Spread Betting Strategies

After 2 weeks of decline I had a positive week. Not as positive as expected. The week ended at £1,884.11, so an increase of £26.49. I’m going to start tracking the performance against FTSE All-Share. The way things are going I would be better off buying an index tracker!

So to the action this week… Inchape and Galiform where I amended the stop losses to just below the weekly close were sold.

The only other sale this week was Rightmove. These showed a sharp decline which I think had something to do with the announcement from Google. Good job my stop loss kicked in as they are a lot lower than when I sold.

There were 4 buys this week – Pearson, Home Retail, Aegis and Meggitt.

The two best performing shares I have are Tesco and Mothercare (Mothercare flew this week). They are in the black to a tune of £78 in total. I am thinking of adding another element to my Spread Betting Strategies about moving my stop loss when in profit.

My new spread betting strategy will be to move the stop loss to breakeven once the stock has moved into profit by twice that of the amount risked. Tesco has satisfied this condition so I will move the stop loss to 390.4.

Melrose were on my warning list last week and closed down lower which means I will amend the stop loss to just below close.

New accounts on the warning list this month include BT, BBA Aviation and Brown Group.

Technorati Tags: Spread betting online review, Spread Betting Strategies

I like the gold story and would like to test my Spread Betting Strategies on gold. So far I have been testing stocks but I’m sure they will apply equally well (or poorly!) to commodities. From now on when I do my analysis I will include gold.

Technorati Tags: spread betting gold

As mentioned in my previous post I want to trade out of Filtrona. The reason for that is their moving average has turned down significantly.

Now I had a problem trying to do this when I logged onto my online trading broker because as I do this at the weekend, the markets are closed. So I had an idea, instead of trading out immediately I adjusted the stop loss to just below the last close. This means that if they go lower, it will trigger a sell but if it doesn’t then I will still be in the trade at a higher price.

I will now incorporate this rule into my Spread Betting Strategies.

So here are my new trades for this week.

Buy Greggs @ 436 (risk £19.40)

Buy Stobbart @ 128.8 (£19.96)

Buy St James Place @ 258.5 (£18.59)

Buy Bunzl @ 660.75 (£19.35)

Buy G4S @ 253 (£19.55) 

You may notice that Greggs was on of my trades that hit its stop loss last week. I don’t like the idea of buying them again but my objective spread betting strategies indicates I should so I have set them up.

Technorati Tags: Spread Betting Strategies

Another strange and volatile week where surprisingly, it finished on a positive. My account balance stood at £2014.61 at the beginning but then took some large hits and fell to a low of £1901.27 by Wednesday. Following the UK market making another recent high, the account rallied strongly and closed at £2028.30.

I have added a new trades page where you will be able to see how all my holding which I have bought to test the spread betting strategies are doing, so here I will concentrate on the trades that were executed and exited this week.

Monday 9^th was a very busy day with my email account flooded with contract notes. Seven trades were entered and 1 was exited, in fact, one was bought and sold within 2 minutes. Cadbury were subject to a takeover bid from Kraft and amid speculation my trade was entered at 785.5 and exited at 745.25. That resulted in a £20.13 loss in 2 minutes.

The other six that were entered on Monday were Eaga, Galiform, Greggs, Colt, Britvic and Money Supermarket. Eaga went on to be sold the next day at a loss of £21.67.

Two other trades were sold this week, Friends Provident which were bought out last week at a loss of £10.15 (my first loss under my limit of £20!). PZ Cussons which I entered into on 5/11/09 also hit its stop loss incurring a loss of £20.34.

So far 5 of trades I have entered into have been exited and everyone has been at a loss. I am not too concerned about this at this point as my Spread Betting Strategies are all about letting your winners run and cutting your losses short. Usually I do the opposite when I am investing with my normal portfolio!

As usual I will give details of the trades I have set up later in the week. There aren’t as many as the previous 2 weeks as there have been fewer pullbacks.

Technorati Tags: Spread Betting Strategies

As mentioned in my last post, I set up a lot of trades this week on my spread betting trading platform so apologies for the long post.

OK, so last week didn’t end on a good note, but I’m doing this to test the Spread Betting Strategies at this stage so every lesson I learn is valuable. The lesson I learnt last week is not to get too confident. I had a good first week, doing great in the second week then the market turned and now I’m down overall.

The market still appears to be in an upward trend although may be stalling. I therefore still want to be on the long side of the market. When analysing the sectors for this week I noticed that more trends seem to be waning but most still, according to my spread betting strategies are in an uptrend.

The 4 shares that I currently have in play still have the conditions to remain so. These for have been left for this week. The stops on these also remain the same.

The spread betting strategies identified the following trades to set up. All were set up on my spread betting trading platform on November 2^nd. The amount in brackets is the total risk per trade.

Buy Associated British Foods @ 854.5 (£16.75)

Buy BT @ 137.3 (£20.7)

Buy Cadbury @ 791 (£22)

Buy Hargreaves Langdown @ 296.7 (£18.53)

Buy Henderson Group @ 141.5 (£19.92)

Buy Carphone Warehouse @ 197.4 (£19.5)

Buy Kingfisher @ 238.2 (£19.92)

Buy Mothercare @ 597.5 (£19.5)

Buy Sports Direct @ 104.5 (£19.8)

Buy IMI @ 468 (£20.05)

Buy Melrose @ 186 (£19.8)

Buy Legal & General @ 85.6 (£19.4)

Buy JKX Oil @ 301.3 (£18.2)

Buy PZ Cussons @ 260.3 (£19.56)

Buy Vectura @ 91 (£19.75)

Buy Connaught @ 417 (£19)

Buy Galiform @ 81 (£19.11)

Buy Serco @ 531 (£19.6)

Buy ARM Holdings @ 154.5 (£19.2)

Buy Pace @ 231.5 (£19.6)

If you notice that amount risked in brackets from Henderson down were very close to £20. This is because I worked out that I didn’t have to trade whole £s per point. My spread betting trading platform allows my to trade at £1.2, £2.1 etc. per point which is great.

