Whilst TradeDirect365 offers personal and non-personal trading accounts, our focus in this review is on personal accounts for private, retail traders. Significantly, TradeDirect365 does not stipulate a minimum opening balance requirement on live trading accounts and gives access to trading leverage up to 1:200. However, funds must be deposited to the live trading account before live trading can start. Moreover, a minimum cash balance of AUD $100 must be maintained in the TradeDirect365 live trading account and should the balance fall beneath $50, the account may be closed.
Traders who want access to live data feeds for the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) are required to pay a monthly fee of AUD$27.50 to TradeDirect365. Nevertheless, the fee is waived if traders make four single leg or 2 round-turn CFD trades in a calendar month, with stocks selected from the ASX. Order types available for traders at TradeDirect365, include Trade Orders at real time quotes, Limit Orders and Stop Loss orders with margin calls made at 20%. Importantly, we saw that traders are not automatically protected from negative cash balances and are obliged to pay negative cash balances immediately to TradeDirect365.
TradeDirect365 Demo Account
A demo account at TradeDirect365 can be set up in seconds with just a name and Email address. Importantly, the demo account is free of risk as it operates on a copy of the live trading platform. We saw that traders get $10,000 of virtual funds to practice trading on the TradeDirect365, CloudTrade platform. Conveniently, traders can have a demo account running in parallel to a live trading account, allowing them to test trading strategies in the virtual environment, before executing the strategies on the live platform.
TradeDirect365 Fees and Commissions
The highly competitive schedule of fees for CFD transactions are clearly set out in the PDS and Market Information Sheets on the TradeDirect365 website. We saw that all individual share CFDs (except US shares) are charged commission depending on the country of listing. Whereas, for individual US shares CFDs, TradeDirect365 calculates a dealing spread price by deducting 2 cents from the bid price and adding 2 cents to the market offer price. For other individual share CFDs, we saw that commission rates are calculated on the contract value of both the opening and closing trades and don’t usually exceed 0.1%.
Impressively, ASX CFD commissions start from $5 and only when trade values exceed $7,150 is a commission of 0.07% charged. For products with no commission charges, customers pay dealing spreads that vary across markets. However, traders can see the spreads on the ‘market information’ page on the broker’s website. Notably, forex spreads for major currency pairs including AUD/USD, are fixed at 0.8 pips with no added commissions. Moreover, traders investing in the Australia 200 index benefit from 24 hour fixed spreads from 0.9 pips are fixed for 24 hours on the Australia 200 index. We also saw that TradeDirect365 offers guaranteed stop-loss orders where fees are charged only when the stop is triggered.
