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Spreadbets are leveraged, so with £1k margin, if you use, say, 10:1 gearing, you can gain the equivalent to £10k's worth of shares. Of course, then it only takes the shares to fall 10% to wipe out your margin. It's the same principle as property investment (with a mortgage). With traditional share dealing more money is required to cover the same amount you could with a spread bet. Of course with leverage comes risk - ultimately it is up to you to use good judgement and use leverage wisely.
Many stocks aren't very liquid. With spread betting opening a trade is however very easy and since most spread betting platforms are based on the market-maker model you can close out positions quickly.
Right now, there are no taxes on spread betting profits. No stamp duty, and no capital gains tax if you are fortunate enough to have a gain. This situation could change. The authorities in a number of jurisdictions are studying spread betting with a view to bringing it under the auspices of the same agencies that regulate mainstream investments. When this happens it is reasonable to expect that there will be some political pressure to impose taxes as well.
Short selling is when a trader takes the view that the market, or a particular stock, is in a downward trend, or the price is about to collapse for some reason. There are a number of mechanisms to allow this belief to be exploited. The most common are short selling of the share, and the purchase of PUT options. Of course, if you already owned the share it is open to you to simply sell it, or if you wanted to retain the stock you could sell covered CALL options.
Where short selling or the purchase of PUT options is contemplated, the trader will immediately come up against a number of obstacles. In order to sell short, the broker must be able to borrow the required number of shares to sell, until such time as the trader decides to close his or her short position and buy them back. This could prove to be difficult. In addition, certain shares will not be eligible for short selling at all. These will be securities that are already at a low price to begin with. In Europe, in particular, many brokers will not allow anyone to sell short.
As far as options are concerned, things are not always equal with regard to PUTs and CALLs. Very often, the most liquid market exists on the CALL side and, while you will not normally have great difficulty in purchasing your PUTs, there could be a problem in finding a market when you want to sell them. You could, of course, keep them to maturity, but this increases the risk.
In spread betting, all other things being equal, there is no difference between playing the long side and the short side, except that in one case you want the price to go up, while in the other you want it to go down.
Most like to allude spread betting as a tax efficient way to hold long positions in shares. However, the real advantages of spread betting is that you can take small positions, top slice, use partial (non-guaranteed) stops...etc for no extra dealing fees...
It is often claimed that one of the advantages of spread betting is that there are no transaction charges like there would be if you were to deal with a normal stockbroker. This is true, but in some cases you are better off financially to pay the broker's charges, this is especially so for positions held over the long term. Remember that spread betting effectively disguises the charge within the spread.
You place bets (either buy or sell) based on what you think the share price will be at certain future dates. Normally these are rolling daily bets (for short-term traders only), or 3, 6, 9 or 12 months ahead. The further ahead the contract, the larger the spread you have to beat. This is fair enough, as it is the way the spreadbetting firm charges interest for the leveraging involved, and normally the spread is not too unreasonable (only a couple of %). You are free to close your bets at any time weather you're 'winning' or 'losing', either cashing in your profits or cutting your losses. You can also rollover the bet to the next time period if you want to keep it running, rather than closing the bet and opening a new one.
Financial spread betting companies are more interested in taking bets on the various stock market and other indexes than in the value of the shares of individual stocks. This limits the scope for their customers. One of the advantages of trading individual company stocks is that the trader can make quite informed judgments about the potential of the company's share price performance based on its assets, cash and cash flow position, the markets it sells into and so on. Where indexes are converned, the only meaningful criteria are broad based economic indicators, such as interest rates and consumer sentiment. The individual investor.s potential for standing out from the crowd, so important for success in investing, is largely not present.
You will not receive any dividends when the stock performs well and you have no say in how the company operates. When purchasing shares through a traditional stock broker you in effect own a percentile of the company and receive dividends when the company performs well. You also have a say in how the company is run. With spread betting are simply taking a position and profiting (or suffering a loss) from the difference in the stock price of the company between the time you open and the time you close the position. Although this also means that with traditional share dealing you also have to pay capital gains tax on any profits if you sell the stocks and you lose money if the stocks go down in value.
If you buy shares with the purpose of holding them for a relatively short period of time and then selling them, you will be engaging in the activity known as trading. The trader is set apart from the type of person who buys shares with the intention of holding them for a long period, perhaps forever, with the expectation of benefiting over a long period by having an income from dividends with a large capital gain in many years time.
As a trader, you will only have to worry about what the market does. There are very clear definitions of what you can expect to get when you decide to open or close your position. True, you will have a spread to contend with (the price at which you can buy from the market maker will not be the same at a given instant in time as the price at which he will buy from you) but this will be, to a large
extent, transparent to the normal trader in a market with normal liquidity.
You will, in effect, be pitted against, and find yourself interacting with, the great body of other traders who are interested in the same securities as yourself. The market will dictate the outcome, for better or worse.
When you start dealing in equity or index options, the position changes. The spread then becomes a significant item, and you will be up against option contract expiry dates, as well as the market as a whole, but at least you are still dealing in a real market, unlike in spread betting.