So a lot of trades were set up this weekend. My gut feeling is that the market will see large declines but my spread betting strategies don’t listen to my gut feelings.

I will update you on what happens soon. I do hope some trades get executed. Wouldn’t have wanted to go to all that work for nothing!

Technorati Tags: Financial Spread Betting UK, Spread Betting Strategies

So when reviewing my account last week I had three trades in play and 5 that weren’t executed.

I looked at the market first and it appears to be in an upward trend. The close for the week was little different from the open which may be of some significance.

So my first job is to review the 3 in play trades against my spread betting strategies to see if the case for the trade still exists. All 3 appear to be in an upward trend so happy to let the trades run.

There does however to be some resistance at the closing level of Filtrona but reaching resistance is not an exit point in my spread betting strategies so the trade remains in play.

I have not amended the stop losses for these 3 trades.

I then reviewed the 5 trades which were not executed this week. Having done a full review against my Spread Betting Strategies not one of the trades now fulfil they relevant criteria so I have abandoned each one.

I then continued my analysis to find new trades, the trades that I set up on my spread betting trading platform (23/10/09) are below…

Buy Chloride Group @ 170.7 (£19 Total risk in brackets)

Buy Cadbury @ 811 (£14.25)

Buy Synergy Health @ 628 (£21.1)

Buy Aviva @ 458.5 (£17.5)

Buy Grainger @ 321.5 (£23)

Buy Friends Provident @ 84.5 (£19.6)

All the trades were set up with contingent stop losses in line with the spread betting strategies.

These trades were set up last Saturday so I will give an update about the 3 trades I had in play and if any of the further 6 trades were executed. Having just looked at the markets I think it is more likely my 3 trades were stopped out!!

Technorati Tags: Financial Spread Betting UK, Spread Betting Strategies

This post is just to let you know what happened in my first week after my trades were set up. In my previous post I let you know which trades I had set up resulting from my spread betting strategies.

By the end of the week 3 out of my 8 trades went into play and the week ended with me being up £9.37!

I first checked my account on Tuesday and none of my trades had been executed. I was a bit disappointed and questioned if my Spread Betting Strategies were going to give me any action!

By Wednesday however, I had my first trade. I bought Tesco @ 390.4 and by the end of the day my position was up by £1ish.

I didn’t check my account again until Saturday (remember that I am using weekly spread betting strategies). When I checked I found that 2 further trades had been executed.

Vodafone was executed @ 137.53, a minimal amount above my requested execution level. Filtrona was executed @ 168.35, well above my desired execution point of 165.7 but having checked the daily charts it appears that it had gapped up on the Friday open.

Tesco and Vodafone finished the week slightly down on the price that I bought at. All my gains have come from Filtrona which closed the week very strongly @ 172.8. There appears to be some resistance at the closing level.

I then reviewed all the trades that went in play to assess whether the conditions for the trades remained. I then reviewed all the previous set ups that weren’t executed to see if they still fit with the spread betting strategies. Once that was completed I started analysing other financial Spread Betting UK instruments to identify trades for this week. I have found a number and set these up on my spread betting trading platform on Saturday.

I will give an update on the trades I have set up later in the week.

Technorati Tags: Financial Spread Betting UK, Spread Betting Strategies

OK, so last weekend I set up my first trades. Adhering to my spread betting strategies, if the market is trending, then I will trade on the side of the trend. I am trading financial spread bet UK equities so I first analysed the UK market. The market was clearly in an uptrend so I knew my trades would be on the long side.

I then did some analysis of different sectors. The majority where in an upward trend confirming the market analysis I had done earlier. This was a completely different scenario to what I found when I was practicing in the summer where only a few sectors were in a clear upward trend.

Now this is where my Spread Betting Strategies differ from my normal buy to hold strategy in my stock ISA. At the current time I would be reluctant to purchase stocks to hold given the dramatic price rises. I feel uncomfortable about going long now but that is what the spread betting strategies I’m using is telling me to do. I need to identify the trend of the market and trade in that direction and not fight it. I will not try to impose my will on the market.

The 7 trades I set up (on 18^th October) on my spread betting platform were as follows…

                                                Total risk

Buy Tesco @ 390.4                       £22

Buy Northern Foods @ 68.5           £19.20

Buy Close Brothers @ 770.1          £16.60

Buy M&S @ 368                           £14.10

Buy Vodafone @ 137.5                 £20

Buy Beazley @ 118.4                   £18.40

Buy Filtona @ 165.7                     £20.4

Buy FirstGroup @ 428.6                £14.85

I set up a contingent stop loss orders on each trade and the stop loss points combined with the bet size per point determine the total risk. I have not given the exact stop loss and size of the trade as this may tempt visitors to this site to copy. This site is a diary and doesn’t make recommendations on any assets so I don’t feel they are needed anyway. My stop losses where determined by a recent low.

As mentioned in a previous post, as part of my spread betting strategies, I only want to risk 1% of my capital at this stage. I am publishing the total risk to keep myself in check! I know that 2 of the trades above where slightly above that threshold (of £20) but they are only slightly over and I’m comfortable with the risks associated with each trade.

I will give an update in the next day or two to let you know if any trades where executed and if so are they in profit (and hopefully not a loss!).

Technorati Tags: Financial Spread Betting UK, Spread Betting Strategies