8th October

Subject trading first week

Dear John

Today I completed my first full week of demo trading. I got up early and did a quick 10 pip trade in 5 minutes and then a loss which was my fault entirely as the trend was going up fast but it ran out of steam. So I got out at 15 pips and then put in a sell and recouped the 15 I lost. What makes me excited is that I reached my 10 pip target in less than 5 minutes and now it feels great that the day is ahead of me and anything else is a bonus and if I decide not to trade again today its ok. If it looks like a bad day I won’t trade as I have done what I set out to do. Getting up early is the key. Although they say you can trade 24/6.5 I still feel that in the evenings for us when the markets are all officially closed things do slow down.

Last night as an exercise on another demo account I worked on picking up only a few pips at a time and that worked fine but the markets were sluggish. I was able to pickup anything between 3 and 8 pips. Personally I don’t want to make the evenings my main trading time of my day. I rather get up early and when I’m refreshed put in a few trades and then get on with my day. I see the euro is now dropping as fast as it went up 30 minutes ago but I’m not in a rush to enter the trade unless it does something dramatic. I did my practice on the VT. Instead of putting in a 1 to represent 10 I put in 10 because with Worldspreads I put in 10. Boy did my profits take off. It took a while to realize what I had done so maybe it’s a good idea to stick with one platform instead.

The signs for not getting in on the down or up is that the shadows and candles are not as long as they were with the first candle drop/rise. I often find that the first drop/rise with the long spiking shadow isn’t repeated again so if I get in a few minutes later I find it harder to make a few pips. Before entering a trade and if it’s shot up into the shadow line, I wait for it to drop back into the candle before entering the trade. I guess if you are really quick at entering trades when it reaches the top of a long shadow line is to put in a sale/buy to capture the drop back down into the candle and then bale. Yesterday morning I could have picked up 40 pips that way. Relax I won’t do anything this stupid.

Yesterday I got the ball rolling to open an account with Worldspreads. I had to get a copy of my tax return from last year seeing I’m self employed and then I filled in the form online. I asked whether I could open two accounts and they said I have to wait several months before opening a second one. I guess they want to check how I fare first. In the meantime Leigh can open one with CMSFX. I’m not in a hurry to get into real trading. There is so much to learn still. I want to do the scalping course as well. I will most probably be in the USA for most of November so I’ll give you my USA address to send it to. Can’t wait to do that course.

What I also find puzzling is that Worldspreads say you have a 1 pip spread from 8 till 4 on cable. Yet yesterday and I see again today it shows clearly that there is a 2 pip spread on cable.

I am sticking to two currencies. Cable and Euro / USD. Their charts are very similar. There is enough activity to just stick with two. I have the USD / YEN as well but don’t really trade that but I use it. Also the euro spread is only 1 so I did all my trades since I went onto the Worldspreads platform on the euro.

To analyze my emotions for the past week I’d say that the excitement has settled down to just sticking to my daily target and once reached to sit back and get on with my day. I found by doing that there is no rush to enter into a trade unless it’s obviously a cracker.

I see the government is offering a £50 billion bale out. Will the pound strengthen on that news? So far the pound keeps dropping. Have a great day. I hope your shares are recovering. Kind regards - Desiree