Well I just completed my first week on my simulated account, trading as though this was a £5000 account which is the size I will open with if I do eventually go live
It wasn't a bad week overall - and I learned something real important too!
I've been trading Natural Gas, plus shares in Pandora, Ctrip and Abercrombie & Fitch
I've placed 15 trades of which only one made me a loss
The 14 good trades made me £369.50
The one bad one lost me £257.37
So I have a net profit of £112.13
My Trading success rate was 93.33% I made a couple of trades I was really happy with, three of my best four trades were closed on profit calls and I seem to do better using this method than sitting watching the trade as I tend to get nervous and quit out sooner than I should
I also placed two totally automated trades, placing order price, profit and loss calls and just letting the trade sort itself out
One thing I really did notice, placing trades for a smaller number of contracts relative to my account size has made things seem a lot less like a rollercoaster ride and actually quite relaxing at times.
The trade that lost me a lot of money was on Natural Gas which took a strong dive on Thursday around 3:30pm.
Now the interesting things is I did a google search to see if I could shed any light on my sudden misfortune and found out that on Thursdays there is a weekly announcement regarding gas supply and reserves and this week the levels were higher than the market expected - so of course the price fell suddenly.
http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/
Storage build is slightly larger than market expectations. Market expectations called for a build of 71 Bcf. When the EIA storage report was released at 10:30 a.m., the price for the June natural gas futures contract fell 9 cents to $4.60/MMBtu on the Nymex. Prices continued trading around that level in the hour following the release.
Just looking back over the last few weeks, both times I have benefitted from sudden jumps in gas prices have been Thursday afternoons around 3:30pm!
So what did I learn, well I really need to know more about a market if I am trading in it and hope to be consistently successful. SImply but obvious.
I did previously post on this thread 'I'll keep a track of my progress on here and if nothing else it will give you all a good laugh when things go tits up for totally predictable reasons'.
Well sudden Nat Gas price jumps on Thursday afternoons should have been totally predictable. Not the direction of them, just the likelyhood of one occurring
OK so another lesson learnt - I'll make sure I don't have any open positions on Nat Gas on a Thursday afternoon - but I will make a point of watching what happens about 3:30pm GMT and see if I can jump onto the bandwagon if I see a sudden price shange occur.
If i had known before about these Nat Gas announcements I may well have had a 100% success rate on my first week of proper simulated trading, by simply making sure I was doing nothing at the critical time.
Rich