What’s a day trading platform?
A day trading platform is the technology used to facilitate the trade of financial instruments, enabling positions to be opened and closed within a single day. This trading style is not suitable for people seeking to trade or invest in the longer term.
When trading with us, a fee will be charged to your account for keeping your intraday trade open until the following day. You should refer to the Product Details for information on when the cut-off time for overnight funding charges applies.
Note that there’s a difference between an online trading provider and a trading platform. An online trading provider provides the platform, while the platform facilitates the trading activity on the financial markets. An online provider like us enables you to open an account for trading or investing1 securities in the financial markets.
Our day trading platform will enable you to trade using a derivative product – CFDs. CFDs are leveraged products, meaning you’ll amplify your exposure to the markets. Leverage will magnify profits and losses you make on your day trade – manage your risk carefully.
CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage.
Alternatively, you could open an intraday position without leverage by trading shares. Trading shares offers decreased assets and market exposure, which means you’d need sufficient market movements in the day to make the day trade worthwhile.
How to find the best day trading platform
To find the best day trading platform, there are several things to take into consideration. These include your experience as a trader, trading goals, the types of assets you’d like to trade, costs and charges involved and the type of support you will be offered.
1. Consider your experience and trading goals
Taking your experience and trading goals into consideration when venturing into day trading will enable you to have clear goals in mind. This will ensure you put in the time to practise and fine-tune your trading style and strategy before you open your first position.
You can use fundamental analysis as part of your trading style or plan to predict market price movements and use technical indicators for your strategy. Your strategy is determined by your preference and the level of risk you’re willing to be exposed to when trading the markets.
If you’re a beginner, you’ll need to choose the trading strategy that suits your preferences. For example, if you choose to use scalping as your day trading strategy, you’d make lots of small trades of the asset you’re trading with the aim of profiting from the little price changes.
Once you’ve chosen your strategy, ensure that you diligently stick to it as one impromptu move may lead to a trade that results in a huge loss. Your aim is to make a series of small wins from your trade and benefit from them instead of a few large ones.
You can learn more about trading strategies by visiting our Analyse and Learn section on the website or IG Academy. You can also try out these trading strategies by opening a demo account with us and practice with $20,000 in virtual funds. Once you have gained your confidence with using our platform, you can open a live account with us.
2. Learn key day trading concepts
There are some essential day trading concepts you’ll need to educate yourself on when it comes to the financial markets:
- Volatility – intraday trading will require that you have the ability to identify if the market price has sufficient movement to present profit-making opportunities. This is known as ‘volatility’, which measures how much an asset’s price moves over a period of time
- Liquidity – this describes how easy it would be to open or close a position in the markets without the asset’s price being affected. A rising demand for an asset increases its liquidity, meaning you can take or close positions at the price you want. With us, you’ll get deep internal liquidity, giving you access to several buyers and sellers, which will assist with the quick execution of your trade
- Volume – this provides details on the number of times an asset has been traded over a certain timeframe and is a key indicator of the market’s liquidity. You can trade volumes as a strategy to identify entry and exit points in the markets. For instance, a rise in volume when there’s a sharp movement in the market is indicative of the market maintaining that direction in the future
3. Find out about day trading products and assets
CFDs are the main day trading products used. These are leveraged products that will increase your market exposure at a fraction of the full value of your trade. But while they’ll magnify your profits when the markets move in your favour, they’ll amplify your losses if they move against you.
Carefully manage your risk and only trade using an amount you’re comfortable losing. There are over 17,000 markets you can trade with CFDs.
CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage.
