Arbu does Free Proprietary Trader Training

I was thinking for a while of doing one of the paid trader training course but in the end decided to follow the recommendation to save a lot of money and teach myself . So here's a journal to track how it goes. I'm actually two months into it now and so will be copying a lot of what's in my existing trading journal which I've kept on my computer into here. I've been able to devote maybe half my time to this project.

29th November

I shorted ocado shares a couple of times over the summer and made about £80 each time. I use ocado myself and they just seem too generous in their discounts and I know they've never made a profit. So I shorted them again on a rise for which there seemed to be little explanation. There was some talk about Morrissons buying ocado, but that didn't seem possible. I was getting more confident so went for a £20 stake. Set my stop loss to a level which I just couldn't see it reaching.

Reading "The Futures Game" as recommended in the training course, and sorting out an extra monitor.

3rd December

ocado has gone up and hit my stop. It just seems to make no sense to me at all. Maybe too many other people have been shorting it, and they're all having to close their positions? £280 down.

"The Futures Game" is pretty dry. But I take the point that the futures markets do provide a service for hedging and so movements aren't just random - speculators are in effect providing a service to hedgers so should be rewarded for doing so. It's just very hard to be on top of it.

Spending quite a lot of time familiarising myself with different platforms.

6th December


Trading the FTSE on a demo platform using Bollinger Bands and MACD as suggested in this thread. Didn't work. It seems to be a lot harder to make it work in practice than when you look at a graph in retrospect.

14th December

Still using the demo platform. Using some of the technical trading ideas suggested by the broker. These seem to be based largely on support and resistance levels. Didn't work. Lost quite a lot of money.

31st December

Demo account has been closed because I've had it for a month now. Lost money on that nearly every day I used it.

6th January

Reading a couple of books I already owned - Anthony Bolton's Investing Against the Tide and the FT guide to Using the Financial Pages.

13th January

Reading New Market Wizards. Interesting, although it was written quite a while ago and I'm sure things have changed quite a bit since then.