Spread Betting in the 1980s Continued Growth Though the answer to increasing the demand in spread betting seems obvious now, it must not have been back in the 1980s. Thanks to another financial boom, fuelled by the FTSE, the market for spread betting did continue to grow; but there was still a large market of private investors that were not being reached. The major problem was a lack of innovation. The spread betting companies were only making spreads on major indices, commodities, currencies and options. The small-investing public found these financial instruments very confusing and were not willing to speculate on the direction they were heading. The public was used to investing in stocks and bonds that is what they knew and what they were comfortable with. However, the spread betting companies were not making spreads for these. There was still one underlying problem that was holding the public away from spread betting. This was a lack of technology, for both the investors and the spread betting companies. Spread betting is a very fast game, spreads are constantly being created and adjusted and for the system to work, the spreading information that the spread betting companies are creating must be immediately available to the trader. Also, once the trader sees a spread, they must be able to immediately place a bet on that spread, or else it might change. Back then, a real-time portal was needed to display spreads and make bets and such a thing was not yet available. Another problem was that for spread betting companies to offer spreads on stocks, they would need to make thousands of different spreads a day, this would also require much greater technology than was available during the 1980s. | 
