rizwanuk said:
I agree title of my post was not the best, there is nothing "Unreal" about the profits one makes from Spread betting. But English is not my priamary language so please excuse me for this.
Not at all, not at all ... I should ask you to excuse me for offending you with the critical tone of my post. It wasn't you I was criticising and that was not my intention at all!
The point I clumsily tried to make was that to contrast spreadbetting with "real trading" could be taken as demonstrating a prejudicial starting assumption that one is "real" and the other "only betting" and therefore not a serious, professional business. I realise of course that this wasn't what you meant at all, and I apologise for my comment on the subject.
Unfortunately, what tends to happen at this site is that when some people see things that don't conform with their own experience, they respond by openly calling the poster a liar (or similar; or worse). We've seen this happen time and time again here, and have even lost highly valued members over it. This serves only to alienate people, and one of the unfortunate results is that the few people who actually do have something valuable to impart on the subject from their own successful experience all disappear. (It's very unusual around here for me to be in that group of people, I can tell you: it's almost always the other way round!).
The people who do actually know what they're talking about won't hang around to share their knowledge if the immediate reaction is that they get called liars, or idiots or whatever. That sort of behaviour simply has no place here, in my opinion, and I hope the moderators agree and care enough to take action over it.
As you can see from many other threads at this site, this seems to be a subject which provokes extremely strong expressions of opinion (usually disguised as "fact" though that isn't what it is) from ill-informed people. In my opinion there are two main reasons for this. One is that some people rely on very out-of-date information in a changing market (e.g. many people don't realise that for some forms of forex trading the dealing costs are now no higher with spreadbetting than with any form of direct access trading), and another reason is that many, many people have expensive and extensive losing experience of spreadbetting, usually because they've over-traded, used inappropriate position-sizing, and/or treated it like a form of gambling rather than as a serious business. Understandably, this sometimes makes them very blinkered and prejudiced.
rizwanuk said:
I want to find out that Spreadbetting or Regular trading which is relatively more trader friendly?
Well, different people have different opinions about that. Speaking for myself, I moved from direct access trading to spreadbetting and stayed with it (for 4 years now) partly because I find it more trader-friendly. And that's also improving all the time. Now that competition among spreadbetting firms is increasing some of them have realised that making and keeping it trader-friendly is the way forward; and I hope and think they're right.
rizwanuk said:
I mean If similar strategy is used on the same vehicle, how would the results differ because of spread betting or regular trading.
It would depend very much on the "something" and how it's done. Sorry - not a very helpful comment, I realise! There are many forms of trading which have no (or no sensible) spreadbetting equivalent, and I'd be the last person to suggest that it's a suitable vehicle for everything and everyone. In some areas and with some products, high spreads still remain a problem. With some spreadbetting firms (not all, by any means) the "bias" in the prices remains a problem to some traders (depending on their trading methods). It's not the be all and end all of trading, in other words. But one of the key ways in which the results will always differ (and this is only relevant to traders making consistent profits) is that in the UK, spreadbetting profits are tax-free at the moment. To me, that's enormously relevant. But in any event to dismiss out of hand as simply "lies" the opinions of the few people who have been using this form of trading for some years as a way to feed their families, pay their mortgages, and whatever else, strikes me as ridiculous as well as offensive.
So, the bottom line is that it all depends on whom you want to believe. In my experience the ones with the loudest voices, the most offensive manners and the most "bluster", however unhelpful their advice, are always the ones you get left with after the better-informed and less opinionated ones have been driven away simply because they have better things to do and have no incentive, after all, to hang around only to be insulted!
And on that note, if you'll excuse me, I'm now going to depart from this thread and not return to it. I wish you every success, and once again my apologies for "rising to the bait".
