July (gross)

Had two huge losing trades but had an amazing run in the last week bringing my total higher than June which was my target. Hopefully in August I will break 2000 euros. I have a definite up trend throughout my first 3 months so I feel a little more confident now and hopefully can be trading bigger size next month.

Update

Well at the end of May I had one really bad day losing 930 euros in 1 trade... it wasn't just me but I was feeling very demotivated and I couldn't see how anything made any sense with spreading. Luckily since then it has gone better.

Spreading is kinda cool

I only made 1 trade on Friday so didn't bother to blog about it, but today I had a reasonable up day which was nice because every Monday I have lost money so far. In fact during my second trade of the day I was down 400 euros but it eventually came back in my favour.

I am approaching the end of my first month and it has been far better than expected. Spreading is really quite fun, there is very little information on the internet as well as scalping which are the two techniques I use to trade. Spreading ensures that I am hedged when I take a trade on and I don't even have to have a bias on any of the two products. I trade two similar products and when I buy one I sell the other, the spread between them changes with time and when the spread moves wider I sell it etc. The spread does trade within a range often but can move to a new range without warning. The challenge is to make a lot of winning trades and not allow your few losing trades to be to big. There are many things I like about this style of trading one is because I am trading the spread it doesn't really matter what each individual price is, I could be buying the high of the day on one of them but that could be because the other product just blew through it's high of the day and I think the other one will catch up. It is easier to do than trading outright I don't need to guess the market direction just try to work the bid and the offer. Because I am scalping I just look for a small profit.

I try not to pay the spread between the bid and the ask, as a scalper you would like to wait in line to buy something then wait in line to sell it, the cheapest seller is always higher than the cheapest bidder so if you can bid at the best price and have someone sell it at that price to you then you can offer it at the cheapest and hope someone buys it. Not everyone wants to wait in line and if the price is rising then normally no one is going to sell it to you at the best bid price so you have to buy it off the people on the offer before they retract their offer! and soon this will become the bid anyway. It is not just about going bid and then offer when you spread because you have to think about getting out a good price and keeping yourself hedged. If your not hedged it is very easy to just lose a days profit target, so there are many factors to consider and always two ways in and out of the trade. You can always buy 1 of the products if you think it is going to go up, if it doesn't but you see the other product about to move a price down you can sell it at the last possible moment which gives you a chance to make profit on an outright and if it doesn't work just hedge yourself. I have been doing this especially if I like the price I would hedge myself at, there are many other things you can do, e.g. buy and sell one side of your hedge when it is oscillating between two prices and turn a profit whilst being hedged some of the time! Maybe I will go into more detail about it but just to say I am enjoying this style of trading.

2nd Day

Today was insane by 11am I had hit my target again but made a very costly error by double clicking by accident and lost almost half of it but managed to pull it back to where it was. The markets were moving so fast and it was so hard to get out at the price I wanted. I was really happy during the day to just sit down and get in a trade then back out 4 minutes later and go to shops and chill out.

The bobl rocketed up, I don't trade it but many people around me do and the spread shot out by 100 ticks and the environment kicked off pretty badly... I feel sorry for some guy who was helping me, who was definitely on the wrong side of it. It was just brutal how it ripped out the range so fast... when your looking for 1 tick profit and it moves 100 ticks in 20 minutes, it's a scalpers nightmare, especially if you average into it.

Training Course: Day 4

Yesterday was fun, we finished early and hit the pub and then met up with a friend for drinks afterwards and got back at 2.30am, what made for a long day after a heavy week. The atmosphere at this company is just amazing, I don't know how I could possibly go back to being a software developer, where no one has anything to talk about, you can't really get that excited about code... If this job works out for me, it's going to be pretty full on, but I can't see what else I would enjoy doing. It's going to be tough to get a place with them after training so I just have to go for it and hopefully hard work will pay off.

We set up our trading environments yesterday and watched the bond markets at the moment when it was announced that Greece was downgraded, which was pretty cool to watch. We generally spent the day being tested and improving our skills of quoting the market and different spreads and butterfly's. My keyboard and mental maths scores marginally improved and I am reasonably pleased with my other scores. I have a fair bit going on this weekend but will have to find a fair bit of time to study and read the news.

Training Course: Day 2

I am feeling a lot better today, which is good!

I decided I am not going to go into huge detail about the company or the course structure in general, at least for now as I don't know the view of others at the company. I wouldn't want to upset anyone but I will do my best to provide enough detail.

I continued to be tested and was more pleased with my results today, I managed to remember almost all the names that I was learning last night. I really don't know how I remembered 38 persons names all in a night, including their first name and surname and when many were foreign. Having stayed up learning information and revising topics ready for tomorrow I didn't get much sleep but it didn't affect me much. It's also great to meet successful traders and to hear about the money they are making, it's definitely motivating and just a great atmosphere to be in. My head feels packed full of information right now, we are learning about spreads which we will soon be using. Were focussing on things like bobl, bund, schatz etc. Just to give you some idea. I am finding the course really informative and I am so glad I applied here.

Also it's great to be back in London and to have lots going on around me, I really feel energized, something I haven't felt like in quite a while.

Support becoming Resistance

Day trading really interests me and I love how a markets move for the day is largely pinned to fundamentals or news but then how there are also so many psychological factors playing a part. There are different players with different goals, e.g hedgers and speculators. Each player is unique and has access to an array of tools. Some use technical analysis which is the process of analysing past data to predict the next move. Technical analysis can be done in so many different ways which adds to the complexity of understanding how people interpret the data but this makes trading more interesting.

Zero sum games: gambling or not?

I realised my understanding of zero sum games is actually quite good and I thought perhaps I should share some of my own thoughts. Firstly zero sum just means that for every winner there is a loser, there is no wealth created. Investing isn't a zero sum game because companies actually create wealth. I am always interested by zero sum games because you have to out think someone and it's definitely a great feeling when you make money from it too.

Preparing for training course: Intro

This is my first post and right now I am set to start at a proprietary trading firm in April on a 4 week training course and I am aiming to get backed by them although I appreciate it is going to be a tough challenge. I am spending my time learning as much as I can whilst taking some time to relax and enjoy waking up whenever I want. You can see my background on the right, I don't want to discuss it too deeply as I don't see much need too but a few thoughts can be found below.