Trading stocks comes in the form of the buying and selling of actual stocks where you pay full price of the security and effectively own it, on the other hand, stock CFDs is a contract enable you to trade on rising or falling prices without taking ownership of the underlying asset and can be used to trade a range of markets such as forex, shares, indices, commodities, and crypto. If the price of an asset goes up by 5%, your CFD does the same. If, on the other hand, the price goes down by 5%, your CFD also loses 5% in value