Hi

well pretty much as expected today: just treading water and very little happening either to the FTSE or my portfolio. In fact I'm about £40 down on the day, which is better than I expected really. I've had a few really great days and, as always happens, there's a retrace and/or consolidation after big rises.

Again, as expected, RANGE RESOURCES had a small retrace of 1.75 points. Considering this is about £175 down for me, I reckon I did well to be just £40 down overall. Fortunately the rest of my portfolio did fairly well and this helped to reduce those losses.
SOUND OIL made a small but satisfying gain to keep me well in profit on this share.

Otherwise no complaints at all; my account funds are still a solid £2565 going into the weekend. All being well I hope to add a few more pyramids next week, particularly with SOUND OIL, which I feel is ready for some serious upwards movement in the near future...

Some of you may have noticed I am becoming slightly more 'adventurous' with my spread betting. At the moment it seems to be paying off, though I still retain a healthy respect for my own rules and regulations, as it were. I'm here to make some money and, quite honestly, 'fiddle-faddling' around with £2-3/point, at this stage, is not going to make that happen. We'll see how the next few months pan out.....

BIG AL

Al,
do you set limit/stop orders on an evening to automatically execute trades for you or are you placing each trade manually during the day?

_________________
Spread Betting Trader
http://spreadbettingtrader.blogspot.com/

Hi

to be honest I usually set up an OTO (order to open) the previous evening based on the last few days performance (of the SP!). If a share has been doing well, and I think it's still trending up, then I'll set the open level around 5-10% above the top of the spread quoted by IG Index. This way I can get in on a positive upswing - which will hopefully continue throughout the day; however the danger is that the SP may rise initially and then fall back again below your opening price. I try to avoid this by not having the opening level too near to the current SP - it's a balancing act I suppose, and there's always the usual element of luck and 'gut' feel about the whole thing. So far, anyway, I've been fairly lucky when opening new or 'pyramid' positions...

BTW I rarely, if ever, open a trade manually - don't really know why, just one of those things that I'm not comfortable with...

BIG AL

Hi Al, thanks for the reply.
I know what you mean about manual trades, sometimes its hard to pull the trigger. I seem to have fallen victim to what you describe with setting up OTOs, it opens for me then inevitably the price plummets.
When trying to manually open a trade, the beginning of the day throws up spreads which are too high, so you dont take the trade, then if the share price rises you can miss out on half of the days price upswing. Grrr!
Its all a juggling act!

_________________
Spread Betting Trader
http://spreadbettingtrader.blogspot.com/