Introduction

First, thank you for reading this guide. It is a good introduction to financial betting and spread betting in general using a financial spread betting company as opposed to a conventional stock or futures broker.

I wrote this guide to explain how you can become a spreadbetter using the simple route of gambling, or betting on the stock market. The conventional route into futures and stocks is via a stockbroker, but this can be hard for the average person of modest means – and doesn’t come with tax free gains either!

I used to bet on horses and win fairly consistently. You can win on horses if you are disciplined and do not follow your whims, but instead, stick to a system which you follow through its ups and downs. However, once you start winning consistently on horses, the bookies, don’t want your money. They’ll close you out’ – which means you can’t place a bet with them anymore.

After spending a year or so going around bookies in various disguises, getting friends to place bets for me, etc, I was getting a bit fed up with the whole scene. I wanted something a bit bigger – it’s hard to make more than about £12,000 a year on the horses, consistently year in, year out so I was hungrier to make more.

Obviously I knew about the stock exchange. I knew what shares were and that they went up and down but I thought it was all a bit complicated and I couldn’t really how to make big money easily. If I bought say, £6000 of Marks & Spencer shares at £2 a share, and they went up over 6 months to £2.30, then I would make a lousy £450. Ok, it’s worth having, but the odds are laughable. A £450 win for a £6000 bet? Come on, only a mug would take that, even though the ‘downside’ – chance of losing all your original stakes – was relatively low. I saw the stock market as a place for long term speculative growth. If all went well, you could grow your money by 10% a year if you waits ten or twenty years for the highs and lows to even out. That was not for me.

Short-Term Stock Market Speculation is Gambling – Get it Clear in Your Head

I want to make one thing very clear in this guide, right from the outset. I am a gambler by nature and this is a guide about gambling, for gamblers. I like betting – as long as the odds are in my favour. I am not a reckless man, or a mug punter who had ‘hunches’ and ‘feelings’. I am a scientific gambler. I would never bet on something which was purely random, for example, flipping a coin, rolling dice or roulette. These things are for mugs.

Why?

Because statistically, you can’t win. In the long run, you will break even at best, lose at worth if the house takes a cut.

You cannot win long-term on games of pure chance.

The laws of mathematics are flat-out against you. There is a name for people who bet like this. They are called ‘Mug Punters’ and the entire gambling industry exists only because of these people throwing their money away. There are millions of them chasing their ‘dead certs’ and their ‘intuitions’ or following ‘tips’ given by a friend.

P.S. Remember : it is gambling, but, with applying very disciplined rules you can make a lot of money. A bit like poker pro’s…. they have to be extremely disciplined in order to make final tables… Just don’t bet to hard, and build it up over a period of time, you’ll then know if you need to crank it up a notch.

Spread betting is a leveraged product and as with all leveraged products can result in losses that exceed your initial stake. Readers should endure they fully understand the the product and risks before getting involved.