Recent content by ausairman

I guess it doesn't really help to generalise about which instrument does what, when in practice even long positions on the stock market can be extremely risky. When talking about the risks of one instrument or another, you really need to look at the way people use them, and why. Therein lies my...

Futures contracts can be bought and sold long, without exposure of more than principal, just like options. I'm not saying that all CFD trades are riskier than all options trades, or that CFDs are inherently more risky than some other instrument. Both can be very safe and very risky, depending...

Stock investing is not zero sum insofar as companies (and in turn their owners) have the capacity to produce a net global benefit to the global economy. That is to say, the sum of all stakeholders in the economy can be better off after the company exists, than before. Whether the benefits of...

We're on the same page. Not really sure why you're disagreeing with me. Yep. But remember, the net payoff for all derivatives is around 0, so it doesn't really make sense to use that as a guide.

I don't think so.

The mean net trader benefit of all options sells on the market is -2T%, where T is the average brokerage incurred for each options transaction. A good options trader in the right market could probably achieve several hundred-fold increase on initial investment (in the order of 10,000%) in a...

Investing in the stock market is not necessarily zero sum. In fact, by a graham definition, investing is by its very definition not a zero sum game. Futures carry much of the same risks as CFDs and I wouldn't encourage their speculative use any more than CFDs, the same goes with stock...

If you don't mind me asking, what makes you think you can make money trading CFDs? I know that sounds facetious, but I'm being very serious. CFDs are theoretically zero sum game, and in practice a negative-sum game. In the theoretical limit of equal knowledge among everyone participating in...