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I've been demo betting on Tradefair for a week now and i'm up, i'm only in for short term bets of a few hours max. I keep my eye on the ball, and only had up to £5 a point, and bail out when i feel the profit is enough (greed is bad in SB).
Anyone else had any experience? I have read a couple of books including The Naked Traders books on shares and spreads, anyone on here made any serious money? Or make a living out of it?
Betting is a mugs game.
BUT, if you can take advantage of the disparity in odds between say betfair and ladbrokes whilst spreading and laying, automatically through the website API's then you can guarantee yourself a win every time. And then you can make some cash. Tis a rather expensive debugging process though!
That's called Arbitrage betting. You can lock in a profit by exploiting differences in odds offered by different bookmakers. Betfair has made this process easier as you can bet ON something with Ladbrokes, Hills etc and bet AGAINST the same thing on Betfair.
Not without risk though - not always possible to get a bet on at the odds stated for example.
Best done on "2 horse races" (snooker for example) or long term events.
A few years ago I was spread betting on NASDAQ and FTSE 100, right around the times the banks were going up and down daily.
I made about 3k in a day, then, stupidly (aka greedily) didn't cancel my spread and lost 500 quid. At that point I gave up
I used to work for one of the big spread/CFD companies. It's an open secret that 95% of clients break even or lose money. Having seen what our traders did and how they spoke about our customers, I'd avoid it like the plague because the playing field is ALWAYS in the favour of the house despite what the documentation says. The fact that spreads can mysteriously widen for certain customers means if you're causing them pain (it's unlikely unless you have loads of cash), you may find they just force you to another provider.
Also, if you're doing arbitrage, make sure to do it apples and apples. We had a customer who was doing it against two different things (with similar names) and lost a load of money.
Finally, we had a company timeshare in the Algarve, keys to several expensive cars etc because of people not able to pay debts, nevermind those who spent the mortgage, kids inheritance etc. Be VERY careful about how much you can lose, go for a limited risk acct when you start and keep a close eye. Things can go south FAST (I lost £200 when I was having a pee in my short lived spread trading attempt).
So yeah. Not much of a fan.
The best way to make money out of betting is to be a bookmaker.
...though having said that, I'm currently a few hundred up on the bookmakers. All made betting on the 2008 Olympics - I've not made a bet since. The secret being that I thought I had better inside knowledge than the bookies, and so it proved. Made most of my money betting on us winning more medals and more gold medals than they thought - based on working out where I was fairly confident we'd win medals (I actually predicted one less cycling gold than we won) I decided they'd got it badly wrong. Also made a bit on individual bets - most notably on Ben Ainslie, where I got an "almost" arbitrage (I think I'd have lost my money if he'd had a freak accident and not made the start line) betting on him winning at one place and on anybody but him winning somewhere else. Getting true arb bets which are worth it is rather difficult - they do tend to keep an eye on each other.
I can confirm that SB is more fun when slightly drunk, and i make far more money too.
UK 100 Daily and the Johanesburg index bombed today and i went with it 😉
Happy dayzzzzzzzzzz
Understanding spread betting has opened up a whole new financial world to me, making money on down markets is very easy and lucrative, i'm sure it doesn't help UK plc very much (although some think it helps even up the greedy bulls..)
But watch them indicies people like a hawk and pounce 8)