sorry tomorton, but you need to wake up and smell the amyl nitrate!
average joe will lose money far more quickly on a spread betting platform due to:
the larger spreads
marketing/encouragement of over leveraging positions
encouragement and 'education' of placing stops at TA levels
re-quoting
paying overnight rates to finance positions held overnight
platform quoting according to your position
unreliable java/web based platforms
unqualified and unknowledgeable staff like our friend at capital spreads
etc
etc
etc
here's a fact: most spreadbetting companies have 3 books. each customer is placed in one of these books.
1. 90% of losers. no need to hedge their positions. their accounts will be in the sb coffers within 6 months guaranteed.
2. 7% of customers whos positions are not hedged. sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. overall they are break even.
3. 3% of customers who are regular winners. the sb will not hedge their positions, but mirror them in the REAL market. if sb is so great, why dont sb's lay these bets off with another sb?
Add to that the fact that SB is far more accessible, more heavily advertised and has lower entry costs, so of course it attracts a higher percentage of losers than DMA. but these things don't make SB a scam. You could just as easily argue that far more kids fall off bicycles and hurt their knees than crash Ferraris, so bikes must be banned - kids fall off bikes because they're kids and they fall off stuff, and they can't afford Ferraris.
Yes, SB spreads are wide. but people pay for what they want, not what you think they should want.
Over leveraging positions? - Yes, OK, you can do that if you're a newbie or you can afford to keep re-financing. But if I want to eat 3 desserts, what restaurant is going to stop me? But you can also borrow on your credit card to finance a DMA account, so what?
Poor placement of stops - As I said, most traders would lose whatever platform they use, that's not the fault of the platform designer.
Re-quoting - I've been spread-betting for 8 years and never seen this.
Overnight financing - there's no need to use Rolling positions for longer-term SB's. People pay these charges if they want, but they don't have to.
Personalised quoting - Never seen this.
Unreliable platforms - The Finspreads platform was pretty unstable for a while, maybe about 6 years ago. Not a bad record, and not uniquely worse on SB sites / services.
Poor staff? - Just wrong. I have several times queried transactions with two SB firms and found that they were right and I had made maths or chart-reading errors. Most recently, Caps had identifed, before I even rang them, a rogue price that had been delivered when they closed a position of mine and reinstated me within minutes.
As for your statistics, maybe they are correct, but without source they are impossible to verify, and your track record on other assertions is debatable.
Quite a long time ago I recall that sonmeone suggested on T2W that if a trader was successful on DMA, he should carry on happily trading on DMA and basically keep his opinion of SB private. Of course, if you're not successful on either, then I suppose you're not really a trader.