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.
I’ve Gone Against The Crowd
Hi folks,
Boy, I wish I’d had a second accountant to have lunch with today; the sun’s on turbo-charge, which is more than can be said for the markets, and I’m stuck indoors. To make matters worse I lost patience and sold a scrap of FTSE and that’s now covered in red ink. There’s not a lot of action in the forex or commodity markets and my barbeque is firing up at bang on 6 o’clock tonight.
The current open positions of spread bets through paddypowertraders is showing an 85% long in FTSE; I’m in the 15%. That would have been fine if I’d sold the market when I first thought about it at 5380 this morning. It would even have been OK if I hadn’t closed out my first sale at 5329 for a £3 profit when the oil price dropped earlier.
But no, I sold on a small bounce after a break of 5300. I wasn’t convinced, so only sold a couple of quid at 5305. I was soon nearly £50 up as the index dropped to 5280, but my mistake was to believe in the bigger move, rather than take the money. At the moment I’m back to a fiver down and with most of the US earnings now finished for the day it looks as though the next 20 points in either direction will be driven by the oil price.
*****************************************************************
I’ve just sold GBPUSD in a tenner at $2.0025 on comments from the Fed’s Plosser that US interest rate rises should be sooner, rather than later. My original stop was at $2.0080, but a quick move has allowed me to close off half my bet for £65 and trail down my stop to $2.0024 to safeguard the gain. My remaining fiver is showing a running profit of £125 at $2.0000.
******************************************************************
Hey, this is great. Paddy Power are offering odds of 33-1 that Jordan represents Great Britain in the Dressage at the 2012 Olympics (yes that’s the one in the UK not China). They’re also offering 100-1 that she wins a medal at the event. Hmmm, Jordan in a tight pair of white jodhpurs; I’m almost tempted to have a little flutter.
I’ve not found the photo on the Internet yet but check it out in the Irish Times. How comfortable does Brian Cowen look having a friendly cuddle with Carla Bruni’s hubbie?
Happy Trading
July 22nd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I hate to say it, but I did say short gold, long equities was the way to go…added a lot to my short gold position earlier today and now I am v happy…did you abandon the FTSE short? I tried to go short FTSE as a sort of bi-trade/hedge against my long equity positions at around 12noon when the wahcovia car crash appeared but abandoned it and went back long when the market seemed to take the dip as a buying opportunity. Now v happy - my long dow/FTSE still in place, my short gold seriously in the money. I think I was right about disinflation! (at least for now).
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Hi Flashrabbit,
yeah, good on you mate, some good calls. Yeah, gold has broken my support at $950-55 so all bets off on that one. I’m still the not so proud owner of my FTSE short. I’ve made good money on Cable today so have been happy to run FTSE through the drop in oil to see how the Dow closes. I’m guessing I might have to walk tall and take the hit tomorrow if this continues, but so far the FTSE downtrend resistance is holding. it’s the usual thin line between holding a position I ultimately believe in and listening to what the market’s telling me. I might hold out for the weekly oil data and tomorrow’s mega-day of US earnings before taking action.
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Any idea’s why the nasdaq 100 gapped today at the open? Bit of an ameteur at this game so not sure why. Have started trading this market as i think this is a “safe”ish market to cut my trading teeth on. Am i nuts?????
July 22nd, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Hi DG, welcome aboard,
I’m afraid I don’t do Nasdaq, I view it as a more tech stock index, but I might even be wrong on that. As a generalisation beware the first half-hour of most equity markets. There’s a lot of monkey-business going on with traders getting a feel for where the support and resistance is. A lot of stops are triggered during this time. The US also seems to open in a casual French manner; prices go live between 2,30 and 2.45 so the early indexes are oftne misleading. Hope that helps a bit; you might get some more informed comments from others later.
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Yeah, I think trading NASDAQ is almost, but not quite, like trading a sector. DAX is also tech-heavy. FTSE is going along that road with oils and miners but some way to go to match Nasdaq for bias. The Dow is a pretty narrow index too. So S&P 500, which is a good broad based index, could be the safe (as in least volatile?) option.
Just a gut feel, no facts to support this.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Sound advice from the boys above. The NQ is entirely a techie index, dominated by the likes of Apple, Qualcom, Microsoft. Google Cisco, Intel to name just a few.
My guess as to why it ‘gapped’ would be a plethora of disappointing earnings from tech companies last night after the close. To me it is a bit of a homogenous index, in that there are very few ‘defensive’ stocks in there and it is all very high beta.
Not saying that money can’t be made, just be aware that a few stocks are disproportionately weighted
More later as I have to skip out
July 22nd, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Hi DG,
the state of Steve Jobs health is a concern for apple investors - apparantly he had a cancer scare once and is looking unwell again. seemingly, this caused apple to gap down and affected the market.
I hope the guy is ok and wish him no illness - but seriously, what a great trade - just take him for a vindaloo and 12 pints on a sunday night then short the nasdaq til wednesday.
July 23rd, 2008 at 12:59 am
Hi FT
had a pretty shitty last week - spent the last couple of days getting myself out of it - did well - then some stupid late deals got me right back into it today - howvever I think $US WTC OIL is well over sold here 26/27 range- on $ fundamentals - good luck for anybody who wants to trade - I will be in on the next 4/5 dollar drop, 200 point stop loss minumum
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:42 am
Ed, I like your thinking mate.I wonder just how ethical his doctor is.
Hi Simon, you as well! I was lucky to bail out of a short position last week. Then after one day of being sensible I was suckered into selling FTSE even though my gut was warning me of a further rise in prices. This is familiar territory for me and usually takes acouple of hundred off my previous gains.
Oil’s a tricky one isn’t it? To me the risk is that any number of things could set it flying again. This looks like a much neeeded correction and could go further without ruining the bull case. But there must be a lot of traders who’ve made easy money and want to lock in their gains.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
DG-part 2 as promised
Although NASDAQ don’t helpfully publish a stock weighting guide that us plebs can access (nothing for free in the land of the free!) similar info on a NQ 100 index tracking stock might suggest that
Apple 12.72%, Qualcomm 5.49% Microsoft 5.28% Google 4.42% and Research in Motion 4.09% look like the top 5 stock by index weight-though without having the ‘official NASDAQ data’ this might be slightly different.
So chuck in disappointing results from AAPL (which at one stage was down 10% after hours )& Texas Instruments after the market shut plus unhelpful comments/results from VOD & Ericcsson pre the US market open and voila- a recipe for a ‘gap’ in the NQ 100 is created.
There are other indices which are less dominated by individual stocks, and which have a wider industrial composition ( i.e not all tecnology related).
Ken’s point is well made, could be worth looking at the S&P 500-the biggest stock is Exxon, at just over 4%, whilst the top 5 stocks account for just 12% of the index.
In terms of sectors, Energy (16%, IT 16% & Financials 14% also gives you a broader spread than the tech-laden NQ100.
Hope this helps, personally, if I was cutting my teeth again, it wouldn’t be on betting on the NQ100!
July 23rd, 2008 at 5:11 pm
So i am nuts then!! Thanks guys. Alot of good info there. my trading knowledge has increased 10 fold. Cheers again!