Independent Investor

There are a number of ways of speculating or hedging on house price movements.    Spread betting is the most popular way, although there the futures can also be used, but this tends to be used by professionals.
There are a number of advantages of spread betting on the housing market; the first is that there is already a liquid market as there are a number of other people betting on the market.  This means that there are no delays or difficulties in market timing.  However there …

Buying or not buying a house can be one of the biggest financial decisions that someone could ever make, and it’s probably the first big non-career decision that most people do make (unless they are putting off starting a pension).  Either you can stay out of the market, and risk watching house prices going up and pricing you out, or you could jump in and find that you own an asset with a declining value, a loan worth more than the house and a …

Spread bets, futures and contracts for difference can cover a number of different areas, one of the most interesting of these is for house prices.
There are two reasons (we can think of) as to why you would do this.  The first is to hedge against a bigger position that has been taken, the other is that you have a strong opinion that you think is simply ignored by market sentiment.
In this post we will look at the speculative position.  Many people are already taking …