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Is spread betting for fools?


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Guest gold menber
On 27/04/2020 at 15:15, dmedin said:

Trading and investing are both b*llocks ... leave it to the professionals.  The kind of people who actually enjoy sitting on their spreadsheets and analysing book value.

76% of 'punters' lose :D  - I've no idea where they get that figure from but I can tell you that it's higher than that.

mayby higher, mayby not, the bulk on the other side of this equation would be the insiders, the house etc....surely not the chancers. The thread was very good. I never met yet anyone wining millions in lottery, yet I believe such venues are available,  venues yes, millionaires, I don't think so. Then again, I come from a conspiracy angle.

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On 29/04/2020 at 14:22, OSCARDAX said:

Yes of course - they do NOT make money from trading, if you could why sell a book / a course / a tip-sheet? ALL BS

 

There are so many of them (supposed top hedge fund managers, retired star traders and all the rest) who seem to have switched into writing books, starting training centres, selling speeches and the like, and you have to wonder if they are able to turn $15,000 into $5 million from trading why they aren't happy just to keep doing it and enjoy a luxurious life filled with holidays abroad in the sun and good times ... why would they want to spend all their free time giving speeches and training on trading?  It makes no sense.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello,

I have been watching this post with some curiosity. I too have just looked at my total deposits vs total withdrawals. i probably have a similar pattern

The good thing is that I had estimated my losses quite well LOL.

13 minutes ago, dmedin said:

I spent some time looking over my old trades from 2018.  Realized how fking sh!t I was.

Then I got really depressed when I realized that maybe I still am fking sh!t.

 

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  • 1 year later...

Definitely not for fool. I'm not you just need a good strategy. Took a while to polish mine. But since trading with IG, let's just say I took my original capital invested when I first started and basically just trading on profits now. I average about £2k/week now and thinking about doubling my capital. This is my weekly gains attached. Not sure why people lose money  but I can only speak for myself and my own strategy.

2053312452_Screenshot2021-08-23at02_32_05.png.e8bae3b3994060c6917222629e746fca.png 

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  • 2 months later...
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Since this is still my all-time-favourite thread, I've decided to continue here 😀

Admittedly, haven't logged into this forum for about a year or so. Just had my head down and was grinding.

Countless of hours in front of the screen working on my craft. Read about 50 trading/investing books, hundreds of articles in the internet, forum posts, blog posts, youtube videos. Thousands of hours of thinking about the market.

In any case, it just so happened yesterday, that I finally broke above break-even on my account. Guess IG is going to close my account soon now, they can't have that lol 😉

So here's a quick recap:

  • First trade in this account on 02/03/2018
  • 1345 days of trading (well not really, cause of weekends and stuff, but that's the timespan in between then and now 😉)
  • 1956 trades closed
  • 945 profitable (48%)
  • Total Profit of profitable trades: £19.4k
  • 1011 non-profitable
  • Total Loss of non-profitable trades: £18.5k
  • Net Gain: £900 (Or £600 according to the analytics tool below, not sure what's correct, transaction log shows £900)
  • 2018: -£544 Net Loss, 447 Trades
  • 2019: -£1413 Net Loss, 860 Trades
  • 2020: -£1223 Net Loss, 292 Trades
  • 2021 (so far): £4077 Net Profit, 357 Trades

 

Interestingly, in 2020 I came really close to Break-Even once, in fact just £26 short of BE, but then lost it all again and some more. I was on a better track back then, than before, but still not the right track.

Really only since April this year is where things started to look better and I got some consistency in the game. Since April I only had 2 loss-making months (Aug, Sep), but these were only small losses compared to the gains before and after.

All-time-PnL.thumb.jpg.6be911a2fc6bc5a88984dcd83cb0e34b.jpg 

So where does the journey go from here?

I obviously hope to stay in the profit zone and finally add some serious profits to this account. Steadily growing the account until I'm at a point where I can withdraw part of the profits each quarter to invest into other ventures.

 

Key Learnings from 3.5 years of trading:

  • Forget about trying to make 20%, 50%, 100% gains per month. You might pull that off once or twice, but the amount of risk required to do that is ultimately going to blow your account. I'm aiming for 10% return per month now which I'm confident can be achieved on a long-term basis
  • Forget about trading on 1min or 5min charts for the most part and closing out your trade every hour to put on a new one (daytrading).
    I'm not saying ignore the 5min chart all-together, I sometimes put on positions on the 5min chart, but only to find a good entry point. My analysis is done on the hourly and daily chart and I'm holding my position until the hourly/daily chart would suggest otherwise.
  • Forget about trying to pick one market or one subset of a market and only trade that day-in and day-out. Like I hear people (including myself back in the days) say all the time "I'm a forex trader" or "I trade US equities" or "I trade the gap-and-go set-up" or "I'm a trend-follower".
    Nowadays, I trade everything across all asset classes: Stocks, Currencies, Commodities, Indices. Whatever is moving and has a valid set-up. I trade trends, but also counter-trend movements. I go long, I go short. I buy into fundamentals, but also do pure volatility plays. I hold positions for weeks and months, but sometimes only for days. Rarely, if ever for less than a day.
  • Forget about looking at a trade in isolation. I now build portfolios and manage those. I have about 10 long-short positions open at a time and use portfolio management techniques to manage the risk on a portfolio level instead of on any one individual trade. That way, if a trade goes against me, I don't lose my ****, but can apply counter-act measures to re-balance my portfolio.
  • Lastly, forget about what day of the week it is or day in the month or your running PnL and trade according to that. Like, some (including my past self) might take a profit on a position because it is the end of the month and they are still short their monthly profit target and closing that trade would take them above it. You're missing the bigger picture. You rather want to have a month with smaller profit or even loss-making than getting out of that trade too early, when the market doesn't suggest that yet. Always trade the market, never your PnL.

 

That's it from me folks.

@dmedin @nit2wynit Hope you guys are doing great, too. Catch-up soon ✌

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Thanks for the update, interesting stuff. Looking at the cumulative total return chart I would be inclined to look at it from the other end, it looks as though in April and November the markets or you were doing something different that turned things around, were you able to identify what that was?

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You mean April & November this year?

Yeah, in April I was re-starting with a fresh mindset, process and approach to the markets. Essentially incorporating the learnings I noted earlier. Stopped "day-trading", started looking at longer timeframes, stopped looking at positions in isolation and instead started building a portfolio with up to 10 long/short positions.

And November (this running month), there's a strong spike-up in the PnL because I closed one of the positions I've been holding for a few weeks, which was my largest winner to-date.

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