The Beginner's Guide to Financial Spread Betting

Book excerpt: Now fully revised and updated, The Beginner's Guide to Financial Spread Betting provides an essential grounding in the basic principles of spread betting. Spread betting was once the domain of institutional investors, city traders and high rollers. Not anymore. You would now be hard-pressed to find any other form of trading that allows such a scale of return and has such wide appeal. The popularity of spread betting has increased massively over the last few years, with thousands of new traders entering the market every month. And, whilst the basic principles of spread betting are simple, there is jargon to overcome and some important lessons to be learnt if the novice trader is going to make the most of the opportunities available. However, these huge opportunities do carry some risk and this book describes how it is vital that traders manage those risks and understand how to minimise them wherever possible. Aimed squarely at beginners, the book is designed to be accessible to readers with perhaps only a basic grasp of investing. It starts with an explanation of what spread betting is, moves in to cover the mechanics of a trader, then explains the bid-offer spread and margin trading. It then discusses the tools available to traders and looks at some of the key spread betting strategies before taking a brief look at trading psychology and some real-life case studies. The appendices and glossary at the back then serve as your quick and handy 'cheat notes' when you start trading. By the time you finish reading this book, you should know how to place a spread bet, the rules of the game and how to trade successfully so that you too can, with a little time and effort, start to make serious money from the markets.