TWO SPREAD BETTING ACCOUNTS?

A worrying development comes out of the US. Last month on a number of occasions (and always when the stockmarket was sharply lower) the online trading platforms of some of the larger online brokers such as TD Waterhouse and Schwab's completely broke (for a few hours) forcing anyone that wanted to trade to use the telephone with the standard waiting time of over 45 mins.

Basically if you wanted to deal you couldn't, and perhaps more significantly these 'breakages' occurred when the market was down considerably, notably the 28th Jan. Many of the more cynical market participants are saying that these failures are part of a bigger plan to disrupt and curtail selling pressure literally at the flick of a switch. Maybe that's taking things too far but theoretically it is now very easy (for the right people) to pull the plug on the whole damn stockmarket. It is not in the US government's best interests to have wave after wave of selling so what better way to stop it than make it impossible to sell.

So what's this got to do with spread betting? Simply this, while the internet and our brokers' software platforms are great we are at the mercy of technology, and technology does and will falter.

• The whole internet can go down
• Our personal internet connection can go down
• The internet of our spread betting firm can go down
• Our computers can break
• Our spread betting firm's computers can break, and so on, the list is endless

And not only this, but the time we encounter problems will always be the wrong time. Perhaps you're long the FTSE in a big way, major selling hits the market and you simply can't get out. This is why it's often a very good idea to have a backup spread betting account.

Opening Another Account is Free

Spread bet traders should therefore (especially if they're risking good money) look at opening a further account with another spread betting broker purely for backup purposes. In the old days opening an account was a hassle, but not anymore as you can do this online in a matter of minutes (See the list of spread bet brokers below).

I myself have just opened another account as a backup facility and I don't even need to fund it although I have deposited a small sum of money in reserve. Alternatively the Spread Bet brokers usually allow real-time deposits to be made via Delta/Switch/Connect etc.

Think about these points and realise that ultimately we're at the mercy of machines that are out of our control.