FT has been trading full time from home for two years, with nothing but four kids and a beach to distract him .
He fills his spare time with weight training and rugby, though more coaching than playing these days.
FT mostly trades the forex markets and although he plays FTSE on occasions his bread and butter market is £$.
He likes to think that his technique is evolving but still hasn’t the temperament or money to back the big calls. He prefers to trade between 1 and 3 times a day, aiming to take regular small gains, but feels part of the evolution is in not dealing if the conditions don’t feel right.
A Margin Call From The Easter Bunny
Well it looks like equity markets have already left for their Easter break, leaving the currency/ commodity combo to do all the work. I’m writing this in the hope of being proved wrong, with a bit of action from the US later. The pre-opening mark-down in equities looked promising but, as often happens on option expiry, FTSE rarely strayed from the comfort of the nearest big figure, 5500 in this case.
The Easter bunny brought some curious gifts; notices of an increase in Inital Margin Requirements (also known as trading margin) from a cople of companies I used to spread bet with. This is presumably a reaction to big boy Man Financial Global jacking up its margin requirements for their clients. Now I’m not just mentioning this to show how much better paddypowertrader is (I just checked and they say they have no plans to change their margin requirements at the moment). The stories I saw in the press this morning suggested this news is bearish for the market and that traders with long positions have to either stump up the extra dosh or close their positions (hence pushing prices down). And that might have been behind yesterday’s biggest 1-day fall in gold for 18 years. But I reckon there’s a lot of savvy traders out there; if they think this is a bear market then they’ve probably got short positions. Stating the bleedin obvious but closing these off will mean buying stock back and pushing prices up!
And talking of buying back, I’m mulling over closing my FTSE short for Easter. Option expiry this morning means that I’m less exposed to the market; my short is on a tasty profit and it might be healthy to come back on Tuesday and have a fresh look at the markets.
Here’s a classic case of needing to stand back and take in the bigger picture. My daily perception has been that recently Sterling has lucked out against the Euro and Yen, but has been hanging in there OK against the Dollar. And there’s a load of other currencies out there that I don’t have the time, or mental capacity to follow. Then I read that yesterday Sterling fell to an 11-year low against a basket of currencies (known as the Trade-Weighted Index or TWI). Wow, that should help the fight against inflation-NOT!
I returned to the forex market for my ‘Easter eggs’ trade. I jumped aboard the Dollar express, selling £10 of EURUSD at $1.5457, but jumped off again at the next stop. I had no ambition to play around for long in pre-Easter markets, so set a limit order to close me out at $1.5447. That left me with £100 in my back pocket, ready for a quick trip down to Sainsburys.
Easter greetings to Eddie O’Sullivan, who’s looking to have a slightly longer break than the rest of us. Why not check out the PaddyPower odds on his successor; I reckon London Irish coach Brian Smith looks good at 20-1.
Finally I’ve been asked to make a public service announcement: markets (and paddypowertrader) will be closed tomorrow. However US and Forex markets are open on Monday so paddypowertrader will be open for business for them. The dealing telephone lines will be open all day and the customer support will be open from 08:00 to 14:00 (allowing those nice people on the phones to go home and finish any uneaten chocolate).
Happy Easter
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