William Hill is a leading bookmaker in the UK, and has been in the gambling industry for many years. Despite this, William Hill does not yet seem to include financial spread betting in its range of products, though it has built out from sports betting to embrace online casino games, online poker, and online bingo.
This daily price chart reflects the market’s ambivalence towards William Hill’s performance, while recognizing the improvements that have been made recently. William Hill was originally founded in 1934, while gambling was still illegal in the UK. While keeping the same name, it has been acquired by several different companies over the years, including Sears, Grand Metropolitan, and Brent Walker. The company underwent a leveraged buyout in 1997 by a Japanese bank called Nomura, and was eventually successfully listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2002 after an early failure in 1999.
It bought Greyhound Stadiums in Sunderland and Brough Park, and subsequently in 2005 acquired 624 betting offices from Stanley Leisure, which put it a par with Ladbrokes bookies. But it was forced to sell some of these offices by the Office of Fair Trading, which deemed it anticompetitive, and by December 2005 it fell out of the FTSE 100.
Recently it has been trying hard to improve its business, partnering with Playtech, an online gaming company in 2008, and moving its online operation to Gibraltar in 2009 to avoid taxes. Its current valuation is about £2 billion, which puts it in the top half of the FTSE 250. It employs about 16,000 people, and claims to process more than one million betting slips per day.
With 25% of the UK market, it is a major player that is doing many right things to improve its results – as you can see the price is generally in an uptrend.
William Hill Rolling Daily: How to Spread Bet on William Hill shares?
You may be interested in placing a short bet on William Hill, figuring that a retracement is likely. The current price for a rolling daily bet is 337.95 – 339.75, so you could wager £4.50 per point that the price will go down. Your bet will be placed at the selling price of 337.95.
If you are correct, you might find that the price drops to 289.63 – 291.43, and you could close the bet to collect your profits. Your bet will close at the buying price of 291.43. It is easy to remember which one of the two prices to use, as it works to minimize your profits and maximize your losses! So you have gained, with your short bet, 337.95-291.43, which is 46.52 points. If you multiply this by your stake of £4.50 per point, you can figure that your winnings are £209.34.
If on the other hand your bet lost, you might find that you have to close the trade when the current quote is 373.60 – 375.40, simply to avoid further losses. This time your closing price would be 375.40, so with the opening price of 337.95 you have lost the difference which is 37.45 points. For your chosen size of wager, this is a loss of £168.53.
For those who do not spend all their time watching the markets, the stop loss order can be useful as it closes a losing bet automatically, without your further intervention. In this case a stoploss order might have closed when the price went up to 365.35 – 367.15, saving you some of the loss. Working out how much you have lost, your starting price was 337.95, as before, and your closing price was 367.15, the higher of the two prices quoted. The difference is 29.2 points, which would cost you £131.40.
William Hill Futures Style Spread Bet
The future style spread bet works best when you think you might need to hold the bet open for more than a few weeks to achieve your profit objective. You can hold the bet open until the expiration date, but you are allowed to close it at any time when you want or need to, to capture profits or to staunch losses. The current price for the far quarter spread bet on William Hill is 338.74 – 343.33.
Say you believe that the price will go up, you would place a long bet at 343.33, and might choose to stake £6.50 per point. For the sake of this example, assume firstly that the price goes up as you wish, and you decide to take your profits by closing the bet when the quote is 406.92 – 411.21. The closing price will be 406.92. 406.92 minus 343.33 is 63.59 points. 63.59 times £6.50 is £413.33, which is how much you have won with the spread bet in this example.
Of course, financial markets do not always comply with your wishes, and in this case the price might go down after you placed the long bet, so for the losing example assume that the price goes down to 287.31 – 291.67. You close the spread trade, which would be at a price of 287.31, and work out how much you have lost. 343.33 less 287.31 amounts to 56.02 points. Multiplying by your stake of £6.50 per point gives you a loss of £364.13.
Many spread betters decide to use a stop loss order, usually placed when they open the bet, to take them out of the trade if the losses reach a certain level. In this case a stoploss order might have closed your bet when the price dropped to 301.52 – 306.01. The bet would close at 301.52, a loss of 41.81 points, and this would cost you £271.77.