Far from being a trend of the past, after more than a successful decade online trading is still ramping in the financial markets and between retail traders all over the world.

The fact of being able to control and move your capitals in order to gain profits and ensure your wealth is a tempting idea for many people across the world. Still, you should always be aware of the fact that this activity may be dangerous for your finances if you make the wrong choices and ignore some essential features.

With that being said, if it is true that there’s always an innate risk in every investment (especially on volatile financial markets), it’s also true that many rookie mistakes may be avoided by just following some easy concepts. That’s why we decided to write down this small article, together with the help of the staff of trading24online.com, as a guide for helping out every future trader out there.

Using A Brokerage Service

If you want to start trading you must have access to a trading account. In order to do so, you must search for a proper brokerage service capable of offering a proper trading platform and sign-up with them for a trading account.

The first and foremost important thing to know when starting your quest for the perfect broker is that you can only rely on regulated brokers. A broker, to be considered regulated, must comply with a regulation imposed by a national or international financial regulator. Opting for any non-regulated broker introduces significant risks, increasing the likelihood of falling victim to fraud or unauthorized practices. In such cases, seeking assistance from Securities Attorneys becomes crucial, as they specialize in addressing investment fraud issues. In that regard, The White Law Group are securities fraud attorneys, and can play a vital role in helping investors recover losses incurred due to investment fraud. Their expertise and advocacy can navigate the complexities of securities law to ensure justice and financial recovery for defrauded investors.

In the second instance, you should also confront your budget with all the commissions and fees to cover in order to trade efficiently. There are some brokers who may charge higher fees than the average ones, while others may ask for higher minimum deposit. Compare as many offers as possible and be aware of those risks.

Speaking of which, the best way to compare two or more brokers between them is through the extensive usage of demo accounts. Those kinds of accounts usually work exactly as a standard account: they have the same features, the same tools and they also show the same outcome of every investment made by it. Only main difference is that they will do it by using a virtual balance, which means that no money is needed in the process.

Finally, you should always look out for any free education material included in the broker services. While many brokers offer only basic advice and information tools, there are also others which have dedicated many resources on the development of their educational sections. The most advanced one in this field usually include learning tools such as free e-books, online seminars and video instructional to help every trader who wants to know more about online trading and finance.

With all these tips and criteria to follow, we decided to pick the best brokerage service available that includes all the aforementioned trading features in their offer: IG Markets.

Our First Pick: IG Markets

IG is considered one of the most reliable, trustworthy and well-rounded regulated brokers in the online trading industry.

Founded in 1976 as a spread betting business as IG Index (which is an abbreviation for Investors Gold Index), the company gained popularity and power during years until it became a public traded company. During the last decade, the group started to be interested in the online CFDs trading as well and developed IG Markets, a world-leading online trading provider.

CFDs are an acronym for “Contracts for Difference”, a derivative financial instrument extremely popular on trading platforms. With these derivatives you can take advantage not only of the rising of the market (or “going long”), but also of its eventual falling thanks to short selling.

As of today, IG is considered to be the World’s No.1 CFD provider, which includes 17,000+ markets to trade with. Between them we remember the following:

• Share CFDs: you can trade on more than 10,500+ assets with a minimum spread of 0.1 on the most important shares available today. Those include major public companies such as Apple, Google, Tesla and Microsoft.
  
• Forex: this form of trading consists in buying and selling currencies on the foreign exchange market (also known as FX or Forex) and aiming to make profit from it. The benefits of trading in this market with IG include the possibility of having access to high liquidity, using the leverage and having a wide range of FX pairs such as GBP/USD, EUR/USD; USD/JPY and USD/ZAR.
  
• Indices: there are more than 100+ indices to trade related to the most important exchange including US Tech 100, FTSE 100 and Japan 225.
  
• Cryptocurrencies: these assets can be traded exclusively via CFDs, so there’s no way to actually possess cryptos. Still, you can profit from the high volatility which characterize these assets and invest on Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.