"Thank you for the ongoing excellent service. I would appreciate your view on appropriate vehicles for long term investment in India (via spread-betting)."

David Fuller's view Thanks for your generous comment.

The main reason to spread-bet, for those of us who are UK citizens, is because there is no tax on profits. However, this is a double-edged sword because losses cannot be offset against gains or income from other sources.

With stock markets, the most promising time to open spread bets, in my opinion, is when a recovery commences following a sharp decline. The gains can be quite good and often occur within the time duration of one or two spread-bet futures contracts. However, the bid-offer spreads are only narrow for highly liquid instruments, such as major indices or very actively traded commodities, including crude oil and gold.

In contrast, for less liquid markets the bid-offer spreads widen considerably. You can check this out by looking up the spread-bet futures contracts for instruments of interest to you and adding some of them to your 'Watch List' because the spreads can change with turnover or volatility.

I think you would find the spreads quite expensive for ETFs or other investment vehicles for India. This would certainly be true for individual shares.

From an overall long-term perspective, rather than a spread-bet, I do think the Indian stock market remains an interesting long-term investment play, best purchased following one of the periodic sharper setbacks.