BigDeal

It is the market which influences the price offered by the SB companies, not the other way round. The thing to remember is that SBs are bookmakers - they will reference the underlying prices, but will set their prices as they wish. Actually they don't move very far from the underlying most of the time but there are times when they do - if they anticipate a strong move in either direction their quote will be ahead of the market. If any of you have accounts with different brokers you will sometimes see a difference in price because they use slightly different algorithms (which you could theoretically arb if you had the speed of execution - although this is almost impossible). Your bet with the SB has no influence on the underlying. You would almost certainly be prevented from placing a very large bet anyway.

Actually, respectable SB brokers want to keep their clients. Brokers provide a service which costs, of course, and they will make money out of both A and B book clients. As lose most of their trades and either need to improve their trading in which case they could possibly become Bs or they will simply run out of funds. Bs are still profitable because the broker will hedge every trade (but at a better price than given to the trader) and therefore still make a profit - so this is where they want to see high frequency trading, or larger positions. But they have not 'banked' any profits (on the spreads at least) until a position is closed of course.

OK so I don't know if I can anything of value here, but it's an interesting thread and I'd like to be involved somewhat. I day trade full time and am comfortable with my returns. My simple view is that spreadbetting is for short term trading only; it is too expensive to hold overnight positions for very long. You do need a develop a strategy (which works of course!) and you must stick to it through thick and thin. I have traded for many, many years in various forms and has SB accounts since 2003 during which I have had varying degrees of success. However for the last few years I have settled on what I consider a pretty simple approach which I have stuck to - and it works for me at least. Basically I no longer trade individual stocks, FX or commodities anymore (of course I've tried them all). I only trade indices, and every trade is hedged with another index. I only trade FTSE, DAX, CAC, DJIA ('Wall Street'), NASDAQ ('US Tech 100'). The UK and European indices are only traded against one another, and the US indices are only traded against one another. So if I want to trade FTSE long I will only do that with a short on DAX or CAC and vice versa. Similarly DJ is only ever traded with a hedge against NAS. The trades are effectively identical in size in opposite directions so for example right now FTSE is trading at 7356/57 whilst DAX at 12452/53. Therefore if I place a trade right now I would trade the ratio 1.7:1 respectively if that makes sense. Yes, the approach will limit returns, of course, because I will invariably take a loss on one and a gain on the other, but I rarely see a big loss and I do have other strategies for dealing with the issue before the end of the session if the overall position is showing a loss. The thing which will make people laugh is that my exit strategy is not very robust - in fact it does not exist - if when I come back to the screen the trades are in profit I will either close the loser and add a trailing stop to the winner or close both trades. If not I either wait or possibly place other trades if I am still confident that my original view still applies. I like this approach because I don't have to do much research, and anytime of the day is practical to trade this strategy. Now I'm not posting this because you should do the same, but it may give you food for thought? The issue (as with all SB I guess) is that if you don't have professional trading status then your margin requirements are big and restrictive if you don't have much capital.