After Advice please

Am reasonably new and thinking about trying out cfd trading but was wondering how much i would need to start an account , was hoping to initially try 5k
I have a small Sb account and when i say small i mean it £750 atm and it has piqued my interest in trading. The style i would be trying is trend following either moving stops up manually after work each night or trailing stops whenever possible.
Im looking for advice on Account size for cfd`s and position sizing and wether trend following is viable for cfd's
thanks in advance.

welcome to trader2win imho, if you are new to forex trading I wouldn't advice you to open a live account just yet, if you can stick with demo for a couple of months, and treat your demo account as real money with a capital that you think you would like to use in forex, trade with and trust me you will realize a lot of things during the process, another thing you might consider doing it going through pipsology (google it) its an online free course for learning forex, it will really help a lot, with regards to opening an account, the minimum deposit really depends on the broker, I think oanda offers like a 1$ min, and hotforex the broker that I;m using offers a minimum of 5$ and other may have a higher value! but for now and before you try and use your savings in a crazy market such as forex, try to aquire as much knowledge as possible and keep on practicing for a couple of months, it migh seem long but trust me its really worth it! do not rush and fall like the 90% of traders do! best of luck

thanks for the reply it looks as if i have not made myself clear my mistake im sorry .
Im going to be trading CFD`s in stocks not forex that market moves too quickly i think for what im going to try. Im hoping to find out more about the turtle methodology and employ that at the moment im still learning about how to spot uptrends/downtrends and entry/exits mostly im doing it through books as i cant find many sites based around this method im guessing its not exciting enough for a lot of ppl these days but i think its the one that suits me best .
Anyhow thanks for your reply maybe if i do make some money at it ill try it on the forex market and see if it works hehe

no worries apologies for the mix up I do not know much when it comes to stocks but I do wish you the best of luck..

mrmenstig said:

im still learning about how to spot uptrends/downtrends and entry/exits mostly im doing it through books as i cant find many sites based around this method

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Try reading How to Trade in Stocks by Jesse Livermore.

You might also want to look at a trio of books (fairly new) by Al Brooks. Don't be put off by the fact that they focus on day trading, there are some interesting concepts in there.

Ive bought a lot of books from amazon regarding trend following/turtle trading as it would seem to suit my life at the moment, having still to work etc i just needed something i could put the orders in for and leave without too much worrying during the daytimes.I also got an android tablet which allows me to monitor trades etc during the daytime now all i need to do i think is work out what constitutes a trend and the rules i need to enter into sharescope in order to follow it

Mr Menstig, before you go near any method with real money, you need to do a lot of backtesting. Those that end up making it in this game have done 100's and 100's of hours of backtesting - you'd do well to follow their lead.

can you tell me any sites that will work with UK stocks like stockfetcher does for US ones (if id does work with UK ones i cant get it to) I have sharescope plus but dont see a backtest function
any help would be much appreciated

mrmenstig said:

can you tell me any sites that will work with UK stocks like stockfetcher does for US ones (if id does work with UK ones i cant get it to) I have sharescope plus but dont see a backtest function
any help would be much appreciated

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Use either a broker's historical charts, or buy some software which allows you to go back over years of data. You should test by hand your method over 5 years minimum, or 1000 trades, but the more the better. You'll need to come up with a set of rules for your strategy in order for it to be executed exactly the same every time. There is no discretion invloved in backtesting.

Does Anyone know of/can tell me the name of any decent software that runs backtests on UK LSE data as all the stuff ive found so far is for the US markets

after some digging around on the net i came up with two programs
one looked favorite Meta stock as it allows you to run your strategies for forex,options,cfds and most other things.
The other one appeared to be mostly Austrailian orientated so i didnt look into it much.
Does anyone else have much experiance of meta stock or use another backtesting program?

mrmenstig said:

after some digging around on the net i came up with two programs
one looked favorite Meta stock as it allows you to run your strategies for forex,options,cfds and most other things.
The other one appeared to be mostly Austrailian orientated so i didnt look into it much.
Does anyone else have much experiance of meta stock or use another backtesting program?

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Put the backtesting aside for a bit, and just concentrate on educating yourself through the books you bought. There's no point jumping into backtesting if you haven't got a clear idea of the strategy you want to test. I brought up backtesting as it's essential for anyone who wants to trade a mechanical method, but you're not at that stage yet.

im certain i want to go for a breakout/trendfollowing system
for US stocks i was toying around with stockfetcher and came up with a 6 day/21 day moving average crossover breakout system. These are the results from the backtest.
There were 99 total stocks entered. Of those, 79 or 79.80% were complete and 20 or 20.20% were open.
Of the 79 completed trades, 38 trades or 48.10%resulted in a net gain.
Your average net change for completed trades was: 2.86%.
The average draw down of your approach was: -5.51%.
The average max profit of your approach was: 11.26%
The Reward/Risk ratio for this approach is: 1.92
Annualized Return on Investment (ROI): 65.15%, the ROI of ^SPX was: 38.75%.

Exit Statistics
Stop Loss was triggered 12 times or 15.19% of the time.
Stop Profit was triggered 20 times or 25.32% of the time.
Trailing Stop Loss was triggered 47 times or 59.49% of the time.
You held for the maximum period of time (0 days) 0 times or 0.00% of the time.
An exit trigger was executed 0 times or 0.00% of the time.

It closes all trades on the last day and it was showing
Transaction Summary
Daily Gains : $2954.24
Daily Losses : $1266.44
Running Gain/(Loss) : $12948.87
# Stocks held at end of day : 0
This testing is done on a $100,000 account so far the only way of altering the amount of stock it buys is by telling it to enter more trades ie it can enter 10 trades a day and have a maximum of 250 trades open at one time.
I used 5 entries a day and 20 trades open and it would buy $5000 worth of stock at any one time.
As far as i can see it only works on US stocks im hoping to find on that will work in a similar way for UK listed ones to try similar testing out .
Thanks for all your advice Tony and everyone else who replied to this thread if any of you know of such a program or how to program sharescopes testing functions could you please leave details here thanks.

mrmenstig said:

Am reasonably new and thinking about trying out cfd trading but was wondering how much i would need to start an account , was hoping to initially try 5k
I have a small Sb account and when i say small i mean it £750 atm and it has piqued my interest in trading. The style i would be trying is trend following either moving stops up manually after work each night or trailing stops whenever possible.
Im looking for advice on Account size for cfd`s and position sizing and wether trend following is viable for cfd's
thanks in advance.

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i would advice against trading CFDs; why don't you trade the underlying stocks?

alphadude said:

i would advice against trading CFDs; why don't you trade the underlying stocks?

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5 grand is a tiny amount to trade stocks, but a reasonably substantial amount for CFDs.
My experience from the distant past in trading both stock CFDs and the underlying......
is it really is not that much difference.
The spread will be the same.

I went for CFD`s as 5000 looks like it will go farther with them than just trading the underlying stocks
YES i know its a margin product but ive gone for a breakout trend follow type strategy and im only risking 1% of my account per trade so thats £50 i can work out what i need to buy in order to make a reasonable return compared to risk (ie how many cfd`s to loss ratio) using the ig markets buy tool if i cant afford to make a reasonable return on 250 cfds i dont bother trading it until or if my account gets bigger it looks like trading stocks and or etf`s