Not all CFD brokers are equal
While most Forex brokers offer roughly 20 pairs in the currency markets, the CFD market can be quite a different animal. For example, almost all Forex brokers offering CFD trading will start with silver and gold. Beyond that, the most common CFD is for crude oil.
However, there are some CFD brokerage firms out there that offer thousands of instruments to trade. Obviously, there are several different amounts of CFDs available between various brokerages, but if you are interested in trading copper for example, you need to look for that before putting your money to work. Opening an account with the CFD broker only to find out that they offer just a handful of markets is counterproductive.
There are some brokerage firms out there that offer CFDs against individual stocks, and at that point you could be talking thousands of markets to trade. It comes down to what market you want to trade, but in general what you will find is that most of the major stocks are covered. For example, one of the most common CFD stocks out there will be Apple. You can also expect to see IBM, Google, Citibank, and the like.
The advantage of finding a CFD broker that has individual stocks from several different countries is that it allows you to play the global marketplace from one account. This is one of the major advantages to a CFD broker, because you don’t need large deposits to do so. You can trade according to your account size. While there are some brokerage firms out there that allow you to trade stocks in various countries on the actual stock exchange, and those brokers tend to be very expensive with a high barrier to entry, quite often an initial deposit requirement of $10,000 or more. With a little bit of searching, you can find a global brokerage firm that allows you to take advantage of multiple opportunities. This is one of the biggest mistakes that new traders will make, they will settle for a broker that offers just a couple of CFD markets, only to find that they want to trade many other markets and can’t.