Spread Betting Section

The Times Tips IFX (Finspreads)

June 2005

Last week The Times newspaper was tipping IFX the parent company of financial spread betting firm Finspreads. It stated that the company has been a disappointment over the last year mainly because it lost a fair amount of capital to clients who bet on a falling US dollar.

However IFX has tightened up its internal risk management which presumably means it's not going to take aggressive opposite positions to clients. Trading performance has improved slightly and the company is soon to launch binary bets which at present IG index has a virtual monopoly. The company is also seriously looking at marketing to China and other foreign countries.

As The Times says it's a real gamblers stock so have a flutter.

InvestorProfit's View

In our view there's still too much competition in this sector, it needs a good shakeout. Finspreads offers a good service, we use them for spread betting ourselves but we'd prefer to buy the stock on any weakness in the general sector over the next year or two as our spies at IG Index report that this is almost a certainty.

Also, we're not sure about the move into Binary Betting. Yes, long term Binaries are likely to add significantly to the bottom line but they require serious computing power alongside major money invested in the software to run the systems. We're not saying that IFX can't do it rather there are likely to be problems running binaries in the first year.

See Also

• Finspreads website
• IG Index website
• Capital Spreads website
• City Index website
• LearnMoney - Guide to Spread Betting