Where did Contracts for Difference originate and who discovered this fantastic product and thought enough of it to bring it to the main stream financial world?

Comparing Futures, Options & Contracts for Difference

Most financial products that turnover billions every day on the worlds stock markets have been around for decades, if not hundreds of years. For example, futures markets have a history dating right back to 1710 when the Japanese traded rice on the worlds first official futures exchange.

Since then there have been many different financial products like options trading, options on the futures markets and of course foreign exchange or Forex. These are your main stream financial products and in amongst that mix of mainstream financial products, CFDs are making great headway.

The Introduction of CFDs

In fact since CFDs launched to the retail public in the year 2000 the interest has been staggering. No-one could have ever predicted the pace at which the investing public took to CFD trading and it continues to rapidly expand around the world.

CFDs first began back in the 1990's by a London derivative brokerage firm called Smith New Court which was later bough out by Merrill Lynch. Initially CFD trading was a way for clients to short sell the market whilst using leverage and as a double bonus clients were able to avoid stamp duty, thereby reducing their costs even further.

GNI Touch was the first company to introduce CFDs to the retail public back in the year 2000 and since that steady start, they have literally exploded around the world. In 2007, an investment survey by Investment Trends noted that CFDs were growing at 100% per year (in Australia) and were looking to continue their staggering growth in the near future.

MF Global realised that CFD trading was going to be huge and eventually bought out GNI in October 2002 to create a dominant force in both futures and CFDs.

Who are the Major CFD Brokers?

Nowadays there are dozens of CFD brokers around the world with the major ones being MF Global, CMC Markets, IG Markets, First Prudential Markets, Sonray Capital, Saxobank, GFT, City Index and Macquarie Bank to name a few.

In addition to the number of brokers offering Contracts for Difference is the number of world stock markets that you can trade on.

For example, if you open an account with any of the major CFD brokers you will get access to the following world stock markets to trade on: Australia, UK, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, US, Singapore, Russia, Canada, Finland, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Ireland, New Zealand and many others around the world.

Further to this, as the world increase their capacity to introduce fast broadband access, the number of people trading the worlds stock markets using CFDs is only going to continue to grow.