Financial Betting Articles

I can double your efficiency. I can cut your research time in half. I can make you rich. (OK, I lied about one of those.)

If you can bothered - and not many people can - you could filter out a sea of commentators by going to last Wednesday and Thursday and noting who revealed that they know nothing. Who opened their mouth or put pen to paper to take up your mental time and space to explain why the worst of the oil rises were over.

They got it wrong. So, so, so wrong that you should do yourself a favour.

Now, this isn't a problem for me because I don't believe the commentators anyway. But life is so much freer when we are not dumb enough to believe every rent-a-gob. It forces us to make our own decisions. And we might - as I regularly find - be tempted to conclude that we know nothing.

Where's oil going? Well, why wouldn't it go up? The president of OPEC said it would hit $200, a Goldman's research note said the same, others are jumping on the band wagon, demand is increasing... It's a perfect traders storm.

Then we have George Soros saying that it's like 1987 all over again and when this bubble bursts it's going to come off and then some. And let me stick MY neck out and agree. That this will push up, up, up then drop off the edge.

So I'm going to make millions, right? So, so, so wrong.

I'm not some French guy with billions of my bank's Euros to burn. Oil won't go up in a straight line - note last week's retracement - and that is an expensive position to get into. I really don't want to commit the money involved in a spread bet or CFD to go long of oil. If it can leap $10 in a day - 1,000 ticks - it can sure as hell come back $10 in a day. Do I do $1 per point to be on the safe side and miss out on the big move? Or do I get greedy, do $10, even $100 a point and get spanked on the way back, lose my nerve, cut my position and watch the market rocket to the moon? Not for me. Once bitten twice... Well, now I think about it, about a dozen times bitten actually...

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is the perfect market for sticking to fixed odds or binary betting. This is a time for limited risk. I agree, I agree - he would say that, wouldn't he. But there's a fund manager's metaphor that nails this market perfectly:

"If there was a train that you knew was going to crash in the next ten stops, how many stops would you stay on it for? Three? Six? Nine? Or would you just not get on the train in the first place...?"

Oil's what I'm trading this week. It's volatile, it's moving, it's interesting. But if I'm wrong I want to know straight away. So it's binary betting for me. And yes, I really would have said that anyway.

But if you're looking for greater wisdom, look no further than George W. Bush. "It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas." With sharp shooters like him in charge, how can we fail to resolve the oil problem?

Prove that you know more than George at ChoiceOdds.com

Oil is not the only market making big moves. The Dow traded in a 422 point range last Friday, the widest for over two months.

Overall last week the Dow traded in a healthy 307.3 point average daily range. May's average was 251.3 points.

Are more big movements to come? The Dow closed more than 100 points away from the previous close on four out of five days last week. It only managed this a total of seven times in May.

Over the last three months, if you had placed a bet every day for the Dow to fall you would have won 32 and lost 31.

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