iJinks to be had for punters on holiday

Jon Sutcliffe, a 43-year-old manager of an Audi dealership in Cheshire, is skiing in the Austrian resort of Saalbach over the Easter holidays. As a ski lift takes him to his next run, Sutcliffe reaches into his bumbag for his iPhone and buys a contract for difference (CFD) on BT Group shares.

That trade has now netted a swift 8% return but was barely conceivable before mobile phones evolved into smart phones.

These fast-developing gizmos, particularly the iPhone, have transformed the previously conservative world of financial spread betting. In October, City Index became the first spread-betting group to launch an iPhone application which meant that its clients now have a pocket-sized device which is almost as easy to trade from as a desktop computer.

Punters such as Sutcliffe have lapped it up. "I have also bought dollars in a bar in Times Square, bought RBS and Barclays shares while away in Barcelona and used the app in Marbella," he says. "I tend to use it for CFDs. The fact that City Index launched the iPhone app was the major reason I switched my account from my stockbroker."

He is not the only one to be seduced by the new technology. City Index reckons that around 12% of all its trades are now placed through a mobile device — up from about 3% before the iPhone app was launched — and 19% of all active clients trade through a mobile device. Of these mobile trades, 86% are placed via the iPhone (as opposed to a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile).

Josh Raymond, market strategist at City Index, said: "Spread betters traditionally seek out volatility to create trading opportunities, and with this comes quick price changes. It is crucial that a spread better is able to react quickly, by both monitoring live prices and trading whenever they see an opportunity, on the go." Inevitably, rivals are following. In January, spread betting group GFT launched its own iPhone application and the results have proved similar.

Tim Gort, a company spokesman, said: "All of our mobile applications, including our iPhone app, simply give our customers more freedom to trade. With our basic mobile application, many traders are using it to check the markets and check on their existing trades. With some of our more advanced Dealbook mobile apps, such as for Blackberry or iPhone, we find a significant increase in the number of customers using it for trading."

Even those spread-betting groups who were previously sceptical are now starting to change their minds. Market leader, IG Index, plans to join the party and launch an iPhone application this summer — having previously just offered its iPhone customers the chance to trade via the phone's web browser, while also supplying other applications for different phones. Tony Cross, a spokesman for IG Index said: "We have 100,000 trades a month on mobile platforms.

Because people can do it, they are doing it, as the hardware is evolving and it is proliferating," which was not exactly how the company saw it last November. Back then, David Jones, IG's chief market strategist said: "The majority will use [mobile trading platforms] more as a way of keeping abreast of their current positions as opposed to opening and closing positions."

But as traders like to say: "The trend is your friend." That trend looks increasingly like more growth in mobile trading — and more punts at great altitude while donning the salopettes in Saalbach.