Our fourth blog article is about Plus500, which is a widely-known worldwide trading platform for stocks, forex, cryptocurrencies, commodities and many more asset classes.
Plus500 is a broker specialized for retail traders, which means traders like you and me. They also offer leveraged trading and many more trading options which we do not recommend you to use.
Plus500 was established in 2008 by professionals in finance and technology. The company is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange, and is thus primarily based in Great Britain.
Some of the investment classes which they support are:
- Stocks;
- Indices;
- Commodities;
- Forex;
- Cryptocurrencies;
- Exchange-Traded Funds;
Their website states that they are specialized in Contracts for Difference (CFDs), which are investment vehicles that allow traders to speculate on price movements without owning the underlying asset itself. CFDs track the assets price, and work basically the same. Profits or losses are the difference between your entry price and your exit price.
Luckily they have added the possibility to own real stocks and other investment classes in 2021. They are no longer only specialized in Contracts for Difference! Now you can actually own the assets and earn dividends for example!
Plus500 uses its own proprietary trading platform which supports many different features. Their services can be accessed with both your computer and your smartphone. They offer advance charting tools, price alerts and risk management tools.
All of their services are designed for you to be easy to use!
They are officially registered with several authorities, which we will not go into detail on. These can all be found on their own website. Plus500 is a truly professional trading platform which has been around and trustable for a long time and operates in line with current regulations in all different regions in which they offer their services.
One specific feature that Plus500 offers is trading with leverage, which means significantly expanding your investment position with borrowed money. As you might have read on our website, this is extremely risky, and we therefore do not recommend you to use this feature!
Plus500 also offers many risk management features, such as stop-loss orders, guaranteed stop orders, take-profit orders and negative balance protection.
One other thing that is important to note about Plus500 is that their costs and fees work differently than most other brokers. Instead of paying a fee every time you trade something, they have fees calculated in their bid-ask spread, which is the difference between buying and selling prices. They also have an inactivity fee which you would have to pay after extended periods of account inactivity.
It would be wise for you (as always) to study all of their fees before using their services! This way you can minimize your costs, which we have discussed earlier in chapter 3.2 Costs & Fees.
Some of the major advantages of Plus500 is that their whole platform is easy to use, even for beginning investors. As said, they also offer a really wide range of trading services.
We must state that Plus500 is primarily designed for active trading, and not so much for long-term investing. But they do offer services (like real ownership) which enable long-term investing as well.
Their services are available in over 65 countries worldwide which include Europe, Asia, Australia and parts of the Americas!
If you would like to register your own account with Plus500, please do so by using one of the links that we have provided above!