I recall I’d been made redundant and went to interview at another broker based around Imperial Wharf. Downstairs they had their “education” department where people paid large sums to “learn” how to trade, which mostly involved drawing shapes in stock charts and pretending they had meaning (if trading were that easy algo trading would be trivial). Upstairs I got to see the broker they ran, which they funnelled everyone who learnt how to trade into using. Dude interviewing me was coked out of his head, sniffing every 10 seconds. They were, essentially, pretending to teach people to trade while running the trading platform that would take all their money.

They offered me the job. I turned it down.

Online CFD brokerages look to me like the gambling industry wanted to have a section that was branded as "investments" so they could extract that money from uninformed casuals.

I'm not one for banning things, but I really wish there was more financial literacy. Half of the stories in europe of "retail investor loses shirt" are with CFDs when the so called investor likely doesn't even know the difference between a stock and a CFD.

Moreover, because anyone in the financial industry knows this, I assume all companies offering CFDs as their core product, and making their best attempts to make it look like they're selling actual stock, are all ran by a bunch of scammers.