Category: Spread Betting Strategies

I Spread Bet a hunch on PV Crystalox the other week and boy what a mistake it was. I don’t know how many times I’ve made the same mistake. I think it’s the old over trading me coming back to haunt me. I hadn’t made a trade for days and I read a news article about solar power, so I started thinking hmm, solar power is probably going to be pretty big as we try to move more towards renewable energy sources. The only company I could think of that make Solar power items was PV Crystalox. Therefore I bought into them on the back of my Spread Betting Hunch. Sure enough the stock is in down trend and the stock plummets to new all time lows stopping my out and I lost £15 to boot. Ok so it’s only £15 and it could’ve been a lot worse, but still it’s difficult enough trying to find a trade to make £15 without throwing away good money on a stupid spread betting hunch. So the lesson to take away from this is stick to your trading strategy and don’t deviate from it. It’s tough, as I said I’ve made this mistake several times before but my goal is to make this the last time. No more hunches, just trades according to my strategy.

I made a new spread bet yesterday on TUI travel. It’s a long trade at £1 per point at 224.49 with a stop set at the super trend value of 210. Other than that I’ve been manually adjusting my stops where necessary and checking for new trades every day. So far there haven’t been many coming along that meet all my entry criteria. There was one the other day but the risk was way too high for me so I passed up the opportunity.

In other news the FTSE100 competition winner will be announced at the weekend after the FTSE closes on Friday. It’s looking like it’s a two horse race at the moment but as we all know with the FTSE100 anything can happen.

Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner

Today I made one new spread bet. I made the trade in my brand new SpreadCo account purely to see what the platform is like etc. First impressions are reasonable, although I think there is possibly room for improvement. If you’re new to spread betting the I would suggest opening a demo account with them first and get used to the platform. It’s really too early for me to comment too much about their platform and service as I’ve only just started trading with them. I’ll keep using them for a while then do a proper review at a later date. SpreadCo are another one of the spreadbetting companies that I can add to my growing list.

Todays Spread Betting Action

Anyway onto todays spread betting action. As I said I made one new trade. It’s a super trend cross sell trade in old mutual. Sell at 134.23, stop at 145 and £1 per point. This gives me a risk of £10.77 just about on the money for my 1% risk rule. I was thinking more about my super trend strategy. With it being a trend following strategy I’m wondering if I should do the same as I’m starting to do with Vinces strategy. That is always be long or short of a few stocks. For example if my stop loss gets hit this is also a sell trade signal. If I therefore change my position from long to short I’ll always be in a trade with this one stock. Therefore when a big trend comes along I’ll be in from the start and I’ll be on the right side of it. The only question is would all the whipsaws I would face outstrip the potential profit from one big move. Well who can say? The only way I could guess would be through back testing the idea. I really have no experience of back testing but I know pro real time offer it as a feature. Has anyone used it? I’ve tried it briefly but I don’t really know what I’m doing. I know off the lip back tests using excel. The only problem there is I would need to write a super trend indicator so I could back test it. Doable but I wonder if pro real time might be the better solution. If anyone else has other good ways they use to back test strategies I’d love to hear them.

Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner

Finding a spread betting strategy that suits your own personal trading needs in no mean feat. Look at me for example. I’ve been actively spread betting for over two years now and I would say I have yet to settle into a spread betting strategy that I know and can trust in. When I say trust in I don’t mean it will give me a winner each and every time, but it will give me bigger winners than losers, thus giving the spread betting strategy a positive expectancy.

I think that each and every successful spread bettor will have their own way. Whether it’s an adaptation of someone elses strategy or whether its a strategy of their own creation. The important thing is to have a strategy whatever it may be. In my view trading without a strategy is just gambling, and believe me I’ve been there and done that.

The Most Successful Spread Betting Strategy is:

Well I wish I knew. The fact is I don’t and the important thing to remember is that just because a strategy works for one person doesn’t mean it will work for another. One things is for certain it will take a while for you to find a strategy and settle into it. I think the important thing is to give any strategy a fair chance. Don’t do what I’ve done ( and am still doing) which is chopping and changing your mind all the time. It’s very easy to become disheartened when you suffer a string of losses and start looking for the next spread betting strategy. Remember losses are a fact of spread betting. As long as your strategy gives you a positive expectancy you should be ok. (Just so were clear I’m not guaranteeing that. It’s certainly possible to trade a strategy with a positive expectancy and end up going bust.)

If you are in the market for a new strategy why not compare spread betting strategies using my new comparison table.

Spread Betting Action From The Last Few Days.

