The stock market offers you a variety of interesting trading options. You can do normal day trading in shares or currency in the physical space or if you are more adventurous and wish to make optimum use of limited monetary resources, you can go for trading in derivative instruments such as financial spread betting or margined trading, futures trading or CFD trading. The derivative instruments fall in the realm of speculative activity and are therefore fraught with greater risk than cash market trading. Let us compare financial spread betting with futures trading. Basically both are leveraged or geared financial instruments where you just pay margin money to be able to trade in a much higher quantity of shares. This margin money is typically between 15-20% of the actual value of the quantity of shares you are trading in and therefore represents an opportunity for you to make quick gains should the market movement be in consonance with the position you have taken. Both do not attract any kind of stamp duty and that explains the reason why they are so popular. You get to keep the profit you make in total and that is a great advantage. However, when you make losses, those losses are for good since you cannot offset it against any profits in future. Futures trading contracts have an expiry period and you have the liberty of holding your position till that date and allow it to expire or close the contract before the date. In any case, there is no physical exchange of shares. The futures contract price also is at a premium compared to the underlying and this is referred to as the funding charge.