Question for UK/LSE share traders

R

risktaker

Do people use margin to trade stocks/etf's in the UK?

Looking through most brokerage sites, none of them mention margin or margin rates.

They all push CFD's and similar crap.

I'm interested in trading UK-based stocks/etf's and am looking for assistance on margin rules there.

Thanks!
 
They push cfd's as you do not have to pay 0.5% stamp duty on them. You can trade LSE in an Interactive Brokers account using margin I presume. £6 a side.
 
AFAIK the only genuine margin account available for UK stocks is the IB one. It covers the top 1,000 stocks for longs and the top 100 or so for shorts.

Which is fine except for the afore-mentioned Stamp Duty of 0.5% on all purchases.

That is the main reason CFDs are so popular over here, despite them being, as you say "crap" :)
 
BTW my understanding of why the UK does not have retail margin accounts is two-fold:

1) There is no "stocks" culture here. It is only a very small minority of the population who plays in the markets. This goes back to the class system ...

2) Apparently, because a margin account involves borrowing against "physical stock", this means that a whole raft of consumer legislation gets invoked. Which most brokers don't want to deal with. Whereas, because CFDs and Spread Betting are purely "virtual", it is all much simpler.
 
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