A popular trading platform has enjoyed a £30 million windfall by betting against its own customers in the first half of the year.

Interim results from Plus500 show that it made $39.7 million from trades by clients that lost money in the six months to the end of June. This helped to boost its revenues by 8 per cent year-on-year to $398.2 million, with pre-tax profits rising by 5 per cent to $183.7 million.

The Israel-based Plus500 is a leading seller of contracts-for-difference, which are complex derivatives used by amateur and professional traders to place wagers on movements in financial markets. These instruments are high-risk, with 80 per cent of Plus500’s retail investors losing money using the derivatives.

Plus500 acts as principal on its customers’ trades, meaning that it suffers losses when clients’ bets pay off but enjoys gains when markets move against its punters. The company says that it expects the impact of its customers’ trading performance on its financial results to be “broadly neutral over time”, although it enjoyed a $74.2 million boost from unlucky clients over the course of last year and a $193 million gain in 2022.

Almost 176,000 people used Plus500’s platform at least once during the first half of 2024, trading everything from equities and currencies to commodities and indices. Contracts-for-difference allow customers to use leverage to multiply the size of their bets. While this increases the potential profits they stand to make from successful trades, it also magnifies possible losses if things go awry. Regulators worldwide have clamped down on sales of derivatives in recent years amid worries that punters using the instruments do not understand the risks they are taking.

Plus500 made an average of $2,264 in revenue per user of its platform during the first half of 2024, up from $2,097 a year earlier. The group makes most of its money from the spread that customers pay between bid and ask prices.

Its business is highly cash-generative and the group is now sitting on $1 billion of cash. It has a track record of returning surplus cash to investors and it said that it would hand back a further $185.5 million after its half-year results, of which $110 million will be delivered through a share buyback and the remainder via a dividend.

This, it said, took the amount returned by Plus500 to its shareholders since its stock market flotation in 2013 to $2.3 billion, compared with cumulative net profits of $2.7 billion and the more than $3.4 billion in cash it had generated from its operations. “No company listed in London has provided higher distributions over the last decade,” Jefferies, the broker, said.

In a further fillip to shareholders, the trading business also said that it was on course to beat revenue and profit expectations for the year.

Platforms that sell derivatives tend to thrive when financial markets are febrile. This is because punters are often tempted to trade during time of volatility, when they hope to make quick profits from sudden movements in asset prices. The presidential election in the United States this year is likely to be a boon for companies such as Plus500 as traders seek to profit from the run-up to the vote and its aftermath.

Shares in Plus500, a FTSE 250 company, were up by 100p, or 4.1 per cent, at £25.32 at the close.