CityIndex Review

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Good Points

Revamped trading platform is very simple and easy-to-use. Minimum stake is now just £0.50.
City Index sends out a good start pack with full info on all their products.
Demo platform with £2,500 in virtual cash is available for a 2-week trial. For the initial 4 weeks you can also spread bet at just 25 pence per point.
Very wide choice of markets, though better commodity range found elsewhere. Access to new markets including Australian stocks plus wider coverage of Asian markets with more stocks recently added.
Offers spreads on the iShares market (margin is 10%). Spreads are also available on the China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan markets.
A wide range of order types including stops, linked contingent orders and Guaranteed Stop Loss tools are available and allow sophisticated risk management. Advanced tools for trade closure and auto-rollover offer trading flexibility.
City Index are one of the cheapest for controlled risk trades, with the premium for a guaranteed stop of just 1 pip. Also, guaranteed stops can be set when you open your position or at a later date for better flexibility although these are not available on all markets (GSL are limited to FTSE 100 stocks and indices).
CityIndex sends you a daily statement that I rarely look at however they also send you a monthly statement that summarizes all the various interests - much easier than doing it daily.
City Index have an execution policy which claims bar a few exceptions, everything below 'their size*' (usually up to £20 per pt = 2000 shares) goes straight through at the price you see on the screen. This provides execution certainty for all deals up to this size unlike DMA platforms. Also, you are not limited by the order flow as on a DMA platform. If there are only 10 shares available at the price you want on a DMA platform you can only buy 10 shares. On a synthetic model like City Index you could go long so as to control 100,000 shares and because it's a quote-driven platform you can sell the 100,000 holdings immediately (unlike having to wait until there are enough people wanting to buy the shares to get out).
Moreover the upgraded CityIndex platform includes streaming tradeable prices, enhanced research and 'firm quotes' meaning that the price you see on the screen is the price at which their trades will be executed.
Overnight financing charges on long positions now only apply to the proportion of your position not supported by margin which reduces trading costs. Previously overnight financing was charged on the full value of open positions. As an example, if you hold a long equity position that is supported by a margin of 20 per cent, overnight financing will be reduced by this amount, so a £20,000 position will now require about £280 less per year in financing. There is no change in the way that financing is paid on short positions.
Interest: City Index offers Libor minus 1 per cent over £50k.
City is an extremely well managed company with obvious connections in the city; this is so that an increasing number of stockbrokers are signing up to use it as the basis of their own client CFD/spread betting service. Offshoots include Barclays Spreadbetting, Hargreaves Lansdown Spread Betting and TD Waterhouse.