Spread Betting With Shares

Spread Betting on shares is essentially like gambling. Instead of gambling whether a horse or dog will win a race you are gambling on whether a share price will go up or down. There are several companies that offer spread betting on shares, most of which is now done on line. Amongst them are (in no particular order, and there are many others as well), City Index, CMC Markets, GNI Touch, IG Index , Spreadex and Finspreads. When you spread bet on a share price you are given a two way quote that offers you a buy and a sell price. You then choose whether you want to buy or sell. If you buy you want the price to go up and if you sell you want the ...  Read the complete review

So what is spread betting, well I'm doing it right now on a screen behind this review. I will attempt to provide an overview of the principles of spread betting and my experience of it for you. * Financial Spread Betting * Spread betting is a way of trading on a financial market (I trade on three european markets) or a product such as a share or a commodity without actually owning the share. As an investor it allows you to bet on whether the price of say a market or commodity will go up or go down in value. If you think a particular market/share will rise in value then you'd buy into it (this is called going long) and the aim is that ...  Read the complete review

Any kind of stock-market investment is a bit of a gamble, but only spread-betting is actually classed as gambling for tax-purposes (i.e. no tax) which makes it rather useful, especially for a higher-rate tax-payer. With most investments (e.g. shares) the stake is the total cost of buying the investment so the most you can lose is all of your money, and the profit theoretically limitless although usually small relative to the initial stake, in any one year. With spread-betting you are just betting on the direction of the chosen market, share, index or commodity etc. E.g. you might want to bet £1 per point that the FSTE100 will rise, in which case you will get the ...  Read the complete review

Spread betting, or trading, call it what you will, an investment or a gamble, it's not really any better than us sports gamblers, or even poker players. You can lose a lot (as the news has recently lead us to see, a lot can be £3 Billion), by not knowing what your doing, admittedly the banker wasn't spread betting, but was effectively betting on the futures market, which is similar (but instead of buying/selling share prices he was buying/selling futures). So how does spread betting work? Well the bookie (or the trader, in most cases with financial bets) will offer you a buy, or a sell price, a hi or a low if you'd rather see it that way. You will be in profit ...  Read the complete review

Spread Betting – How it Works This is how spread betting works. Suppose you want to bet that the share price of Marks & Spencer will rise. Instead of investing, say, £7,000 to buy 1,000 shares at £7 each (paying the broker's commission and stamp duty), you buy a spread bet at £10 a point instead – this means that for every penny the M&S share price rises you will make £10. If the price of M&S shares rises by 10 per cent, your share purchase holdings will show a profit of £700 on your £7,000. But with a spread bet or CFD, your initial deposit 'on margin' will typically have been just 10 per cent of the value of the shares, in this case £700. If the ...  Read the complete review