Spread Betting.. Has anyone returned made a profit?

[clarksonisawilly]

I have not, shall we say. Briefly ended up 35% up after only one day with various safe bets and chucked it all away. Including my entire deposit! Mostly, ok entirely, due to me being a greedy moron.
Can it be considered an investment, or is it pure gambling; you win some, you lose the lot?

[clarksonisawilly]

ShadownINja said:

DonkeyApple said:

Depends on the logic behind each trade. If there isn't any real logic or reasoning behind a trade then you are just gambling and like all punters you'll bankroll the house.

If you can write down on here very clear and specific reasons to justify each trade and more importantly each trade size and then the market specifics of how and why the trade went against you then you have a series of investments that sadly didn't work out.

If you can't then you are just gambling.

Sums up what I'd have said.

Just realised I screwed up the title.

To start, I have very, very little knowledge about markets

Here was my logic for the profitable positions - Looking at recent history for the FTSE, I saw it tended to bounce up and down quite frequently by anything up to 50 points, before making any larger general shift. I set a stop at 100 points one way, and a limit at 10 the other. £1 a point I think. It worked, three times in a row.
The losing fk up, I'm too embarrassed to go into. It was a spectacular cock up.

Looks mostly like gambling now!

[clarksonisawilly]

ShadownINja said:

So you were looking to risk 100 to make 10?

Yes. I had the large stop to allow the price to fluctuate downwards without prematurely closing the ticket. A low limit was used to be a safe, small profit.

[clarksonisawilly]

turbotongue said:

I have a mate who works for IG Index and he says that over 90% of people loose money. If you want to make money then you need to go long term (3-9 months) and trade shares, not so easy when you have all those pretty flashing lights in front of you and the temptation to take on too much leverage.

Discipline is sooo important

Edited by turbotongue on Wednesday 14th April 22:54

I like flashy lights

Out of interest, does IG make money purely on the 90 per cent of losers?