Like me, you may occasionally find yourself in the embarrassing position of wanting to make a trade in your spread betting account at a time when you have little or no "available to trade" trading funds. Like me, you may prefer your spread betting account(s) to be self-sufficient and therefore you're reluctant to feed yet more new money into your account.

You may have noticed that very often you can free up additional trading funds by applying stop orders to existing trades that didn't already have them, or by ratcheting up (on long trades) or down (on short trades) your existing stop orders. Many spread betting companies free up more of your cash for trading when their computers see that you are taking less risk by employing stop orders.

In many cases you can go one better by guaranteeing your stop orders so that the spread betting companies know exactly how much risk you are taking. Read more...