Everythings coming together! After I properly chartered that spead, it looks even better now.
I calculated my profit per trade in Eurex from my long log of trades and worked out the maximum I could realistically pay in comissions. I then set about researching every broker I could find, emailing dozens and dozens of firms asking if they offer ASX, which is the exchange I would be trading on.
Found very few who offered ASX and even fewer who didn't ask for a huge amount as a minimum balance. Then I encoutered a problem with margin, the margins for the products I want to trade are huge, and I needed 25% margin. As I am trading a spread it's frustrating to need a bigger margin than those trading outright because they add the margins on each product and seemed no one is willing to offer me a margin offset. Finally I find a broker who will offer me a manageable 50% margin and reduce my comissions in the 2nd month to something realistic for the strategy I will adopt. After dozens of emails and phone calls I negotiated 25% intra-day margin and much cheaper comissions with a cheaper structure on hitting 6000 lots a month.
I finally got a decent ratio for tick value in the spread vs comissions and should have roughly £300 in costs (massively cheaper than my previous arrangements when I was trading of ~£950-£2000) for platform and charts, have used the charts previously and the software in the last few days on demo account.
Plus I should get 3 months (100%) rebate from the exchange as I am new to the exchange. I found a new place to live, which is cheaper due to the locaton, but has a nice big window with sunlight streaming in and a big desk and spacious enough to trade. A club house next door, for virtually nothing each month, so I can work out at the gym, should help keep positive during the bad times!
Secured part time work 6.30pm to 8.00pm which covers rent and saturday work to help cover expenses, teaching English. Plus I can drop the work pretty easily, but gives me some stability. The markets open at 5.30am in Hong Kong so I pretty much have 11-12 hours of trading initially. I love how the markets are 23 hours, maybe I will one day hate that, but it seems the spread moves about throughout these hours, so can really put the hours in, eurex really died after 4pm, but I am still to see the markets actually move. Nonetheless everything has fallen into place. So this blog will resume! still trading spreads, just different products. Trading smaller size than before but overall my costs will be cheaper. Hoping to really build my account in these first 3 months and get my size up and hit even cheaper comissions, whilst I get exchange rebates. Updates to follow!
