Is 100 quid enough to start?

Can you literally start of with say £10? and just have a go and see what happens?

£10 wouldn’t really be possible. £100 would be sufficient to open a spread betting account but it is not a practical amount to start spread trading.

This is in fact one of the inherent problems of spread trading. Put in simple terms, speadbetting appeals to newbies because its so easy to get setup and trading with a small capital, but a high % of newbies don’t make money. Sticking £500 or, even better, £1000 in an account would be fine. And even then a thousand might be sufficient if you can trade a very small sizes…

With that you could probably make it so that you could only lose £10 or less on a spread trade. Trading RBS, for instance, at £1 a point would mean your total position size would only be £27 or so, at the current price. There’s nothing to stop you doing that for a bit of fun, or to see what you think of it. You could put £100 in an account and do the trade mentioned above, but it’s a better idea giving yourself a bit of breathing room and peace of mind.

IG Index have an educational resource called Tradesense that allows you to trade for limited stakes – I believe for 6 weeks +. At a very minimum you should be fully conversant with its contents before you begin to trade. It’s very tempting to jump in and hope to profit from the volatility but better to achieve some consistent level of performance first. There will be lots of trading opportunities in the future. Good luck.