I've been looking into this over the last week anyone on here involved in Spread Trading / Spread Betting on Financial Markets. JC

I used to work for a company that wrote software for spread betting on financial markets... it's an amazingly successful way of losing a vast amount of money in a very short time!

For example, one day I was testing a new version so I put a £1 of Monopoly money (i.e. test make-believe money) per point bet on the FTSE100 index. By the end of the day I had made more than £10,000. When I came in the next morning I had lost £50,000!

In other words - it's best avoided unless you have a huge amount of knowledge of the financial markets.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^As above, plus you also need to be ina position where you can open/close posiions at the drop of a hat as things can change very, very quickly on the markets.

Is that anything like manure spreading?

Pretty much the same... you can certainly be 'in it' remarkably quickly...

[Edited on 13/5/10 by David Jenkins]

"it's an amazingly successful way of losing a vast amount of money in a very short time!" - Couldn't agree more - about 20 years ago I lost about £6k in the space of about 3 months, the firm doing the trading for me & giving the recommendations strangely made a significant profit on the transactions .........................


My advice would be that unless you have RELIABLE insider information (which of course is illegal) avoid like the plague!

have a play on this site www.bullbearings.com
don't know quite how accurate it is, but worth playing with to see if you're likely to be any good

I work for what you might describe as a very high tech (and very successful) hedgefund. Before joining them I used to think that spread trading was something I might dabble in but now think the whole thing is best left to the pro's!

instead, I put my money into funding risks I have a better understanding of... like kit cars

Yes, I do, but I'm crap at it

A close colleague of mine who is extraordinarily bright has recently started to 'dabble.' He does ok but, quite frankly, he's barely mortal.