The Financial Spread Betting Handbook: A Guide to Making Money Trading Spread Bets

If you're looking to branch out beyond the traditional forms of betting available at casinos and sportsbooks, financial markets are an excellent place to start. While financial spread betting is ordinarily complicated and intimidating, the second edition of Malcolm Pryor's Financial Spread Betting Handbook can have anyone trading with complete confidence. Using mountain climbing as a metaphor, the esteemed technical analyst will guide you through every key aspect of the discipline. You'll learn everything from deciding what to bet on and choosing the right software, to psychology and risk management. This updated title ought to be required reading for just about anyone who wants to succeed at spread betting.

As with any second edition of a book, The Financial Spread Betting Handbook had a lot to live up to, as its predecessor experienced considerable success. After all, if The Financial Spread Betting Handbook: A Guide to Making Money Trading Spread Bets hadn’t been popular then there wouldn’t have been a need for a second edition.

So could Malcolm Pryor ensure that The Financial Spread Betting Handbook lived up to high standards set by his first attempt?

To begin with, Pryor’s stuck with the mountain climbing metaphor that guides the reader from a financial spread betting novice up to the summit of spread betting. This is certainly a good start, as it allows financial spread bettors of all levels to find advice relevant to them and improve their chances.

For the complete novices, there’s the Base Camp where everything from choosing your type of betting to selecting your computer software is covered. As the book progresses, so does the complexity of the information that’s handed out. This is where the book’s main strength lays – its versatility. As previously mentioned, it can be read from cover to cover by beginners, but can also be picked up half way through by bettors with a decent knowledge of the basics or even just referred to when needed by financial spread betting pros.

This opinion goes against a small number of the customer reviews we’ve seen claiming this is a handbook for beginners only. But we defy anyone to explain the Average Directional Movement in a simpler way and imagine that few people are able to remember all of the ins and outs of arbitrage, pairs trading and hedging. These are just two examples that highlight the use that Pryor's title can provide to bettors of all levels.

Another major strength of this book is the level of attention to detail that is applied to all aspects of financial spread betting. Things that many wouldn’t even think about: backing up your data, which computer to use, having a positive attitude, all of which are covered to make this an extremely useful guide. In a world where the smallest details can have a huge impact, it’s reassuring to know that all the factors have been taken in to account.

We particularly liked the chapter on common and really expensive spread betting errors which pointed out a few things that we hadn’t considered. Although the points made may only serve as reminders for the more experienced financial spread bettors, as explained by Pryor, they are points well worth double checking.

With these tips and many more, it’s hard to overemphasise how useful this book could be to a financial spread bettor. While this is simply an update rather than an overhaul of the first edition, The Financial Betting Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Making Money Trading Spread Bets still provides readers with all of the tools needed to tackle the world of financial spread betting.