One of the first choices I needed to make was which CFD trading platform would be the right one for me.

In Australia, there are two majors players: IG Markets and CMC Markets. It immediately became apparent that it wasn’t just their names which were similar. Both brokers offered CFD trading in shares, indices, FX and the like. They both offered their own trading platforms, which unsurprisingly, were very much the same. They were even the same when it came down to the sign up process: both claimed to have instant sign up, but actually took 2 days for me to get online. Mere coincidence?

In fact I could only identify two differences:

Brokerage fees

IG charges $8 whilst CMC charges $10. Now you might think that this is quite insignificant, but please, let me explain. That $2 difference in brokerage is actually quite a lot. In percentage terms it’s 25% more. And considering my minute starting capital, every dollar counts!

Trading platform

IG is by far more pleasing on the eye than CMC. And there’s just something incredibly corny about CMC’s marketing campaign featuring the lion with night vision goggles. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me…

More importantly, IG’s platform is browser based and CMC is a standalone software. This gives rise to several decisive factors:

1. You can access your IG platform anywhere that has a java enabled browser. And when one of my browsers did not support java, IG emailed me straight away with support information (small things like this make all the difference). Having access to my platform is important as I am a full time student with several part time jobs meaning I can’t be on my home computer the whole day.
2. CMC is more robust and flexible. But it is also a huge drain of resources even though it runs off java much like IG. My computer actually died the first time I used CMC. IG’s platform provides almost as good a platform with essentially all the features in a cleaner environment.

A few have told me CMC is better as it provides more features. Perhaps then I have not seen the full power of CMC. But as for now, I’m going with IG Markets all the way!

Which CFD trading platform do you use?