No updates for the last few days as I’ve been busy with other commitments so apologies for that. You haven’t missed much. My spread betting has almost been no existent the last few days. I’ve moved stops on a few open positions and that’s about it. To be honest I haven’t looked for new positions either and nor do I intend to for the next few days/ weeks. The reason being is I have enough exposure to the markets at the moment and I don’t want to just trade for the sake of trading. We all know where that leads us. Therefore the blog posts may not be full of my trading activity and may have more about other things in them for the time being.
I don’t know if anyone else has an account with Capital Spreads but I received an e-mail from them this morning with some details about a new charting package that’s available for trial on their demo account. Apparently new features include: Email Alerts & Back Testing to name a few. There are others but these are the ones that I think a lot of people might find useful. I’m not sure if I have a demo account with them so I can’t take a look. If anyone else wants to open a demo account with Capital Spreads or already has a demo account with them I’d be interested to hear from them what this new charting package is like.
That’s about all from me for now. My first monthly news letter should be out in the next few weeks. Included in this news letter will be your chance to win prizes each and every month. I can’t say any more than that just yet as I’m still getting everything I need in place. When I have more details you’ll be the first to know. The monthly competition will only be available to my subscribers so if you haven’t subscribed yet make sure you do to be in with your chance to win the monthly prize.
Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner
After yesterdays good day for my spread bets today started off not so well. With most of yesterdays profits wiped out I was nervous. So I did the only thing that I could do and that was to leave my positions alone. They have stops associated with them for a reasons and if they don’t pan out then so be it. In days of old I would’ve been tempted to interfere and would’ve ended up making a mistake I would later come to regret. Take my position in ARM holdings last year for example. I exited the trade to free up some funds taking a meagre £30 profit. Now this was in February last year. If you don’t believe me check out one of my old blog entries from back then you can clearly see the position was opened in 12/2/2010. If I could’ve stayed on this trend until a few months ago and avoided some of the recent turbulence I would’ve made a nice 400 points profit. Now I know hindsight is a wonderful thing it’s more than likely that I would’ve been stopped out before capturing 400 points but my point is If I hadn’t meddled with the trade then I would’ve ended up with more profit than just 30 points. My motto now is to plan the trade and trade the plan. Let the trades take care of themselves.
I have actually interfered slightly with one trade. I decided to pyramid into my Barclays position again. I took a look at the chart and a nice down trend is developing. With a nice rally over the last few days I decided that it could be an ideal time to sell into the trade again. I went short at 281.91 with at stop set at 311. This stop should not get hit as my exit signal will occur before. The one thing I do need to be wary of with this trade is there is a strong support line around the 260 mark. I think as the trade approaches this point I may tighten my stop as a precaution.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all had a good trading week and I’ll see you back here Monday. Have a great weekend everyone.
Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner
Today has been a good day for my spread betting. Most of my positions made some level of profit, with some performing better than others. My start performer was National Express with it gaining around 7 points on the day. I only hope my breakout theory is correct and it has indeed broken free from its trading range. We’ll see how it pans out. With this being a newish spread betting strategy I’ve decided I’ll trail the position at 3xATR(10) of the closing price.
Talking of new spread betting strategies I’m trailing another new strategy. I say new but it’s basically a combination of my super trend strategy and the trading strategy from Vince Stanziones course material. I’m basically looking for both a super trend cross and a buy or sell signal from Vinces system. The idea being that if both of these conditions are in place the trade has a better chance of doing what I think it will. Once in the trade I will trail it at the super trend value. This actually breaks the rules of Vinces system as it can be the case that an exit signal will occur but the super trend value is not breached. I’m trying this combination approach as I noticed that using Vinces system on it’s own would encounter several whipsaw trades where as using the super trend value for the stop position eliminates these whipsaws. I’m not saying that this will be the case 100% of the time. It could be the case that the exit signal is valid and exiting would’ve made less of a loss or kept more profit. It’s still early days for this new trail so we’ll see how it goes.
The new trade that I made using this new spread betting strategy is in Misys. Buy at 355.79 with a stop at 313. Now the regular readers of this blog will spot straight away that this smashes my y1% risk rule. Well there is no real reason for this and trust me I won’t be making a habit of it. On the plus side with trailing my stop at the super trend value I should be looking to tighten it after a modest rise today.
Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner
One new spread bet executed today. It's a long trade in national express. I spotted a couple of weeks ago that National Express was trading in range 230ish to 260ish. I therefore thought it would potentially be a good spread bet to place an order if this range gets broken. So I placed an order around the 266 mark with a stop set at 254. The idea being if this range is broken the stock should continue to rise. Well I checked my
