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I’m going to thrill you with my failed prowess in the world of spread trading…

So what if I couldn’t even count the number of tourists in the horse ‘n’ trap ride by the Mersey on this most breezy of Sundays. In the world of spread betting, you leave the counting to the computer. The real money is made in the interpretation.

That’s my theory.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am beginning an education. The education that should be taught in schools. The theory of money. How it is made, and how it is lost. With personal experience (one hopes) more in the former camp. Although from here, anything may and probably will, happen.

I’ve been considering a potter in stocks and shares for a while. Leaving a nice, comfortable job in October last year to discover India and myself, I also left behind the benefits commensurate with serving a large-scale employer – bonus, healthcare, pension contributions, etc.

You don’t generally get this stuff when you’re working for yourself. So after about a year of helping others, contributing thousands of hours to altruistic projects and generally being the invisible good guy, I’ve decided to ‘do a Brown’. As in eschew real life to bury myself wholly in the world of finance and ultimately become quite good at it. Or if not, at least pretend I am to all intents and purposes. However this time, I’m going to turn down the job of PM.

Jean Jones of JJ Wealth piqued my interest in spread trading (or when my mum isn’t reading, spread betting because that’s precisely what it is; trading has some semblance of order about it, which this money making strategy certainly does not) when she delivered a quite impressive 60 minutes on the topic at the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce.

But in actual fact it was simply a case of a well-timed reminder. A happy accident. Since discovering my broadband prospects here in the city (the European City of Culture 2008, natch) were not in sync with the demands I would need sated for my Conversaction business known as Word And Mouth, I needed another outlet for my creative and commercial gearing.

So where am I at right now? I’ve been reading Bets and the City by Sally Nicoll. Totally on-the-button, candid introduction to spread betting. And pretty nicely written too (although the other half scotches me for my praise since she has discovered a typo on page 176).

I was disappointed after reading the Nicoll book to see that a. she has discontinued her blog on Finspreads’ site, and b. Finspreads no longer let the idiot savant beginner lose just 1p a point on their foolish trades. Inflation here is even worse than in the real world; at 1000% the 10p/point incentive is insufficient to drag me into its lair of longs and shorts.

On my to-read list of quite bulky tomes I have:

• Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das
• A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber
• Buffett Step by Step: An Investor’s Workbook – Learn to Analyze and Apply the Techniques of the Master Investor by Richard Simmons
• The 10-week Flexible Investment Plan: A Beginner’s Guide to Stock Market Success by Alexander Davidson
• 24 Essential Lessons for Investment Success by William J O’Neil
• The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Played the Free Market Game by Philip Augar
• The Armchair Investor: A Do-it-yourself Guide for Amateur Investors by Bernice Cohen
• The Financial Spread Betting Handbook: A Guide to Making Money Trading Spread Bets by Malcolm Pryor
• Discover the Upside of Down: Investment Strategies for Volatile Times by Ron Coby (started this and it’s incredible; doom-laden ode to America’s crippled economy and why we should all sell our houses before their values plummet lower than a dwarf with vertigo)

and for fun I’m reading Cityboy by Geraint Anderson, an enjoyable romp through the delirious lives of the City’s most odious characters.

My list of RSS feeds is compact but psyched. At my fingertips and updated often on the HTC Magic I have:

• Reuters
• Fool.com
• Bloomberg

To kick things off technofunctionomically I have:

• started a demo trading account with Barclays
• downloaded a demo of ShareScope Plus. Right now it looks like a bunch of graphs and text that may somehow be linked together. But at this foetal (or earlier; to be honest I haven’t even had sex with a share yet, it’s that early doors…) stage it just looks like The Matrix.

On a hunch and a wing and some prayers I’ve placed some trades/bets on the Barclays platform and all, save for a Japanese punt, have performed as miserably as Jack Dee at a funeral. I’ll regale more about specifics once I’ve done more research than my ‘stick my finger in the air and see if it falls off’ technique which isn’t subscribed to by your average proficient day trader.

I’ve not actually spunked any cash yet. Having said that I had a feeling in my water that Liverpool would avoid their biggest losing streak for 56 years by beating Man U 2-0 today but I failed to capitalise despite passing William Hill at precisely the right moment. That doesn’t bode well for my ‘sponaneity’, an asset necessary to capitalise on the volatile market conditions we have here today. But it also means I won’t find myself making any risky gambles until I’m properly conditioned to do so.

Stop losses and bear markets here we come. It’s exciting stuff. Watch me funk it all up!