A fantastic July so far

Early into my spreadbetting strategy I realise I had made quite a fundamental mistake. After pumping £1500 capital into my account I think the blood went to my head a little. I left behind my cool, calm, collected attitude and went guns blazing into opening as many accounts as I could. At one stage I had committed almost 40% of my capital into open positions on the market. Most who spreadbet will relaise that's a bad idea. If the markets suddenly go against you thats a massive amount to lose in one go.

Of course, coupled with that is the fact that I'm expecting 80% of my spreadbets to go against me. I'm hoping to control my losses and let me successful trades run on and hope those profits outweigh the losses (in a nutshell).

As a result my profit/loss graph looked a little bleak at the end of June. I was down as far as -£300. A pretty tough position to be in. At this point I decided to open no more bets, and to simply let things settle.

Those bad picks would eventually hit my controlled stop losses and i'd lose small amounts on each of them, and eventually i'll be left with those that are profitable as these will tend to have a longer life span (as im letting them run until for as long as possible).

This has been a very wise move in hindsight as July has so far been profit, profit, profit.

Take a look at the graph. A few of my poor trades closed out and at the point of being -£300 down most of my bad picks had closed. Leaving me with the few that had potential to move on. Over 3 weeks i've made a profit of £165 so far.

Dare I say it "another week of this kind of activity and i'll see actual profit on my strategy". There, that's it, cursed right? Probably, but who believe's in curses these days???

To see my overall results in detail and see all my trade picks go to my RESULTS page.

Over 60+ pts of positive movements today

I spent today in books. Studying for my Accountancy Exams which I have on Wednesday. I reluctantly started around 10am after finding excuse after excuse not to do it. "Oh wait, I don't have my calculator", "oh, and I need a coffee first of course", "hmm, i'll just check my trades before I start". Eventually, I ran out of ideas and so got stuck in.

Once in I was pretty much stuck there for the day, raising my head for 20 mins to eat some lunch and back down into the books until about 16:00.

The UK markets close off at 16:30 and if you've ever used IG Index as a platform before you'll know that some trades shift in price after closure between 16:30 and 17:00. As a result I usually won't bother checking my trades until after 17:00 as the markets are closed and it's a good opportunity to take a daily snapshot of how things are going.

To my suprise I'd had a healthy day. A lot of my trades had moved in favourable directions at the same time and with 13 trades open at the moment the shifts tend to be quite big. Well, big in comparison to what i'm used to anyway.

Overall my trades shifted a combined 50+ points in the right direction bringing me in a good £65+

And that's what I love about Spreadbetting. I spend the day revising for an exam and behind the scenes i've made £65 tax free. Not bad for a day's work doing nothing.

Of course, the downside to it is that it could all move in the wrong direction tomorrow and i'm back where I started, but I think it's important to celebrate the good days and getting those few steps closer to reaching profitability. If you take a look at my profit graph you'll see that i've been pennies away from making this a profitable venture in the past but after investing £1500 of my own personal money and opening a lot of trades at once my position fell largely due to the spreads. Another day like this tomorrow and i'll have moved into a profitable position. Who knows?

My best movers were EUR/GBP which fell 34pts. I'm short on that trade so i'm making money all the time the Euro falls against the pound. BT fell 1%, again a trade i'm short on, and ITV fell 1% also. At the same time Mucklow Group plc, a trade i'm long on (I make money if the share price rises) moved up 0.13pts. However, most of my success came from all my trades making small gains in the right direction.

Here's a sneek update of how the profit/loss graph looks after todays positivity. I expect this'll drop again at some point, it won't all be success going forward, but it'll be interesting to see where this is by this time next month.

My Trades - Update #6

Unlike this guy I only check my trades every few days.

So my capital account is now up to £1500 with my profit/loss sitting at -£140 roughly. If you check out my TRADES page you'll notice that i've gone from sitting at breakeven to the -£140 loss in the space of a week.

This isn't an indication of the system not working or anything like that, it's simply because i've opened at least 6 new trades in the last week, some of which held risks of approx £100 per trade.

As with most trend trading there is always an element of daily trade movement where the price will move in the wrong direction immediately after you open a position. As i'm following long term trends it can take a while before the price makes any significant movements into profitable positions for me. It's all about patience. That's why this system is perhaps not for everyone. It's easy to bottle it when you see losses of £140 in your account. However, as of now I have 13 open positions. My hope is that 3-4 of these will go on to make massive profits and the others small losses. My system relies on the fact the profits will be left to run as high as they can go, and the losses will be cut short to manageable levels. This way I can lose lots of small trades for a while before I find the right trade and cover all my losses and make profit. Following trends allows me to be more accurate in picking trades which are already moving in a certain direction, and have been for some time.

It's still very early days and all i'm hoping for in Year 1 is to make some sort of a profit. No matter how high or low.

Check out my TRADES page for a more detailed insight into my current trading positions. It has graphs and everything.