Uphios's Blog

History..... a thing of the past.

I’m going to start this journal with a little bit about my trading history and then what the plan is for the future. I will then update on a periodic basis as and when any events happen.

I started trading towards the end of 2001, shortly after the World Trade Centre attack. Up until then I had only ever bought a few real shares, you know, those ones where you receive a piece of paper about 2 weeks later. The last real shares I had were the BT ones I bought for £16.30 or something like that and eventually sold for about £4.50. In the meantime I had discovered spread betting and opened an account with CMC spreadbet. I had been demo trading for about a month and always doing well on the DOW late in the evening when the all clear came through on my account at about 7pm on a Friday night. I immediately took a position on the DOW where the margin took almost half my newly opened £5k account. It moved 12 points against me and I doubled up my position. By 9pm I had received 2 e-mail margin calls and at 10pm a phone call where I assured the guy I had just deposited more funds. This of course was not true and I went to bed with the position still open and over 100 points adrift. Fortunately for me it bounced back first thing Monday morning and I was able to close for a very small loss. Welcome to spread betting.

Over the next 6 months I traded a little more conservatively and managed to get my account up to about £8k but it was all on gut feel and I noticed that I would regularly win on three days and give it all back on one day. Another female trader I was in touch with was getting a similar experience and had just started learning Elliot waves in order to try and improve. With her growing experience with Elliot and my gut feel I turned by 8k into £180k in less than a year. This was easy money. We shorted the DOW down from 10400 to 7200 basically on my gut feel and caught all of the rises worth having with decent targets on her Elliot waves. Then the Iraq war started. Everywhere I read this would be good for the market but I couldn’t see that it would be and continued my short outlook. I went with my gut feel and she went with Elliot. After dumping £30k in fairly short order I vowed not to do as another college had done and lose all my winnings so I withdrew £120k and bought a house. Good job I did because the remainder evaporated away. At least I still have the property.

Two more restarts with a lot of studying of Elliot, Gann, chart signals, candlesticks and selling my sole to the devil didn’t improve my success rate. I remained convinced there was a way of beating this market thing but just couldn’t crack it. So in May 2006 I finally threw in the towel when my account was back to break even after another fruitless year. I told the guy at CMC I was quitting because I can’t seem to get beyond breakeven, he told me that was better than most!.

Six weeks went by and I am back in the market, this time with just a £500 stake and here is where the journal starts. My £500 has become £250 and small accounts are very hard to get off the floor. So the intention here is not to record a list of trades, the time for them will have been and gone by the time anybody reads this. No, the intention is to record how I turned my trading around. Of course if there are no entries in a few weeks time you will know why.

Charts and crystal balls

I’m not a big fan of charting. It seems to me that if I were to draw on a map all the places I have ever visited in time order it would not give anyone a clue as to where I was going next. Hell, I don’t even know that myself. The problem is what else have we got? When a broker was asked what way the market was going next he replied that he leaves predicting the future to the gypsies, which I thought was good advice. The only good thing I can see about charting is that everybody else uses them and if you can see the same as the majority of the money sees then you are going to be ‘with’ the market. This seems to explain to me why markets can move in apparently the wrong direction on news events, the charts override the news. Of course if the news is in tune with the charts then we see the big moves. In fact often the news seems to be ignored until it is favourable to where the charts indicated.

So I start from the principle that it is 50/50, the market can either go up or down. The object of any market method is to improve these odds, otherwise I may as well just spin a coin. There is though another side to the better methods that I find particularly useful and this is to do with survival. A good method will tell me when to enter the market and in which direction, it will give me a target area to come out and most importantly it will give me a stop where this trade is wrong. Whilst I was never very good with Elliot waves one of the thing I loved about it was some of the clear stops.

So, whilst trading on primarily gut feel I am going to simultaneously try and develop a method that incorporates the best of what I have seen from other methods sprinkled with a little of my own observations. I am going to gear this toward the Forex market, mainly because it is always moving and by changing my selected currency pair I can effectively choose the rate of change. The DOW I am out of love with because it just seems so biased. What with changing the components occasionally, suspending trading if it drops too fast (though not if it rises to fast!) and overnight charges I think Forex just gives a fairer playing field.