Interview with Gavin Ward, Director of Asia from CMC Markets
Gavin Ward, Director of Asia of CMC Markets
Recently I was invited to an informal sharing session at CMC Markets office. They hold these kind of regular sessions to keep industry influencers up to date with their latest services and products. Which I thought was good. Because it allows the influencers to have the time to engage in a dialogue with the decision makers in a close and informal settings.
I personally use the CMC CFD platform for my own stock trading for more than 3 years. I have tried their 1.0 platform and the recently upgraded Next Generation CFD trading platform. I must say they really did a job in upgrading their user interface. With the new platform, everything is web based. So you can access and trade almost anywhere with a connection. How cool is that? I think they really understand what we need from a trading platform : Simple, effective and mobile.
So when I was there, I took that opportunity to get up close with Gavin, the Director of Asia and asked him to comment about CFD in general and more specifically what product and solutions from CMC will benefit the average investors. Here are the highlights:
Contracts for Difference (CFDs) provide you with similar economic benefits to an investment in an underlying asset without the costs and limitations associated with physical ownership. CFDs track the price movement of your chosen instrument, including dividends on shares and interest on positive carry currency positions.
Trading with leverage can be an efficient way to use capital – it means you can have 100% market exposure for a fraction of what you’d pay to own physical shares. Of course, this also means it’s possible to experience losses that are greater than your initial investment. One of the major benefits of trading CFDs with us is that you can control your leverage by dialling it up or down. On our Next Generation trading platform, this is called customisable financing.
Your profit or loss is determined by the difference between the price you buy at and the price you sell at multiplied by the number of CFDs you hold, which means you can still trade CFDs whether the market is going up or down. In fact, shorting is often used to hedge physical share positions in volatile market conditions. For an example on how this works, please refer to our website at www.cmcmarkets.com.sg
With CFDs, there are thousands of products to invest in across a selection of asset classes:
- Currencies, covering over 300 different currency pairs from developed and emerging markets
- Commodities, including agricultural, precious metals, industrial metals and energy
- Global Indices, covering most regions including the Singapore 30, Hong Kong 43, China A 50 and US30
- Companies, from across global markets, you no longer have to stick with just the Singapore market!
- Treasuries, ranging from Eurozone to US treasury bills and bonds
2) After the MFG saga, there is still a lot of caution from traders about putting money in CFD accounts. Can you elaborate what kind of safeguards you have that are different from MFG?
In every country that CMC Markets operates in, we always look towards the financial regulators and authorities rather than our competitors in formulating our policies concerning clients’ monies and financial obligations. In Singapore, we engage in regular communication with the MAS to ensure strictest compliance and governance, this includes full segregation of clients funds as standard and holding these funds onshore in Singapore banks.
3) CMC is always innovating. New updates and upgrades happen constantly. So what can local traders look forward to in the next few months?
We will be launching the Android version of our trading platform imminently. We concentrated on launching our iPhone/iPad apps first as majority of our traders are using this platform for their trading. Take ups of Android smartphones collectively among the various brands cannot be ignored as we have seen that this platform has been increasingly adopted within the trading community.
One feature that we are excited about is our upcoming Chart Message boards feature. Clients will soon be able to (for the first time) discuss, share and swap charts and technical analysis via interactive message boards (imbedded in each instrument available on the platform) which their peers can then view, comment and rate. Within this online community, if a client sees analysis or a trade set up on a message board (e.g. the EURUSD message board) that suits their trading strategy, they can paste this analysis directly into their own live charts.
Other enhancements include increased product range including trading baskets, multiple dashboards and client sentiments.
Features that will be introduced for our Asian markets include our Next Generation Chinese Trading Platform.
4) Fill in the blanks. “The top 5 reasons why one should use CMC CFD platform are __________”
- Fractional Ownership
- Enhanced analysis with Portfolio Mixer and Chart Pattern Recognition Scanner
- Customisable Financing
- Manage your risk effectively (direct from charts, boundary pricing, price alerts)
- Consistently competitive prices (tight spreads and low commissions)
NOTE: Please note that Contracts for Difference (CFDs) is not for beginners as it carry a high level of risk to your capital as prices may move rapidly against you. One can potentially loose all the initial investing capital if you do not understand how to limit your order and money management. So before you try CFD, please make sure you understand the risk and have a strategy in place to mitigate them. A good place to start is here or CMC’s education web site or attend one of their event here, Or drop me a note. 🙂