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.
The Good, The Bad And The Ironic
Hi folks,
Today’s blog has it all; the good, the bad and the flippin ironic. Trading today spanned the forex and equity markets and ended up with a small profit for my troubles.
I don’t know if it was the hot sun belting through my window, or the lasting effects of yesterday’s cider, but I was far too eager to deal today and, as usual in these cases, I paid the price. I placed a £10 bet to buy EURGBP at £0.7904, placing my stop at £0.7865. The trade was never more than a few pips in profit; although the price dropped after strong UK producer prices my trade remained intact, but unexciting. I moved my stop up to £0.7880, where my stop was triggered for a loss of £240. The price didn’t reach those depths again and would now be showing a small gain.
My other forex trade worked better. I bought a £10 bet in GBPUSD after the price broke through previous resistance. I paid $1.9531 for £10 and took profits at $1.9541, $1.9570 and $1.9593 before being stopped out at $1.9560. Total profit on this trade was £249, spookily close to my earlier loss.
For my sins I decided to close my remaining £1 bet in Barclays. It had returned to the previous support level so I closed out at 443p for a gain of £46. Both banks have trading updates this week, but I reckon more worries have been priced into Barclays so I’ll run the A&L bet.
Hah! You’ll love the irony of this. Regular readers will know that I’m itching to sell FTSE again, but exercising a level of restraint I didn’t know I was capable of. After failing to hold its early gains the FTSE index looked trapped in a 10-point range. I fancied selling it (again) but was conscious that Friday was option expiry day. One of many stockmarket ‘rules of thumb’ is that markets tend to go better in the days leading up to expiry. Rather than just accept the rule I thought I’d check.
So out came my old diary with expiry dates since the start of 2007 and I did my best to work back on the chart, trying to take comparable start and finish times. But all I came up with was that out of the most recent 16 expiries, 8 had shown a rise in the market over the preceding week and 8 had shown a fall. Now this was all a bit rough and ready, but to me it showed there was no reason why I shouldn’t short the market ahead of expiry. But this is the best bit; as I returned to my intra-day chart I found that the market had tired of waiting for me and had dumped 40 points. AAAGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The good news is markets have rallied to give me another chance to make my mind up.
Happy Trading
May 12th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Took advantage of that mid-afternoon tumble to buy back my 6200 calls at 35. So £180 to the good — hanging around for the other 35 points to evaporate just wasn’t worth the risk or the stress.
June expiry is a long way off, but the recovery means the 6600s and 6650s are becoming interesting.
BBA is kinda stuck around 160. Well below my 165 stop but I’m losing patience and may close this rather than wait for more cash to go down the drain.
Rightmove pausing around 400. Happy to wait for this one to resume its march down to the old 350 lows.
Opened a new short position in Drax at 598. This one is near the top of a long established downtrend channel and looked to be ready to head back towards the bottom. Until I shorted it and it moved up 2p.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Yeah, closing out the 6200s must be looking good now. Was looking at the Dow for guidance just now (still wanting to sell FTSE at a better level), but the near-perfect uptrend on the daily put the frighteners on. Fundamentally, i still think it stinks, but just supposing it moves up that trend channel. FTSE looks all too keen to drop its knickers and join in the fun. Rightmove’s worked out well for you.
Hopefully it’s all setting up for some lousy CPI numbers.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:48 am
Good call on the A&L short. Kicking myself for not joining you. Ouch.
This rally is running out of steam. Check out yesterday’s FTSE volume, it’s almost non-existent and follows a sustained period of low volume. One more bearish signal to help avoid getting sucked in to the uptrend.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Ollocks!!!
To much cheese for me at lunch yesterday saw me close out my FTSE 6325 calls on the grounds I still want to keep the comb-over and deserve a restful night! (And before you say it FT, it IS probably too late to save the ‘Jackie Charlton’). I’ll just have to settle for the ‘Grant Mitchell’ instead.
Low volume rally……..makes those June Puts look a bit better value today, though are we getting a low volume selloff too?
V. Bearish note out from respected Swiss house (though not immune from writedowns!) suggesting sell B&B (target 135 from 190) with necessity of rights issue looming. Not keen on HBOS either.
Don’t know about you lot, but I feel that worse is still to come, at which point there will be sector consolidation.