Spread betting allows you to bet on a huge variety of financial products in one place and in one currency. You make your bets in one of 3 currencies (Sterling, US Dollars or Euros), which means you do not have to bother with costly exchange rates and can, in general, trade in your own currency.
Spread bets are margined trading products, which means you need only deposit a small percentage of the full value of your trade leaving your excess capital to continue working hard elsewhere. For example, a £1 bet on a share is the equivalent of buying (or selling) 100 real shares. On most shares our minimum Initial Margin Requirement (deposit) is 3-5% of the underlying value of the shares which means that you can take a bet in a share with as little as 1/30th of the money required to buy the actual real shares from a stock broker.
Rolling bets work by just taking the real price in the market and placing a very small spread around it. At the end of the day all open bets are ‘rolled’ over to tomorrow.
