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.
Sorry, What Was The Good News?
For the first time in a while I’m concerned about a possible rally in equities. My screens have shown nothing but bad news stories on banks. Yet equities are pushing higher, spurred on by, yes you’ve guessed it, banks!
The early markets seemed to have the right idea, but with little enthusiasm. The FTSE future was marked lower on news of a bigger than expected write-down by UBS. The Swiss bank also announced that the chairman would have some quality family time, but they needed to raise $15 billion, presumably to pension him off.
The Euro dumped on the news, followed by further revelations from Deutsche Bank. Deutsche warned of a possible Q1 write-down of €2.5 billion. But almost right from the open someone had the bright idea of buying banks; it seems they were impressed with how easily UBS raised the money. It’s just as well because they won’t be the last.
Meanwhile, across the pond the Fed was busy again overnight; it had been arranging an immediate bailout of regional US mortgage bank, Willit Fullya, by Fannie Mae. This followed an after-hours disclosure that Willit faced $10 billion of write-downs on a sub-prime portfolio.
Auditors brought in to investigate an alleged fraud at Willit found that a sub-prime portfolio of properties thought to be in Birmingham, Alabama were in fact from Birmingham in the UK. The discovery and subsequent revaluation led to the write-down.
Fannie Mae is offering $5 a share to holders, with the Fed covering $9 billion of losses. The new corporation will be known as Fannie Mae Fullya.
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Hey, all you gold bugs better check out the early price; on my screen it’s back below $900, and oil is flirting with the $100 mark. The end of the commodity boom or just some more quarter-end monkey business?
The clue might be on the other side of the seesaw; the Dollar is stronger this morning, helped by the Euro’s weakness. Sterling has fallen 4 cents against the Dollar in the past week, and it’ll be interesting to see whether traders view the Euro’s fall as a buying opportunity or the end of a great bull run.
I’m off to mix up some bats wings with some goats’ testicles and see what the dark arts of technical analysis show me.
Happy Trading
April 1st, 2008 at 10:52 am
Bloody april fools! Was just in the middle of googling Willit Fullya before I realised…
April 1st, 2008 at 10:57 am
Sorry bout that Quango; think I’ve suffered more with the market’s April Fool rally!
April 1st, 2008 at 11:21 am
Surely you mean bat testicles and goat wings.
Convinced I saw a recipe from Hugh Fearnley Arseandtool on how to pan-fry these and ‘enrobe’ them in in a crushed black velvet jus.
Nice effort on Willit-though I though UBS was the actual April Fool-or is that just the market reaction?
April 1st, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Stopped out of A&L earlier, Friends Prov not making enough to cover that or £1 short in FTSE. Thank God for forex. Went £10 short of GBPUSD at $1.9846 on Brown’s comments. Just bgt back £5 at $1.9809, stop down to ‘40.
US ISM due out at 3 o’clock, market expects 47.5