Spread Betting

[AtW]

All you need to know about gambling is this - the house always wins.

[_V_]

As far as I understand it (from about 2 minutes on this thread), the spread betting company is the focus of the bet. The behaviour of the other participants only affects the behaviour of the sbc (their spread) in that the sbc will automatically factor in the potential scale of their win/loss into the spread. The sbc will aim to make an average profit over a number of spreads, so that the behaviour of a particular participant does not affect that spread as such and only has a marginal affect on future spreads. Each spread is a seperate gamble and the sbc is like the banker in blackjack. Or am I completely off course ?

That is my understanding. They make money only on the spread, no actual shares/commodities/currency is ever actually physically traded and there is no limit to what you can make. You could use a £1 to make £1000 in a day (unlikely but possible).

PS - Isn't it good to discuss/debate/argue something interesting rather than the usual puerile "banter" on this site?

[AtW]

AFAIK it is against Sharia law to gamble...

[oraclesmith]

AFAIK it is against Sharia law to gamble...

Better get in now before New Labour change the Constitution !

[Chico]

Just changing the subject slightly - what's to stop an on-line gambling site from being completely fixed ? eg. anyone with a bit of technical skill could create a site which plays, say, blackjack with an on-line punter and maybe some other fake players, and only ever allows the punter to win back a fraction of what they've gambled. At least with real gambling you can see the cards being shuffled and dealt so it's hard (but not impossible) to fix, but with virtual gambling it's so temptingly easy-peasy that it's hard not to assume that all these sites are fixed.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. Maxim I learnt when I worked at an Online casinos ten years ago. They were fun days and opened my eyes to the futility of gambling to the punters. The House always wins in the end!!

[meridian]

That is my understanding. They make money only on the spread, no actual shares/commodities/currency is ever actually physically traded <snip>

Not quite true in all cases - depending on the SB company, they may "lay off" your bet in the actual marketplace.

[oraclesmith]

Anyone got a shareware gambling site set up then ?

[oraclesmith]

Not quite true in all cases - depending on the SB company, they may "lay off" your bet in the actual marketplace.

Yes, but that's the risk management taken by the sb firm, not the operation of the spread bet itself. What AtW was on about was the supposed direct effect that one trader has on another with the same spread.

[TheMonkey]

The house always wins, until the directors get kidnapped by the US government.

I made about £2k a few years ago after writing a screen scraper for one of the gambling outfits. Mind you I'm working for another one at the moment so it paid off even more in the end

[oraclesmith]

There must be a good market for gambling site code or simple templated sites where you can change the algorithms used ? As far as I know, the on-line sites are pretty much unregulated so you can cheat as much as you like. Not that I would...