Earnings
Quarterly results reprice a company against what the market had already assumed, not against what it earned last year.
Stocks: A Position on the Company, Not a Share in It
A stock CFD follows the price of a listed company's shares. You take a view on where that price goes without owning the shares themselves.
The instrument
What you hold is a position on the price, not a stake in the company.
The world's most closely watched companies tell stories through earnings, products, competition, innovation and investor expectations.
Trading stock CFDs gives traders a way to follow those price movements without directly owning the underlying shares.
That difference is not a technicality. It changes what the position is exposed to, what it costs to keep open, and what happens to it when the company does something that concerns its shareholders.
What moves the price
A share price is a running argument about the future.
Every company has drivers of its own, and they rarely arrive one at a time.
Guidance
What management says about the quarters ahead can move a price further than the quarter it has just reported.
Sector and rates
A company can reprice on nothing it did. A rate decision or a rotation out of its sector reaches every name in it.
Valuation
A strong company and an attractive trading opportunity are not always the same thing.
The calendar
A reporting quarter arrives in four separate moves.
The results themselves are only one of them, and not always the one that moves the price furthest.
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The run-in
Expectations settle in the weeks before the date, so a good deal of the outcome can already be in the price by the time results are published.
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The print
The figures land against a forecast. What the market reacts to is the distance between the two, in either direction.
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The call
Management explains the quarter and describes the next one. Guidance given on that call can move the price more than the results did.
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The drift
Positions keep adjusting for days afterwards as forecasts are revised, which is where a first reaction is sometimes reversed.
Before you trade it
Single-company risk does not diversify itself.
One name can move on one sentence. A product recall, a resignation, a regulatory finding or a lawsuit can reprice a share while the market around it barely registers the event.
Shares trade in exchange hours and news does not. A price can gap from one session close to the next session open with nothing tradable in between, so a position can be carried through a level that was never quoted. Where stop orders are available they limit that exposure without removing it.
Positions are generally held on margin, which magnifies the move in both directions, and holding costs can apply for as long as a position stays open.
Keep reading
A single name is rarely the whole position.
The pages next to this one cover the instruments that hold many companies at once, and the mechanics that apply to all of them.
Indices
An index instrument takes most of the single-name risk out and leaves the market risk in.
ETFs
A fund-tracking instrument follows a basket of assets rather than the fortunes of one company.
CFD trading
Margin, spread, long and short positions: the mechanics that apply to every instrument here.
Next step
Stock CFDs sit in the same trading environment as the indices around them.
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Trading involves risk of loss. The risk disclosure is not yet published; the standardised risk warning is shown at the foot of every page.