Betting the farm

... or not! In the current issue of Esquire (British edition), there's an article about financial spread betting which enables holders of UK real estate to hedge the value of their assets (and do many other, less adviseable things, really) by betting against, i.e. selling short the appropriate amount of their regional house index. Fascinating - why isn't that available in Switzerland?! Well, it's certainly worth looking into if I ever got that country manor in the Shires ... but then again, some due diligence of the counter party would be in order first.

P.S. On second thought, though there is probably a cheaper way to achieve the same effect in the financial market directly since that spread betting bookmaker doesn't take any risk of its own, so it has to hedge it somewhere.