To ask whether mobile apps for spread betting and contracts for difference trading are a bad thing for day traders may border on heresy. After all when you look at the adverts for anything to do with spread betting then the chances are that it will feature an app of some kind, just as five years ago they were proudly boasting about their new interactive web sites. Many of us also hear the stories that “I saw that this share was low on my blackberry and I swooped in with a long position, sold ten minutes later. £500’s not bad for a few minutes work.”

There are some problems with this. Firstly it can mean that the temptation to make an impulsive buy in a sector that you don’t know about is far greater. If you don’t have a feel for the rules of a certain market it may be that the share is going lower on some genuinely bad news and is over-reacting. It is a bit harder to tell from a mobile phone screen than it is with a computer where there is some news service on the split screen. The chances are that the person who’s boasting about making the £500 is not boasting about losing the £1,000 loss that he made the day before.

As long as people are aware of their limits then the mobile phone apps are a good thing for spread betters and CFD traders. However a trader needs to be aware of the limits and needs to restrict themselves to the markets that they know far more than they would from their computer and to ensure that there is some easy and quick access to information. The stop losses should also be set and this should be set automatically into the app by the user (as the settings are not guaranteed to be carried over from the normal account).

As long as the limits are set and the rules are known, it is possible to trade from the beach, or the supermarket.

About the author

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.