Financial Spread Betting (page 5 of 9)

Short-Term Investment

Spread betting is better suited to short term investments than it is to the long term. It also has advantages over normal share buying if you are a short term speculator.

Some of the reasons why it may be preferable are:

1) You can gamble on many more things than just the price of a particular stock. E.g. on the performance of an index, foreign exchange rates, commodity futures as well as individual stocks and a multitude of sporting events.

2) Spread bets can be made on a margin, i.e. if you make an up bet on the value of the FTSE 100 index you will not need to pay the entire amount that you could potentially lose. You will just need to place a deposit, whereas when buying shares you need to pay the full value up front. The deposit you pay may be just 10% of the possible loss from your bet.

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