Unusual home working jobs – spread betting

I’ve heard about people who work from home trading on the stock market with spread betting, but have never met one before! So I was pleased when Chris Chillingworth got in touch to tell me about his recent move to home working.

Hi Chris, tell us how you got started.
I was searching for a way I could work from home and spend more time with my family. At the time I was working 12 hour days managing an insurance company and I didn’t enjoy it.

One day I was chatting to a friend of mine and he suggested looking at something called financial spread betting, a way of trading the financial markets without needing to own the stock outright.

Never having heard of it I did a bit of research and realised it was something I could do. So I dived in, and very excitedly opened an online trading account and started making trades. I was particularly lucky to make £500 in my first week of trading. It’s not been like that every week since, but as you can imagine, it got me hooked from the start.
 
What was the point at which you decided you could leave your job?
Not long after I began trading around 2010 I started up a little blog called Spreadbet Beginner. It was initially just a free WordPress site and I would show all the trades I was making. I would also write articles about trading with hints and tips.

It became very popular and started to get a lot of traffic. Eventually in 2013 I monetised it by making it a membership website and I was surprised to see people were prepared to pay for the information.

The next year I created a 5 hour online course about how to get started with spread betting, and I sold 100 courses in the first week netting about £5500. I’d never made that sort of money before in a week, not even trading.

A few weeks later I decided there was a future in the website and I decided to quit my 7am till 7pm management job and take the plunge. It was terrifying and exciting at the same time. I’m only 7 months in but I haven’t looked back.

What do you like and dislike about working from home?
I enjoy being around my family more. I have daughters of 3 and 2, and my son is autistic so needs a bit of help in the mornings getting ready and being at home allows me to do that.

I also love being able to work from my garden in the summer. That’s a real perk. The truth is I could work and trade from anywhere with an internet connection. Even in another country.

The downside is it can be a little “too” quiet sometimes. I do have times when it’d be nice to have someone else to chat to during work. However, I find I’m quite productive on my own and I’d be less so with other people around.
  
What is your daily routine? How much time do you spend trading, and how much on your blog?
 It’s generally up at 5:30am (because my son says so) and I’ll spend the first 3 hours of my day battling with the kids in a sort of zombified state. After the kids have gone to school/nursery at 08:00 it’s time for a coffee and to sit down at the desk and start going through my to-do list.

I’ll initially run a scan for any stocks that meet my trading criteria. I run 2 systems. One which only requires attention once every morning, and one that needs attention throughout the day. I have 3 screens so I can watch my positions and scans and still work on the blog on the other.

I’ll usually put a few hours a day into my blog, writing content, answering emails and chatting in the forum we have. I also record a lot of video content of my live trading so the two jobs merge at that point.
 
What kind of person can make a success of spread betting?
I truly believe that most people with the right training could replicate what I’ve done as I have no financial background, and I know very little about stocks and shares. You don’t need to know about any of those things to make money trading, but you do need other skills and recently I’ve learnt that not everyone naturally has them.

The main skill you need is to be able to control your emotions and be disciplined. When you trade you need to accept and understand from the very start that you are going to make trades which will lose you money. Not everyone can be 100% right all the time.

You need to be able to close losing trades fast and let your winners run on to big profits. Then you’ll be on a good path towards being profitable. If you can develop that skill then anyone can make money spread betting.

Apparently there are now 14x more female trading account holders than in 2001. The top professions for those holding accounts were nurses, teachers, stay at home mums/dads, accountants and administrators. Their top trader was a 51 year old lady from Maidenhead who had made a whopping £1,233,580 in profits. I’ll say right now that I’m not in her league!

But it just shows that anyone with the right mindset can make money from the stock market regardless of your background or what you currently do for a living. Be prepared to put in a bit of time learning the best spread betting practices on how to stay profitable and you’ll do well.

Find out more about Chris, his blog, and the help he provides with spread betting at Spreadbet Beginner.