Forward Testing Many traders are familiar with the concept of back testing their trading strategy, but often less thought is given to forward testing. Back testing is straightforward. You take historical tables or charts, pretend that you had been trading at that time using the strategy you are testing, and you see if the results […]

Trading Web iPOs Web IPOs in general have a chequered history. No matter how good the fundamentals of the company, such IPOs have not always enjoyed great success. For example, according to the Renaissance Capital listing of biggest Web IPOs, out of all the 10 companies in their list, just one – Google – has […]

Interest Rates and the Federal Reserve First of all it is well noting that higher interest rates translate into higher costs for businesses to borrow and can lead to currency appreciation which is in turn disruptive to a country’s manufacturing industries. Higher interest rates also affect consumers which has less disposable cash to spend in […]

Mental Noise and The Importance of Exercise and Fresh Air Trading can be an all encompassing endeavor that is hard to shut off. Your mind just keeps going on and on and on. The mental noise can often be a distraction and extremely detrimental to your trading. If you are a discretionary trader the mental […]

Flexibility…No I’m Not Talking About Stretching Successful trading is very much a counter intuitive game. It often requires you to be extremely mentally flexible and rigid in that flexibility. Yes, I did just use the words flexible and rigid in the same sentence. On top of that, I said you need to be rigidly flexible […]

A Discretionary Trading System A discretionary trading system is one where you have an element of personal choice in what spread bets or trades you are going to place and when to exit them. This is in contrast to a mechanical trading system, where your actions are dictated in advance, and you are expected to […]

A Mechanical Trading System that Works “He who fails to plan, plans to fail” – attributed to Alan Lakein. There is no doubt that you can spread bet without formally adopting a trading system. You can glance at the charts, act on news items, and perhaps achieve some success. However, most people who have traded […]

Intraday Trading Strategies Intraday trading strategies are ways to improve your chances of making a profit by trading on the markets while they are open, and not allowing any positions to remain open overnight. You may also hear this type of trading referred to as “day trading”, though where you are in the world and […]

Money Supply Announcements When you are spread betting, how can you turn money supply announcements to your advantage? Money supply is something that governments control, in essence by freely printing more bank notes. In practice, so much finance is handled electronically nowadays that the government can increase the money supply simply by diktat. Increasing the […]

Trading the News Another strategy is to simply trade the news. Most of the trading strategies we have reviewed so far are based on technical analysis and charts that rely on price action to predict the future direction of an asset in time. Another approach is to take a more ‘macro’ view and this is […]