Stock Trading | Index Trading

By trading CFDs on a stock index you can take a position on broad market movements with one simple trade.

What are stock indices?

A stock index measures a particular section – typically the most highly-capitalised companies - of a stock market. For example, the Straits Times Index, or STI is an index tracking the performance of the 30 most highly capitalised companies listed on the Singapore Exchange.

There's a broad range of factors which could influence the level of a stock index at any point in time, such as macro-economic data, the performance of other indices and financial reports of companies in the index.

As the world's largest CFD provider¹, our experience allows us to provide up-to-the-minute information to inform your trading decisions, including:

• Insight news, analysis and dealing centre
  Collating news, analysis, charts and aggregated details of how IG clients are trading each index onto one screen
• Real-time charts
  Index movements laid bare to help you spot trends and trading opportunities

Efficient trading of the world's indices

We make it easy to trade a huge range of stock indices from around the world, including the Singapore Blue Chip, the UK's FTSE® 100, America's Wall Street Cash and the Hong Kong HS42.You can trade at any time as we quote prices for the leading indices even when the underlying markets are closed.

For more details about trading stock index CFDs, see an example.

Intraday and long-term trading

With stock index CFDs, you can trade on immediate market direction or longer-term trends.

If you expected the Singapore MSCI Index or SiMSCI, for example, to rise or fall substantially on a particular day, you might try to capitalise on this with a Singapore Blue Chip cash contract.

On the other hand, if you anticipated the index being affected by a longer-term trend over the course of a month or more, a Singapore Blue Chip Forward contract might be more suitable.

Our minimum contract sizes are typically smaller than the minimum transaction size in the equivalent futures market, and we offer trades for a wide range of contract months which often include months not quoted in the respective futures market. Our stock indices contract details page makes clear the details of the contracts we offer.

1. Largest retail CFD provider by revenue (excluding FX). Source: Published financial statements. As at August 2012.