Like to spread bet? Can you beat these?

I came across this article the other day which looked at some of the greatest and biggest spread bets in history. Some are funny, but for those going £1 a point there is some food for thought here.  Big bets win, but they can get you in the poor house as well, but here are some winners.  Some more by luck than judgement it would seem.

Here's a selection;

Facebook

Then there’s the one about the whale who shorted Facebook when it made its underwhelming New York debut in May. The big-hitter bet the stock would fall on May 21. The shares slumped $4, meaning that as our man had piled in for more than $8000 a point, he walked off with a profit of almost $3 million.

The bet was so huge, said one insider, that when the spread betting firm went to lay off the massive exposure, its broker insisted that the bet had to be closed that day. It duly was. In that one session, our anonymous big-hitter made returns of more than $400,000 an hour. Not bad for a day’s work.

Like Forex?

Euro/Dollar

Betting against the euro seems like the type of thing everybody has been up to, but few have been as successful as the big boys wagering with IG Index. The favoured bet among these punters has been in the euro/dollar markets, where the euro has fallen dramatically from $1.45 to $1.25 in the past 12 months (a 2000-point move as these markets are traded to two further decimal places). IG reports that some whales have been selling at $25,000 a point, so that’s a profit of around $50 million.

Get lucky?

Google

Sometimes you just get plain lucky.Google floated in 2004 at $85 a share and, after the shares initially surged, a rookie spread better placed an order to buy at $99 at £1 a point with Capital Spreads — only she seems to have forgotten about it almost immediately and did not log into her account again for almost a year.

When she did, she saw she had made a £20,000 profit, but assumed it to be an error and alerted customer services.  It wasn’t. The price then stood at $300, meaning it had moved up by about 20,000 cents at a £1 a point). The lucky punter quickly decided that spread betting was not for her and immediately cashed out.

http://www.standard.co.uk/business/markets/spread-bet-special-the-greatest-spread-bets-in-history-8159263.html