It’s been a farily quiet day all round today. Mainly, I think, because the USA has a bank holiday and US markets are closed.

I spent some time over the weekend looking back through all my old trades. You may or may not know this but when the year started I was almost profitable. I seemed to be having some success, winning some trades losing others. I’m not really sure what happend since the start of the year. I started to buy more books on technical analysis etc, thinking that reading and learning more would help to make me more profitable. With hindsight I think it may have done the opposite. I think it has only served to confuse me and make me look for patterns which may or may not predict what is going to happen. The thing is there is no way to predict what is going to happen and I am only just realising this now. Instead I should look at what is happening and trade based on what is happening rather than what I think is going to happen.

So I have been thinking about what I was doing differently before the start of the year.
Well, I didn’t discover proRealTime before the start of the year and I was finding potential trades using some basic VB software that I had written. I’d click a button and it would download the EOD data from yahoo. Once this had finished I would click another button to run the ADX calculations on the data. After this had finished I clicked another button which gave me all the stocks with an ADX value > 25. I would then look through all these and see which were trending and look for my potential trades. I was using a modified version of Malcolm Pryors buying dips and selling rallies strategy from his Spread betting handbook.

When I found a potential trade I would see if it met my risk. Back then I was risking upto £30 per trade. If it did I would place the order accordingly. This seemed to be almost starting to work well for me so I am going to try and revert back to a winning way.

I am going to use Malcolms stratgies from the spread betting hand book, and allow myself a maximum of £10 risk per trade. I will also be limiting myself to a maximum of £1 per point trades for the time being until I can start to get my trading funds up a bit again. I will only be using these stratgies in trending markets. According to my weekly analysis the FTSE all share is currently trending downwards. Therefore I am currently looking for downtrending stocks that are rallying.

I have found three and I have placed the following orders. These orders are set to cancel if they don’t execute tomorrow.

Name
Order
Open
Stop
Debenhams
Sell
55.5
58.5
Galiform
Sell
57.5
60
Punch Taverns
Sell
62
67

Don’t take my posting here as a trade recommendation. The information contained within this blog is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as advice of any kind. The author of this blog will not accept any responsibily for any loss made by anyone acting or refraining to act as a result of reading material contained within this blog.

I was also keeping better records of my trades back then which is something that I will be re-starting from now on.

My quest for the ‘Holy Grail’ Stops here. There is no magic indicator, or system that is going to give me a winning trade every time. I’m going back to a trend following strategy and see how it goes for a while.

Unfortunately I can publish Malcoms strategies from his book here as I would get sued for copyright infringement. If you want to read about the strategies I guess you’ll just have to buy his book.

Thanks to “G” and Steven for the links to the stock sectors and their constituents. I think I may look to making these part of my weekly analysis as well.

Anyway enough for today. It can only get better from here. Hopefully!

Until next time
“May the markets be with you”
Spread Betting Beginner

July 5, 2010 by Harry
Category: blog