An Irish spread betting firm plans to raise close to €9 million by floating on the London Stock Exchange in a move that will value it at €27 million.

Dublin-based Worldspreads will announce today that it intends seeking a listing on London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM).

The company hopes to raise £5.77 million (€8.6 million) from the flotation. Its shares will be priced at 47p, valuing it at £18.3 million, or almost €27.4 million. Worldspreads intends using the cash raised to fund its domestic and international growth plans.

Its directors believe that a listing will boost its profile as well as helping it to attract, keep and incentivise key managers and workers.

In the 12 months ending March 31st, 2007 (the company's financial year), Worldspreads made a €530,000 profit on revenues of €6.58 million. At that point, active customers had grown to 1,400 a month from 500 in the first quarter of its 2005 financial year.

In the final three months of its last financial year, the number of bets placed with the company stood at 55,000 a month, compared to 13,000 nine months earlier.

It has clients in Ireland, Britain, Hungary, Spain and South Africa. In the UK, it executed 1,952 bets a day last March, compared to 91 during the same month last year.

Worldspreads offers spread betting on financial markets and sports, although the former generates the bulk of its business. Chief executive Conor Foley and chief operations officer Brian O'Neill founded the business in 2000. Its chairman is Lindsay McNeile, a co-founder of Sporting Index, one of the longest established sports spread betting firms.

Spread betting allows players to bet on the movement of stock market indices, share prices, commodity values, currencies, asset values, sports results and a range of other markets. For example, the spread betting firm can offer a spread of 12,750 to 12,755 on the Dow Jones industrial average index on a given day.

If you believe the index will go up, you can buy the spread, that is bet on it, at the higher number. If you believe it will go down, you can sell it at the lower figure.

If you buy at €10 at 12,755, and it closes at 12,765, your profit is €100, or €10 for every point that it increases. Conversely, if it closes at 12,745, your loss is €100, or €10 for every point that it falls.

The advantage of spread betting is that it allows you to take a position on a financial product without buying the underlying asset. However, as it is regarded as a leveraged product, it is also classed as high risk.