Investors are not known for living in the now. Most investment plans take years and decades to come to fruition. Investors of this type are often labeled “conservative” and tend to live in a perpetual state of deferred satisfaction. If you trusted only conservative investment advice, you would think that this is all there is to investment. This is why many people never invest at all. It’s too forward-focused, too built upon expectations regarding an uncertain future. Some people just need to live in the now.

Fortunately, investment can be focused on the now too. It’s just riskier. This is why conservative investment strategy is conservative. It’s opposed to risk, and the only way to invest without a tremendous amount of risk is to do so very slowly, over years and decades. That’s why methods like index mutual funds get all the press. Of course, these really should be part of the portfolio of any diversified investor, but they’re not the only way.

Knowledge and education displace risk. Risk is possibilities that lurk beneath the unknown. By increasing your knowledge, you decrease that which is unknown, and you make it possible to make educated decisions about investments which other people would have to make blind guesses about. This gives you an edge over the long term passive investor who knows basically nothing about that which he is invested in. You will be able to make investments that pay off in the short term, because you have learned enough to minimize risk.

One of the best ways to do this is with web broker CMC Markets. CMC Markets specializes in day trading methods, investments which resolve in hours or days. Inherently, investment forms like these are not conservative. They are riskier than index mutual funds, and conservative investors everywhere are going to decry them. That’s because they don’t know enough to be good at this kind of trading. If you’re the kind of person who wants to see results from investment NOW, this is the kind of investment for you.

But this will require a lot of learning on your part. Luckily, CMC Markets provides much in the way of educational opportunities and even offers a demo account, so you can make investment decisions without actually risking any real money. The methods that CMC Markets favors (at least more popularly) are CFD trading and Forex. We’ll talk about CFD by way of example.

CFD is an exercise in buying low and selling high, the very essence of investment itself. The user is presented with hundreds of different financial products, all with buy and sell prices. A product is selected, as well as a specific short window of time. If, at the end of the minutes or hours selected, the price has risen or fallen according to investor prediction, dividends are yielded. If the investor was wrong in his or her prediction, losses are totalled the same way.

By learning about the markets and products which CMC Markets features, the investor can make educated decisions about value speculation. This way, education displaces risk, and big yields can happen in very short amounts of time. Learning is the only way to beat the waiting game in investment, but it’s possible for anyone to do.