has always catered to, and still does, to high-value traders over the phone. It is one thing that makes them different from the majority of trading platforms in that you can actually talk to an experienced dealer who knows your account as well as deal electronically.

For new traders, there is a huge amount of educational and informational content from “how-to” videos and articles to more lighthearted CFD, and focussed programming like the Traders Academy.

Overall, City Index offers one of the best CFD trading platforms, on a wide range of markets with low costs and is suitable for large traders who want personal service and new traders how need assistance looking for trading ideas. A good CFD trading platform for traders who want trading signals and post-trade analytics.