Spread Betting Solutions

Financial Spread Trading CHARLES M. OBER'S stock research routinely takes him to places like Libya, Nigeria and Venezuela - countries whose politics have often been as volatile as the price of the oil they pump out of the ground.

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Nfl Betting Spread Mr. Ober manages the T. Rowe Price New Era fund, a natural-resources mutual fund whose range of investments includes shares of companies that operate in some of the world's least stable regions. His fund is known for steadiness in this jumpy sector. But that element of political risk, which is shared to one degree or another by most natural-resources funds, can make the gyrations of technology funds seem tame by comparison.

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Commodity Spread Trading Even so, the sector has been popular lately with investors. According to Lipper, the fund tracking company, a net $14 billion entered natural-resources funds in the two years ended in August. In contrast, the funds had a net outflow of $440 million during the previous two years.

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Betting Exchange Spread Natural resources funds invest in everything from gold miners to timber companies. But oil-related stocks, ranging from drillers like the Apache Corporation to services providers like Halliburton, tend to predominate. Interest in the sector stems from its recent double-digit returns as well as worldwide developments - including the Iraq war, China's torrid growth and Hurricane Katrina - that have pushed oil prices higher and higher.

This is where spread betting can be so profitable. For every punter backing him to win, letting the bet run and losing every single time, there are spread punters out there who know that one in every three times they back O'Hern on finishing positions they will bank an average of nearly 20 times their stake, and only lose that amount one in five. You don't need to be a mathematician to see why O'Hern is a popular choice for those who spread bet.

Advanced Commodity Spread After lagging behind the broader market during much of the 1990's, natural-resources funds, on average, posted returns of more than 28 percent in the 12 months through September, according to Morningstar. An investor who bought into, say, the Guinness Atkinson Global Energy fund when it began in June 2004 would have had a return of more than 110 percent through September.
With the possible exception of long-term investors who buy shares of a natural-resources fund to diversify a broader portfolio, people who enter the funds now may be setting themselves up for disappointment, some mutual fund experts say.

You can bet as little as 1p per point on many markets, meaning BetHiLo is the perfect site to hone your spread betting skills before venturing out and making larger bets. The bet placement process is slightly different, too. With Sporting Index you simply say whether you want to 'Buy' or 'Sell' a given spread, but with BetHiLo, they use more straightforward terminology, using 'Higher' or 'Lower', understand stake selection screen. When you enter your stake per point, the site tells you how much your maximum win and (probably more importantly for spread betting beginners) your maximum loss would be if you bet at that stake. It means you can adjust your stake until you find a liability you are happy with before you bet ( odds betting, where you know what you're risking when you place your bet).

Online Spread Betting "It's a perilous time to be starting in this category," said Sonya G. Morris, a fund analyst at Morningstar in Chicago. "Retail investors have a bad track record of joining the party late and buying a fund because of yesterday's hot performance. That isn't a good-enough reason to buy. A fund has to have a role within your portfolio."

Stock Spread Trading These funds are generally more volatile than the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, according to Morningstar, but Mr. Ober's fund has been an exception. He says he has reduced the fund's ups and downs by allocating fewer dollars to oil-related stocks than many of his peers, instead favoring such companies as Newmont Mining, a gold producer, and even Nucor, a steel maker. Yet, as a result, his fund can lag behind when oil prices rise.

Betting Horse Racing Spread In the 12 months through September, New Era has risen 36.4 percent, which puts it below the 50.8 percent average total return for natural-resources funds tracked by Morningstar. Oil prices, which have more than doubled over the last two years, spiked after Hurricane Katrina battered the drilling platforms and refineries clustered along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, the price of gold - its producers are another natural-resources fund staple - has also been climbing. It hit a 17-year high in late September.

Complete Guide Spread Trading Oil prices can fall just as fast as they rise, of course, and when they drop, they tend to drag natural-resources funds with them, said Andrew Clark, a Lipper senior analyst. "It's not unusual for oil to lose 15 or 20 percent of value in a month. Natural-resources funds don't tend to fall quite as much, but you could see a 10 or 15 percent drop. You have to ask yourself if you're comfortable with that level of risk."

Sport Spread Betting Amid the gush of investor interest and rising prices, the Vanguard Group posted a warning in August on its Web site, cautioning against investments in the energy sector.

Low Spread Forex Trading (Even so, Vanguard has not closed its energy fund, Vanguard Energy. In fact, it reopened the fund in the summer after closing it to new customers last December.)
Vanguard said that people with diversified portfolios probably already have a big-enough investment in the energy industry. Ms. Morris of Morningstar agreed.

Trading Spread And Seasonals "Most people have a large-capitalization fund as their anchor investment," she said. "Most of those look similar to the S.& P. 500, which has about 9 percent allocated to energy stocks right now. That seems like a healthy, appropriate allocation."

Betting Guide Insider Sports At the same time, recent academic research suggests that investments in commodities, as opposed to commodity-producing companies, may damp the ups and downs of a broader portfolio. That would seem to contradict conventional wisdom. After all, commodities have a reputation as the sort of investment favored by people with a taste for bungee jumping and airplane acrobatics.

Arbitrage Spread Trading "Nobody had ever really studied the commodities market thoroughly, so it had remnants of its reputation from the old days of market manipulation and volatile prices," said Gary B. Gorton, a finance professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Betting Spread Successful The reputation appears undeserved, Professor Gorton said. For a paper to be published in the Financial Analysts Journal, he and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, a finance professor at Yale, compiled a 45-year database of commodities returns and compared them with those of the S.& P. 500 index.

College Football Betting They put together a diversified index of commodities and found that it provided a return and volatility comparable to that of the S.& P. 500. And they found that commodity returns were not correlated to stock or bond returns. In other words, when stocks and bonds slumped, commodities did not.

Betting Point Spread On Nfl The professors also found that commodities provided better diversification than shares in commodity producers like oil and mining companies. An index of commodity producers tracked the S.& P. 500 more closely than it did the professors' commodities index. Several companies, including Pimco in Newport Beach, Calif., and OppenheimerFunds in New York, offer mutual funds that invest in commodities. Both the Pimco and Oppenheimer versions use commodities indexes as benchmarks: the Pimco Commodity Real Return Strategy fund uses the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity index, while Oppenheimer Real Asset uses the Goldman Sachs Commodity index.

Betting Point Spread Ms. Morris, the Morningstar analyst, recently made the Pimco fund her only recommendation in a report on natural-resources funds.

Super Bowl Betting Spread The Pimco portfolio resembles that of a bond fund, with most of the money invested in Treasury inflation-protected securities, known as TIPS. The bonds serve as collateral for the fund's investments in a form of derivative security called a commodity swap. Pimco uses the swaps to replicate the performance of the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity index, said Robert J. Greer, a Pimco product manager. "Commodities swaps are more efficient than trying to trade individual futures," he said.

Betting Fan Football Guide Pimco's fund is "very uncorrelated to the broader stock market," Ms. Morris added. "So it makes a lot of sense as a diversifier."

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