Time to be taking your profits on the “Labour surge”?
Is it Brown that’s now looking a bit vulnerable?
One of the great attractions of spread-betting is that you can close positions down and pocket any profits months or even years before the event has been resolved.
Another attraction if you are really serious is that you can operate on a credit basis which means you don’t have to put up any money when you make your bet.
So in the early hours of Sunday morning after seeing the mounting evidence from the polls I placed my first bets for months on the Labour – Conservative clash. My sense was that sentiment had changed and my intention as I wrote at the time was to make trading profits.
I bought Labour at 215 seats and sold the Tories at 350. The markets have moved quite sharply since then and the latest spreads are above.
I was planning to stay in there because like many others I guessed that Cameron would have a grisly PMQs today thus reinforcing further the hung parliament narrative.
Well he didn’t and Brown looked super-vulnerable on the defence budgets and his sudden conversion after all these years to electoral reform.
When I closed the bets down the Labour buy price and the Tory sell price had shifted by 17 seats. You have got to cover the spread so in each case I’ve been able to make a profit of twelve times my stake level which I can transfer immediately to my bank. Nice money given that it was all done on credit and I didn’t have to lay out a penny.
Maybe the price will move more towards Labour and against the Tories and I could have made more. Who knows? But I’m a cautious gambler and love taking profits.