Sorry for no post over the last few days works busy and so is life at home.
Thanks to “Off the Lip” for his comment. In answer to this the account I currently have Level2 with is digital look. I currently have accounts with tradefair, capital spreads, tdwaterhouse (formerly E*trade), CMC Markets and Digital Look(Market maker investor edition). I use to have a Paddy Power account but closed it in Favour of tradefair (quite a while ago now). At the time I preferred the tradefair platform and since they were both part of the London Capital Group they offered the same spreads, instruments etc so I decided to close the Paddy Power account.
I’ve had the opportunity to move some of my stops over the last few days. Debenhams in now safely showing a profit and I’ve reduced my risk on my northern foods position. I think 888 have risen a bit today so that may provide me with further opportunity to raise my stop in this position. Currently 888 has a risk of £4, with 888 up around 2points so far today I may be able to raise my stop at the end of the day according to my super trend strategy.
Also as I mentioned the other day I am in the process of getting spreadBettingBeginner.com up and running. It’s going to be a while yet but I will let you know when it’s ready. For the time being I will continue posting on blogger and will make it clear when I will be moving to the new site for good. If you do get chance to take a look at the new blog I would appreciate any feed back and comments about the layout. Any suggestions for enhancements and improvements will be much appreciated.
The new blog works in much the same way as this one. You can still post comments and of course you can still e-mail me.
Anyway that’s about all from me for this week. I doubt I’ll any chance to update over the weekend. Saturday I am busy all day and Sunday is looking much better.
Until next time
“May the markets be with you”
Spread Betting Beginner
HARD LESSON!
Hi again
I recently commented about my strategy of finding 'good' stocks with positive trends that I then pyramid fairly robustly. I may have painted somewhat of a rosy picture with this strategy; unfortunately there's a downside…
I had a 6 stage pyramid on an oil and gas stock (ENCORE) which suddenly and without any good or technical reason suffered a temporary 'slide', shall we say. Anyway within minutes the SP fell about 12-15 points and, you guessed it, took out every single stop! To add insult to injury the SP recovered later in the day and is now trading more or less normally.
OK, you say, at least the STOPS on your positions minimised your losses; well, yes and no because here's another hard lesson..
I had stops in place but they were non-guaranteed so the losses were more than they should have been. I normally use guaranteed stops but this was a share which only allowed the use of non-guaranteed – or at least IG INDEX only allowed this.
Anyway I did just manage to sell one of these stocks before the system kept me out and I managed to limit my loss to about £30-40, still bad enough!
So there it is, another hard lesson! I think in future no more non-guaranteed stops for me…
I'm still in the game and that's the main thing, cheers for now, Alan
When placing a big bet on a single market I would likely use a guaranteed stop order if the potential slippage could wipe me out.
The problem is that guaranteed stops are not universally available, they may be impossible to adjust out-of-hours, and they come with strings like an increased spread or (in the case of the ‘Shorts and Longs’ platform) little-publicised higher rolling charges.
So I tend to take an actuarial approach to slippage. By establishing many positions with small position sizes, I expected that any one slippage will not affect me ‘significantly’. I am also inclined to pyramid cautiously, and — if possible — evenly across the board so that no one pyramided position becomes overweight. That’s what I was alluding to at http://tradingtrail.blogspot.com/2010/10/3x-pyramid.html and http://tradingtrail.blogspot.com/2010/09/closed-micro-focus-and-mistake.html
Tony Loton, author of “Stop Orders” (the book)