Market Spread Betting
Spread trading provides you access to trade a wide range of global financial markets not normally available to retail investors:
- Commodities
- Softs (coffee, cocoa, orange juice, sugar)
- Agriculture
- Energy
- Metals
- Foreign Exchange
- Treasuries
- Sectors
- Global Indices
- Global Equities
Share spread bets are some of the most common type of spreadbets. However, there are many other types of spreadbets that can be traded and the list keeps growing. Most providers nowadays will list all the constituents making up the FTSE 100 and FTSE 250. However the list is constantly being expanded due to demand for other share spread bets and a number of providers now will also quote AIM and Small Cap Shares that may not be offered by existing providers
Apart from UK stocks, many spread betting providers also quote share spread bets on international shares including USA, European, Australian and Asian shares. This
means you can trade share spreadbets on Google, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Honda, Toyota, BMW, Porsche and other big brands that are not available in the UK market.
Many providers will also offer index betting. An index is basically a collection of shares and the corresponding composite value of its components. In the UK we have the FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and FTSE 350. Major indices in the international financial markets include the Dow Jones Industrial Average (USA), Nasdaq (USA), FTSE 100 (UK) CAC 40 (France), DAX (Germany), Nikkei 225 ( Japan), Hang Seng (Hong Kong ).
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There are 2 types of spread betting, the first one is sports spread betting and the second one is financial market spread betting. The first type has been known for years and common especially in basketball game bets and baseball. The second type, the financial market spread betting is rather new but is catching wide spread popularity as one of the hottest trends in financial investments online now days.
The financial market spread betting allows the gambler to bet on financial market products such as stocks, shares, commodities like oil, gas, silver gold, wheat and more and even currencies (much like forex just in a type of bet).
The fact that the player is placing a bet on financial products, makes it attractive to more players, even more attractive than forex which is too complicated to handle and it offers a larger variety of available products than forex which concentrate on currency trading.
The explanation to the rising popularity of the market spread betting can be found with the rising of many financial spread betting companies like the financial spread betting city index and other companies who dealt with forex till now and decided to go with the flow and expand into financial spread betting.
The financial spread betting attracts millions of players from the United Kingdom where it is regulated and licensed and the winnings carry no tax which is even more attractive than forex as the potential profit is huge.
Betting on financial spreads can be much more profitable than actually investing the money on real stocks or shares in the stock market since as a financial spread bettor you have the option of leveraging your money and then you can turn 10 pounds into 1000 pounds.
Of course, the risk is big and this is why you need to use life savers such as stop loss which limits your potential loss to the original amount of money you intended to invest.
Financial spread betting is looking to be the next forex and by doing so it seems that more and more companies focusing on the foreign exchange market till today will go into the financial spread betting market business and enable their clients to bet on spread.