With the UK 100 set to end the week 200pts higher (+3.4%), now is a very good time to start thinking about one sector that’s hugely popular with traders and investors alike. Love them or loathe them, the UK’s blue chip banks regularly provide us with some of the juiciest trading opportunities – they’re liquid, high beta (meaning they tend to move more than the index itself), they’re set to report full year 2015 results over the coming few weeks and, best of all, you can trade them with just a 5% account deposit with Accendo Markets.

All our clients are able to speculate on falling as well as rising prices, something useful to remember given what the banks have been through of late. With such a toolbox at your disposal, you’re quite simply looking at twice the opportunity to profit. Think the results will be worse than analysts expect? Then you can open a short position and ride the declines. Confident the worst is now behind the banks? Then you can go long. Remember, the sector is highly depressed – and quite often these conditions are indicative that the banks’ shares may be oversold. If the panic is over, could the sector be set to rebound?

You don’t have to ‘like’ banks in order to profit from trading them, but you do need to know what the drivers are. Accendo Markets’ exclusive research aims to give you that and much more. Sign up here to get the best daily morning report in the City of London as well as regular trade ideas and key trading levels on the major indices, commodities and equities.

John Truong, Senior Trader