Day Trading & Forex Forum

jls483

Okay here are the rules.

1. You can only submit to this thread if you reveal your own earning prediction.

2. You are given £100k to invest

3. You need to tell us how much you think you will earn over the next year. Or put another way how much you would have earned if you had been given a £100k a year ago and you can add a little bit for gained experince - but don't get carried away.

4.Please tell us what sort of trading you will use to achieve this and which company you will use.

5. Give your predictions for a number of percentiles (e.g. P50 is the expected earning P25 is the bad case and P75 is a good case, P1 is the worst possible case and P99 is the very best)

6. Not sure if this is allowed - but you recommend the post so that we get as many entries as possible . If this is not allowed - don't do it!

To start the ball rowling - I'll go first.

I would use a spreadbet account with deal4free and would trade the FTSE 100 rolling cash. I would deal in tiny amounts and never sell at a loss.

P1: -10% P25: 10% P50: 50% P75: 60% P99: 75%

rossored

To quote:

"I would use a spreadbet account with deal4free and would trade the FTSE 100 rolling cash. I would deal in tiny amounts and never sell at a loss "

Can you guarantee this last bit? If so please tell me how so I can do it too!!

jls483

Rossored,

You have not read the rules! You can only ask questions if you have given your prediction! When you've done that I'll explain the not selling at a loss remark

I should also make clear that the reason I am asking is not for individuals to "show off". I'm sure like me, most of us would rather keep our returns quiet!

The reason I am asking is that I would find it very useful to know the sort of trading that people do. What sort of returns they can expect and how risky it is.

We can then use this information to decide what sort of trading might be worth finding out more about (what we choose could be different for everyone).

So if you would also find this information useful - please post. I did. To be interesting we need a good cross section so don't decide not if you have made a loss!

Thanks,

John.

Henry

From the Thought for the day thread :

An amateur thinks about how much he can make.
A professional thinks about how much he can lose.

Just because someone posts on here that they can make a huge amount trading one way, and someone else says they lose loads trading another way, doesn't mean anyone else will have a similar experience with either method. Find something that works for you . . .

H.

jls483

Henry,

Like most people on these boards I just want to learn. I know very little about day trading and all I would like to know is what sort of things people do, how riskier they are and very roughly what they would expect to make.

I'm not looking for a short cut, a free ride or money for nothing. I will not just take up the method of day trading that somebody claims gives the best returns. It will all go in the mixer with a very large pinch of salt and I will have a better understanding of what is out there.

For example, what I do know is that bank accounts are 100% safe and you might get something like 4%. Bonds are a more volatile and normally return a little more. Shares are even more volatile, but over the past century they have returned something like 12% (don't quote me). Day trading is ...

You say find something that works for me. This is what I am trying to do.

John.

rossored

Okay, well I wont answer your question directly but this is what I do:

I trade spreads on a mostly-daily basis with IG Index, on the FTSE, Dow and occasionally Dax. I always run a stop-loss, typically 30 points on the FTSE/Dax and probably 50 on the Dow, otherwise you're on a hiding to nothing.

I normally gamble (lets face it, thats basically what it is) about 25% of my dealing account per trade:some of you might not say thats not very clever but...

...I win on between 80% and 90% of trades and before anyone else posts another reply, no, thats not BS.

I'm not going to say what I earn from it - obviously not millions - but it does me just fine and at the moment and beats working for a living.

But you do have to find your own groove and no doubt you'll do that - as Henry says, what floats my boat might sink yours. And I would whole-heartidly recommend paper trading your chosen market for some time before you invest, if you havent done so already.

Henry

Well the simple answer is that day trading can return 1000% a day or more. Or you might lose all your cash in 10 minutes. Or anything inbetween.

I understand where you are coming from, but personally I don't think asking people how much they expect to make is the best way to find out "what is out there". A better place to start would be to look at some of the more recent posts on FBs "The Basics Of Trading" thread, and the questions that TBS has put up; going through those will give you a much better idea of which area to direct your studies in.

I don't mean to sound rude, but I suspect you wont get a huge amount of people posting their results on here, because apart from anything else this is a question that gets asked time and again on these boards, as you can see if you search through the various topics. No doubt I'll be proved wrong as usual as a flood of people post right after me

H.

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jls483

okay rossored. Thanks for telling us the sort of trading that you do. I get the impression that at least 50% of t2w members are day traders like yourself following whatever scheme they have developed and range from beginners losing lots to hardened professionals making crazy money and giving courses to whoever they can persuade to come along.

I myself am a bit of an oddball (t2w wise). Although I trade many times a day, I trade spreadbets as if they were shares. In other words when I take out a spreadbet I imagine I am buying the share and I make sure I have enough capital to cover any falls. I trade the FTSE so I cover any falls to about 3000 (and get the personal loan application ready if it goes further). I then keep the contract until the FTSE rises to whatever I bought at plus a little bit and then sell it at a profit.

This does means that I might hold a share for ten minutes, ten hours, ten days or ten years. This also means that over the short term I can lose lots of money, but the FTSE always bounces back eventually and all the time I taking little profits which with the current volatility soon add up.

John.