Ok, here's my ha'penny-worth regarding derivatives:
If you are seriously sure of your technicals and you are absolutely sure that a certain stock IS going to move in your direction over the next day/two days/five days, then warrants are fine. Warrants are a complicated enough instrument and ya haff ta make PRETTY sure that you KNOW what your time decay and gearing is and ESPECIALLY how these change against you as you lose your money.
You do not have the luxury, with warrants, that you can ride out an extended side-ways movement as you would be able to do with a similarly geared SSF for example. Time decay is an evil thing which eats you up while you think you're still ok. Add to this the expiry date and you have a lurking monster that spits you out in little pieces. For this reason I think warrants are an EXTREMELY risky instrument. Time decay is there in EVERY trade, whether you like it or not. Juxtapose this with SSF's which give you the SAME gearing as warrants most of the time, but without all the high-risk complexities.
I remember doing a comparison a while ago on this very forum between a reasonable warrant and a bog-standard SSF on Harmony. Same gearing both. Over a period of a month the SSF made a 100% profit while the warrant made a 35% LOSS purely because of time decay.
I believe strongly that SSF's are a clean, professional way of trading while warrants are contructed as they are to merely make money for the issuer.
Yes, there IS a very very remote chance that an SSF might wipe you out *if you trade stupidly*. But there's a MUCH greater risk that warrants will wipe you out if you trade even less stupidly.