With any kind of market trading or wagering, there is always a chance you could lose money. Most seasoned traders will agree that there’s no reward without risk. At gnuTrade, however, we make the risks clear to every player on every trade. You will know exactly what you're risking before you place a trade.

Our free "stop loss" service means you can limit your potential losses without putting a limit on your gains. With many other financial betting firms your losses are open-ended and you could lose more than your original betting amount.

Learn more ways to minimise your trading risks >>

Yes, there are limits depending upon the type of trade you want to place. Currently, the maximum bet amount for a ‘per point’ trade is £2, €2 or $2 per point. For a 'basic' bet it is £10, €10 or $10, and for a 'back a player' bet the maximum is £10, €10 or $10.

Play money bets are limited to  a maximum of gnu 20 for per point trades and gnu 50 for basic bets.  The minimum bet for a 'per point trade' is £0.10, €0.10, $0.10 or gnu 0.10 per point and the minimum for a 'basic' bet is £0.50, €0.50, $0.50 or gnu 0.50. For a 'back a player' bet, the minimum bet amount is £1, €1, $1 or gnu 1.

gnuTrade offers a type of binary bet called a 'Basic Bet', which is easier to place and is more straightforward than bets offered by our competitors. Instead of basing outcomes on complicated arbitrary spreads between 0 and 100, you simply bet on whether the markets will go up or down within a certain time frame. If you're right, you win.

If other players look at your trading history and see that you are trading successfully, they can choose to 'back' you with money. If you continue to trade well, they will win money and you will receive a ‘bonus’ (in addition to your trading profits) because you were ‘backed’. If, however, your trades are not successful, your backer will lose money, but you will not suffer any extra losses.

Similarly, you can choose to 'back' other players if you like the way they are trading, giving you the opportunity to win money without actively trading the markets yourself. The ‘back a player’ facility applies to both real money and play money accounts.

The winnings available depend upon the amount of money a backer bets and how much profit a backed player makes.

Let's say Player A has a play money account worth $5,000. Player B doesn't have too much time to follow the markets personally, but likes the way Player A has been performing, so 'backs' Player A with $1,000.

If Player A trades well and his play money account goes up in value to $6,000, he makes a 20 per cent gain. This means the ‘back a player profit’ will be 20 per cent of the backing bet of $1,000, ie, $200, if player B decides to sell.

Player A receives 10 per cent of the $200, which is $20 in real money betting credits. Player B receives 90 per cent of the $200 profit, which is $180 in cash. The backer always receives 90 per cent of the backing winnings, and the backed player receives 10 per cent.

The gnuTrade site includes a useful calculator to help you work out how much you could win or lose through a back a player bet.

We create and publish our own prices based on real-time feeds from a variety of institutional price contributors depending on the market. We have no 'influence' on any prices and in fact need to keep them based around mid market data as we allow both sides of a trade (buy and sell) to take place at any given time.

Our prices on some markets like major indices are based on the real underlying prices of the most actively traded instruments (futures) related to the market.  For these markets, our daily price is calculated as the price of the relevant futures price adjusted by our daily fixed 'fair value' amount. This 'fair value' adjustment is normally set daily after the market has closed for trading, and is itself calculated from the theoretical value of the dividends payable between today and the expiry of the future and the cost of carry (interest) for the index over the same period. 

The benefit of this, means very dynamic two way prices which react quickly to news and sentiment, and closely approximate the prices on the underlying markets you may see on television or other media sources.