luckystrike

I do trade CFDs - one of the providers i use is Saxobank. The advantage with them is that you can trade both shares and CFDs and in the past they used to allow me to use my shareholdings to act as collateral. The problem is that now they've upped margins sharply so when I've used most of the money in the account to buy shares it doesn't leave much room for opening CFD positions. And I find that pointless because what's the scope then; CFDs are intended to be a leveraged trading product but they're killing the leverage by their huge margins (yet the cheeky **** are happy to charge you financing charges everyday)

About skewed spreads you might want to check those articles: Are Spread Prices ever Skewed? How does a spread betting company make its money? I spread bet myself and don't believe providers skew spreads - you can see this for yourself by comparing a live feed (direct market access) to their quotes - they simply add their percentage on either side of the bid/offer spread - for instance for FTSE 100 shares this could be typically 0.05% either side. Note that the industry isn't really growing that much - there were just 92,000 active spread traders in 2012, the market has grown only by around 9000 accounts since 2009.

it depends where you are located - remember spread betting gains are tax free in the UK unlike futures/options/normal shares... you can compare a few companies here Compare Financial Spread Betting Companies Also, spread betting companies/CFD brokers have different policies and some will only charge you financing rates on the 'amount borrowed'. In any case it might be well worth looking at holding spread bets via futures if you wish to trade over 1 month or so - the spread might be a little wider but they are well worth considering for their flexibility [and no daily fees then]

this should be interesting: How do Spread Betting Companies make money?

Spread betting is a legitimate form of financial trading. Get the market direction right and you make money - their prices mirror the market. Is that so hard/complicated? Yes because getting the market direction right is hard.

Spread betting and CFDs are very much identical products. Spread bets are mainly for UK residents where gains from spread betting are tax free. The rest of the world do CFDs - gains are taxable but you can also offset losses.