I am fairly new to CFD trading and would be grateful for some advice.
I started with 3K and after 10 trades, 2 panic closures and one badly placed stop loss have cost me 650.
Nevertheless my current position with one open trade on MSY is break even.
Anyway, given last weeks buoyant market I assume I should have acheived more?

I would be gratful for any comments on the above, however my main question to you relates to Deal4Free. I am currently trading through Barclays and paying a hefty commission on each trade.
After reading through various messages on this site visiting the deal4free site logic tells me I should open an account with them. However, I do not feel confortable in doing so without understanding how they make a profit, and I cannot find anything on their site in this respect.

geoffcow - here it is > http://www.deal4free.com/images/splash/main_new_bg.gif

OK Cheers...

thank you chartist. I have been using IGMarkets and realise I am working for them!!

Testex/ chartist2004/ Querto - Thanks for your comments.

Assessing the points made I have the following observation:
I've now traded twelve times, paying 0.15% commission (with a minimum of 17.50 per trade), with barclays. I've therefore paid a minimum of 210.00 in commissions.
The first thing I do with each trade is to calculate the "break even" position to close the deal. In this calculation I include the buy/sell commissions, a minimum of 35.00, which makes a significant difference to the "break even" position.
This has effected my decision to close a number of positions in the past few weeks, the cost effect of which has been considerable.
Since i'me new to CFD's I suppose that I should be satisfied that I am showing a notional profit after my first 4 weeks trading.

Anyway, after all your good advice I will be opening an account with CMC in the near future,

Thanks again guys, Ray

CMC? Good luck to you. Hope you dont get any fast moving markets against you. Getting in is easy - getting out in tough conditions is what its all about.

I've been using ETrade for about 18 months (www.etrade.co.uk).

Can't fault it. In particular, the Direct Market Access feature that lets you advertise a buy at bid or a sell at offer makes it a must have. As things stand you can only get this through etrade or through GNI.

Gausie

Gausie, I don't think direct market access is to be recommended for people new to CFDs - I'm sure you would agree. I could do this now but I choose not to - not trading actively enough. I agree about the fast moving markets with cmc - trading highly liquid stocks isn't really a prob but at the end of the day they make the market, so they can give any price they choose. I do trade with cmc (s/b) simply because they have keen tight prices on most things but have reservations about them as well. I like the s/b because of the tax free gain and am trading over days now using limited amounts of margin so simply put limit orders in most of the time.

RayHank, if you're trading regularly with a traditional broker like Barclays then you really should be trading cfd's. E-Trade's platform at 9.95 a deal is good and none of this "what price are they going to quote me?" nonsense. The big plus is no stamp duty, and being able to use margin. The only negative is you pay interest on long positions regardless. However this is minimal and should't really affect your thinking.

SC

The DMA platform can be used in exactly the same way as a quote driven service if required - granted he'll pay a percentage comission per trade, but that would be less than a quarter of what he pays now.

My first CFD platform was GNI DMA.

Ray - I hope you don't mind (this has nothing to do with CMC) but from your previous comment I cannot help but feel that your psychology is wrong when you enter a trade.

Before you enter a trade (or if it looks too good to miss, directly after) you should calculate your target and plan your exit strategy. Let's face it none of us want to enter a trade and simply breakeven - the point of entering the trade in the first place is to make a profit.

However good a trade looks it can always go against you so the exit strategy is of upmost importance and will avoid you holding onto a losing position until you are forced to cut it at a major loss. However, you should allow the trade room to breathe. If the stop is placed too close to the entry point then you will get whip-sawed out of many trades.

Your exit strategy can be based upon support, resistance, trend lines etc or indeed based upon a monetary amount, i.e. I am willing to spend x amount to see if I am right.

The only time I worry about breakeven is when a trade has been going nicely in the right direction and is now reversing along with perhaps the overall market and/or the sector. I would agree in these circumstances it may be wise to abandon the trade prior to it hitting your stop.

Unfortunately you must get used to losses - keeping them to a reasonable size is the name of the game.

Think carefully about your position size. You must trade with a size that you are comfortable with but try and avoid over trading. I have found it is far better to have several reasonable sized trades open than to try and keep track of a multitude of small positions.

All IMHO - hope this helps.

Querto - Thanks for the good advise.
I note that the break even point for me was not intended to be the point at which i exited the trade, just an accurate value of my position. The Barclays platform provides a contantly updating screen showing current open positions. It also shows the current profit/loss position of each CFD. Unfortunately this data is based on the stock mid price and does not include commision costs. On low priced stocks this can be significantly missleading.

Following my last post I have downloaded demo versions of trading platforms for CMC & Etrade, (following SC comments). I must say that although Etrade carries a commission charge, the platform seems far more useable and it comes with level 2 data.

I'm now drawn towards this one which still represents a significant saving over barclays commision rates.

RayHank - Drop croc an email - he'll be able to get you a preferential comission rate.