Getting Started with Financial Spread Betting Strategy

Indicators, Strategies, Risk Management and Trader Psychology

Within trading and spread-betting there are dozens of mathematical indicators and charting tools which are combined in numerous ways to produce strategies and systems for trading. The often used, and true, phrase is that ‘there is no holy grail’ and no system will produce profits time after time with little downside risk.

The aim of the trader when combining indicators and strategy is to increase the probability of making winning trades – or to be more precise, increase the probability that the winning trades are larger in value than the losing trades.

Perhaps of more importance than making huge profits is the concept of not incurring massive losses on a trading account which ends up with the trader being wiped out! This is where the concepts of risk management and psychology come in.

This section will look at some of the commoner concepts, approaches and indicators used and provides an overview of some common strategy frameworks implemented in spread betting.

To be an accomplished/successful financial spread bettor is by no means easy. Many of the books referred in the resources section cover these topics in more depth and all of them are recommended reading. Beyond reading and other educational aids the other key learning tool is experience!

Despite the technology applied by large trading institutions successful small scale strategies are not necessarily complicated they are just carefully conceived and applied in a disciplined fashion.

'I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.'
Thomas Jefferson