How does a CFD work behind the scenes?
There are several ways that the issuers profit from CFDs. If the broker has trades on both sides (buy and sell) they can net the volumes off against each other and profit off the spread whilst using the posted margins to cover p&l from both sides. Because settlement for most securities is not on the same day that the order is placed they can also buy the security with no intention of taking delivery and simply sell it off at the end of day to pass delivery on to someone else. Here again they profit from the spread and that their volumes give them really low commissions so their costs are much lower than the value of the spread. If they have to do this rather than netting the position out the spreads will be wider.  Sometimes that may be forced to buy the security outright but that is rare and the spreads will be even wider so that they can make a decent profit.
We aren't faking it. IT is an extremely complex job so we often have to learn or relearn a technology at the whim of some bean counter because they want to save a few bucks or a junior executive because they attended a seminar and want to try that cool new thing they heard about (cough, DevOps, cough...) My company has a dashboard that basically does this. We select industries / companies we want to be notified of and we get an email in outlook when a new analyst note, research report, or SEC filing is posted on that industry or company. IB's overnight financing cost for US CFDs below $100,000 is the Benchmark Rate + 1.5% for long positions and the Benchmark Rate -1.5% for short positions. You can check the IB CFD Contract Interest for their full list of financing costs for share CFDs. IB's commissions  for an executed trade (where your monthly volume is below $300,000) is $0.005 per share with a minimum per order of $1.00. Commissions and overnight financing are 2 different fees, the overnight financing is charged because CFDs are leveraged. An order is just that, it is not a trade. It means your order has not been executed yet and is still an active order which you have not paid any commissions for yet. Regarding the orders that persist overnight, an example might be, you place an order to buy to open 200 CFDs. If only 100 CFDs are traded on that day, and the remaining 100 CFDs of your order remains active overnight, it will be considered a new order for the purposes of determining commission minimums. I'm not that familiar with them, but as I understand it Eladian is mostly run by Automated Trading Desk guys. (Don't get me wrong ADT was definitely a strong firm at its prime, but I think Citi really gutted it).  I'm sure they have some ex-Citadel people there, but I'm not sure how important they were (I could be wrong, like I said I don't know who's at Eladian). Without dropping names, Headwinds snagged the researcher who pretty much wrote all of Citadel's core HFT algorithms. 1) Yes, there are. Advances in materials or aerodynamics reduce fuel consumption thereby reducing carbon emissions.  2) There is plenty of evidence that businesses act to reduce costs.  Any important question is how they measure carbon emissions. Are the emissions charges reduced with more efficient aircraft? Airlines may find ways to reduce the charges in ways that don't necessarily help the environment. As many people here have pointed out, a CFD is a contract for difference. When you invest in stock at eToro, you buy a CFD reflecting a bid on the price movement of the underlying stock, however, you do not actually own the stock or hold any rights shareholders have. The counterparty to the CFD is eToro. When you close your position, eToro shall pay you the amount representing the difference between your buy and sell price for each stock.  I suggest you read the following article about CFDs, it explains everything clearly and thoroughly: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/09/trade-a-cfd.asp#axzz2G9ZsmX3A As some of the responders have pointed out, and as is mentioned in the article, a broker can potentially misquote the prices of underlying assets in order to manipulate CFDs to their advantage. However, eToro is a highly reputable broker, with over 2 million active accounts, and we guarantee accurate stock quotes. Furthermore, eToro is regulated in Europe (Germany, UK, France, etc.) by institutions that exact strict regulations on the CFD trading sector, and we are obligated to comply with these regulations, which include accurate price quoting.  And of course, CFD trading at eToro has tremendous benefits. Unlike a direct stock investment, eToro allows you to invest as much or as little as you like in your favorite stocks, even if the amount is less than the relevant stock price (i.e. fraction stocks). For example:  if you invest $10 in Microsoft, and on the day of execution eToro’s average aggregated price was $30 after a spread of 0.1%, you will then have a CFD representing 0.33 stocks of Microsoft in your eToro account. In addition, with eToro you can invest in stock in the context of a social trading network, meaning that you can utilize the stock trading expertise of other trader to your advantage by following them, learning their strategies, and even copying their stock investments automatically. To put it briefly, you won’t be facing the stock market alone!  Before you make a decision, I suggest that you try stock trading with an eToro demo account. A free demo account grants you access to all our instruments at real market rates, as well as access to our social network where you can view and participate in trader discussions about trading stocks with eToro, all without risking your hard earned money. Bottom line – it’s free, there are no strings attached, and you can get a much firmer idea of what trading stocks with eToro is like. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us through our site: www.etoro.com. "In May 2011, a report to the board by Promontory Financial Group, a Washington consultant hired as part of the CFTC Dooley settlement, concluded that the firm had vastly improved"" its systems and risk controls, and praised management for setting ""a tone at the top"" supporting ""best practices.""    I actually did some technology work for Promontory Financial Group for a short period.  