The more regular readers of this blog will know that I try to update on most trading days. Well the last few days I haven’t found the time so now I’m playing catch up. I made one new trade on Tuesday in Shanks. It’s a super trend cross buy at 116.6 with a stop set at 104.7. This is slightly over my 1% risk tolerance but not too much so I’m willing to let it slide. The reason it’s over is because I’ve used a guaranteed stop. I ended up placing the trade in my Capital Spreads account for a few reasons. One of the reasons is IG Index would only let me place a guaranteed stop 20% away from price. This would’ve meant that my stop level would’ve been too far away from my entry and smashed my 1%(ish) rule. Also I’d never really checked before but IG Index widen the spread on guaranteed stop trades, to pay for the guaranteed stop, but from what I could tell with Capital Spreads there wasn’t much of an extra charge. Don’t quote me on that, but from what I could tell Capital Spreads were cheaper than IG Index, in this case at least. I think it highlights the importance of having more than one spread betting firm. You need to check you are getting the best spreads available otherwise your just wasting money unnecessarily. I don’t know about you but I hate paying more for something than I need to.

If you are looking for a new spread betting firm, why not compare spread betting companies using my free comparison table. You can view all of them or just select a few using the tick box at the end of the row and hit the compare button at the bottom of the page. You can also read (or write) spread betting reviews of all the companies on my reviews pages.

So that’s it. You’re up to date for now. For the more regular readers I plan to make the format of the blog entries more like this from now on. I’ll have an article of some description at the top of the page, with my spread betting action below it. Hopefully You’ll enjoy this new format more. If you have any thoughts please feel free to leave me a comment, e-mail me or leave me a message on the spread betting forum.

Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner

My position in Yell stopped out today for a £10 loss. With hindsight why did I make this trade? I think at the time I said it was a punt and blatant gambling is a sure way to the poor house. It’s for this reason that I will now only be trading my super trend strategy. After reading the original turtles trading rules document yesterday I’ve realised that my super trend strategy could potentially be very profitable in the long run. I just have to take the rough with the smooth. The Idea of the super trend strategy and indeed any successful trend following strategy is to get as much of a trend as you possibly can. The thing is it may take a few times of testing the water before a profitable trend comes along.

Anyway if I post about a trade that doesn’t follow any of my rules in future please feel free to say “Harry, what the hell are you doing?”.

I think the Original Turtles Trading rules document really is an excellent document. There is so much in there that can and should be used to help on the road to successful spread betting. I think there is lots for us to discuss about this document and how elements of it can be used in the new spread betting strategy that we are developing. Therefore I’ve started a new forum topic called “Original Turtles Rules” to discuss it.

I went to the City Index thing I was telling you about last night. Well what a waste of time that was. I thought it was going to be ideas about marketing etc and some useful content for the site but no. It was more us helping them than the other way round. They are very keen to get new people through the door and wanted to hear from us what is required to make that happen. I suggested a few things which I think they liked. Predominantly based around charting and the ability to add screeners etc. Mainly the things that I would want to see a spread betting firm offer for free.

I had a few questions that I have e-mailed to Joshua Raymond from City Index. I’m still waiting on his response and when I have them I’ll get them added to the site.

That’s all for this week.
Have a great weekend everyone.

Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner

Not great deal to report on the trading front. My position in 3i Infrastructure stopped out at 116 giving my a whopping £1.31 profit. When you figure the position had been open for around 3 months it works out to pretty much £0 with the rolling charges. Still at least it’s not loss.

I finally got some time today to summarize where we are up to with developing a new spread betting strategy over on the forum. Take a look and post a reply if you have anything to add or suggest. If your new to the forum then please register and join in the discussion. I’ve noticed we’ve had some new members on the forum of late. I wish I could say they were all genuine but, it seems a few of them are spammers. Still they’ve received and instant ban over my no SPAM policy. I don’t mind people linking to other sites etc as long as it’s relevant to spread betting. Then again I guess some of the drugs one person was trying to link too might come in useful if your stressed about your spread betting not going well, and I’m sure Ugg boots are not relevant to spread betting. Still there only wasting there own time. If you spot any SPAM on the forum before I do please let me know. The filters I have tend to catch most of it but you never know.

I think the forum is the reason behind the site being slow. I’m not 100% sure why yet but I’m going to speak to my hosting provider again today about some of the error messages I have in my logs to get the issues resolved. With the main page of the site having a feed from the forum this would certainly affect the speed of the main page and the forum. The rest of the site should be fine and to be honest I’ve never noticed any speed issues with any of the other pages. Please let me know if you have noticed otherwise.

No new trades today again. I took a look earlier and there is nothing that fits my strategy. So I playing the waiting game until the right opportunity comes along. I think it’s a game I’m starting to get good at.

Until next time,
“May the markets be with you!”
Harry,
The Spread Betting Beginner