Trading guides

Trading strategies

Creating a trading strategy

Learn the importance of creating a trading plan when you start trading. We explain what a trading plan consists of and why monitoring your performance is important. Learning from previous trades will help optimise your approach to trading and help correct bad trading habits and build on strong ones.

Trading strategies

Financial markets to trade

In this video we cover FX, commodities, indices and shares, and show you how to use our innovative filtering tools.

Trading strategies

Five common trading mistakes

Learning from your mistakes is important, but in this short video we highlight some of the most common mistakes to avoid. Learn about risk management, the importance of a cohesive strategy, identifying the right methodology, over leveraging, poor monitoring and record keeping.

Trading strategies

Portfolio diversification

What is diversification? While more commonly associated with long-term investing, diversification concepts also have benefits for short-term traders. This session covers economic, corporate, political and other developments that have an impact on different markets.

Trading strategies

Trading indices

Watch our trading indices video as we discuss one of our most heavily-traded asset types. Learn about the main drivers of volatility and potential trading strategies.

Trading strategies

Trading risk management strategies

Learn about risk management methods, including how to avoid marginal trades, and trading different markets to take advantage of the benefits of diversification. Standard and trailing stop losses, and boundaries (helping avoid slippage on stop entry orders and market orders) can help to manage the risk of specific trades.

Trading strategies

What is the foreign exchange market?

Learn about the foreign exchange market and how FX trading differs to other types of trading.

Trading strategies

Learn stop loss trading

Learn how leverage magnifies risk, and that while it can increase your potential profit, it can also increase potential losses. Michael examines and explains a key risk-management tool - stop-loss orders - and explains how traders can tailor these orders to suit individual strategies.

Trading strategies

Set up your alerts - mobile

Find out how to set your notification preferences for our mobile app.

Trading strategies

Set up your alerts - desktop

Find out how to set your notification preferences for our desktop platform.

Technicals

Learn about technical indicators

Learn some of the more popular indicators used by traders, including MACD (moving average convergence divergence), RSI (relative strength index), SMAs (simple moving averages) and slow stochastics. Once you understand how they work they can be a valuable tool to back up your trading strategies.

Technicals

Support and resistance

Support and resistance levels are common technical analysis techniques used to help identify trade opportunities. These primary indicators can be used on any chart type, helping to identify buying and selling opportunities. They can also aid effective risk management by highlighting potential stop-loss and take-profit order levels.

Technicals

Trendlines

Trendlines are a common technical analysis technique used to help identify possible trade opportunities. This primary indicator can be used on any chart type and asset class, and can help identify buying and selling opportunities from a technical perspective, and with effective risk management by highlighting potential price levels for stop-loss and take-profit orders.

Technicals

Which chart type is best?

Learn about the different chart types that are available and see how they can help with your technical analysis strategies. This short session covers the most popular types, such as candlestick, line and bar charts, plus our spread charts.

Technicals

Chart pattern recognition scanner

Learn about how pattern recognition technology could help you with your trading. Our pattern recognition scanner automatically scans over 120 of our most popular spread betting instruments approximately every 15 minutes, including currencies (FX pairs), indices, commodities and shares, for common chart formations such as triangles, wedges and channels.

Fundamentals

Trading events

Our Australia Chief Market Strategist, Michael McCarthy, focuses on the key movers of fundamental analysis – economic and company-specific events. He discusses micro and macro events and potential strategies you could employ to take advantage of known fixed events.

Fundamentals

Analysing stocks

Learn about trading share CFDs. What are the major factors to consider when trading company shares? We will walk you through announcements that could potentially affect price action and look at the benefits of shares CFD trading.

Fundamentals

Trading energies

There are many factors to consider when trading energies, including political developments, seasonality, demand changes and more. We also consider the differences between energy commodities and energy shares.

Fundamentals

Leading economic indicators

Discover the most important data releases and learn how they can impact your trading.