What a bunch of tools.  They had a nice office in a newer office building in the business district of Washington DC, not far from the Treasury.  Their ""server room"" was actually a closet.  The number of servers they had produced a lot of heat.  It had minimal ventiliation.  Their solution?  Bring in a portable A/C unit.  Great, but due to the humidity and the amount of heat/energy transfer, it produced a lot of condensation runoff.  There was no drain.     The solution?  Think of the largest Rubbermaid outdoor garbage can that you can buy, and put it under the unit to collect the condensation output.  It was probably 50 gallons.  It filled up in about three or four days, an indication of the output.  Part of the nightly cleaning crew's responsibility was to bail (literally) the water out of the can, and put it in a mop bucket, and wheel it down to the cleaning closet that did have a sink and empty it.  The can had wheels, but who would want to risk rolling 400 pounds of water on tinkery casters down a lavish passageway?    Problem?  On long weekends/holidays, there was no cleaning crew.  So they purchased a ""Mister Sensaphone"" (yes there really was such a device), so that when the can started to overflow, the moisture detector would trigger, it would page the system administrator, and they would drive into the office and bail it out.    All of that because they did not want to pay $30,000 to install additional ac capacity on the roof and ventilate their server room.   I think they were actually proud of this setup, like it was a demonstration of some ""out of the box"" creativity." "There is no secret sauce. Leadership and good decision making is an organic process. Sometimes, the Sr. VP is going to say, ""This quarter, it was more important to expand X through hiring than it was to upgrade Y infrastructure. Next quarter, we'll do Y. I know it sucks to have your project delayed, because you've worked very hard on it, but that's the decision we've made.""  The difficulty is when corporations get to the point where everyone is running around CYA, instead of admitting that real business constraints can mean that the best-laid plans have to be scrapped or delayed." Yes, just set aside the amount of money. If you buy a cfd long in a stock for a 1000$, set aside 1000$. If you buy a cfd short, set aside the same amount and include a stoploss at the value at which the money is depleted. In this case however, you can stil lose more, because of opening gaps. By doing this, you replicate the stock return, apart from the charged interest rate. Something really does seem seedy that if I invest $2500, that I'll make above 50k if the stock doubles. Is it really that easy? You only buy or sell on margin. Think of when the stock moves in the opposite direction. You will loose 50k. You probably didn't look into that. Investment will vanish and then you will have debt to repay. Holding for long term in CFD accounts are charged per day. Charges depends on different service providers. CFD isn't and should not be used for long term. It is primarily for trading in the short term, maybe a week at the maximum. Have a look at the wikipedia entry and educate yourself. "We used an internal billing system where we have Project numbers, overheads, and proposal numbers. Projects may or may not have a client backing them, Overheads are strictly that, overhead costs.  In the chargeback system we utilize (written by yours truly) we devised an SLO (Service Level Offering) which is the default, PC and Default software such as Office, Adobe Reader, Windows etc... and the hardware itself plus depreciation. This, when analyzed with total Business Unit working manhours, can devise an hourly rate that we apply to all Projects/Overheads/Proposals through time booked to these account through the Timecard system. A rate of 3.00 per manhour worked is applied accross the business Unit.  Additional costs are divied by percentage based on Timecards. If Employee A charges 50% time to Project 1, 40% to Project 2 and 10% to project C, then those percentages will be applied to divy out the additional IT costs to the various projects, and thus making these items billable back to the client. This lowers our Overhead costs, transfers cost from Cost Centre to Profit Centre and lowers our GMAF.  As for external to IT, it often prevents shit from getting done. ""Hey man, can you help me for a second?"" ""RAAAAAAWWW GIMME CHARGE NUMBER!!!!!!!!"" and creates internal animosity between project managers." Every job that I've had, I have automated myself out of. I'm an engineer and have always designed the tools to create the final product rather than the final product itself. It's mostly an easy task and getting much easier.  Ever since college when I was interning, I've questioned the implications of this and don't have any answers. In many ways things simultaneously take longer and shorter to come to pass. the financial information is generally filed via SEDAR (Canada) or SEC (US) before the conference call with the investment community.  This can take before either before the market opens or after the market closes.  The information is generally distribute to the various newswire service and company website at the same time the filing is made with SEDAR/SEC. No, CFD is not viable as a long term trading strategy.  You have a minimum margin to maintain, and you are given X days to top up your margin should you not meet the margin requirements. Failure to meet margin requirements will result in a forced sell where you are no longer able to hold onto the stock. A long term trading strategy is where you hold onto the stock through the bad times of the company and keep it long enough to see the good times. However, with CFD, you may be forced to sell before you see the good times. In addition, you incur additional lending charges (e.g. 4%-6%) for the ability to leverage. I'm no pro with how all this stuff works, but you can make a company look more profitable. FedEx structure is pretty complex and I'm no MBA/Accountant. They have like 7 companies under the FedEx Corporation shell company and 100's of accountant and lawyers. I'm sure this is true of many fortune 500 companies.