Trade of The Week: Two Golden Opportunities Taken

I was lucky enough to have taken a stake in gold miner Centamin Egypt at just under 65p-per-share when its share price was in the doldrums in late July, since when my SIPP holding -- not a spread bet in this case -- has risen by more than 40%. Here's how the Centamin chart (courtesy of Spread Co) has developed since:




In this case, it's nice to see that the up-trend seems to be resuming after

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Trading the Price Pendulum

And now for something a little different.

My latest article over at TRADERS' Magazine is titled Trading the Price Pendulum. It draws on the idea of a pendulum as an analogy for the way markets move: swinging from bearish to bullish and back again, gaining momentum and then losing it again, meeting support and resistance at the extremes, and notionally representing "fair value" in the middle.

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No news is good news...

Sorry it's been a bit quite here at Better Spread Betting for the past few days, but I've been busy working on Project FX (the new Forex book) that I hinted at when I told you about my Grand Day Out at RPD FX (and ETX Capital).

I'll tell you more about the new book, and I'll have some other interesting content for you to read here real soon. In the meantime, no news is good news because it means

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Bonus "Trade of The Week" on Petropavlovsk

Since nobody likes to see a losing trade (whatever you argue to the contrary) I have supplemented this week's original "trade of the week" with this one featuring gold miner Petropavlovsk. Here's what the result of the opened-and-closed trade looked like with IG Index... and I must remember to start calling them simply "IG":




It was a nice £67.46 profit on a modest £1-per-point bet in just two

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ETX Capital's New Platform is Coming

Just a short note to say that ETX Capital will shortly be launching a new trading platform, so if you haven't got an ETX Capital account, now might be a good time to get one.

The new platform will be fully customisable, so that you can arrange your trading screen exactly how you like it. Actually, I like it just the way it is, so I'm pleased to hear that...

"Because we know that the original

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Trade of The Week: Supreme Skill vs. Lady Bad-Luck on Lonmin

I'm all for warts 'n' all coverage of spread betting and of trading in general, so my "trades of the week" features won't always be winning trades. In that spirit, today's examples is a good one.

When the Lonmin share price "gapped up" on news that the Marikana miners had returned to work, I thought it would be a good time to go long. But I'm not stupid, and so I waited for a significant

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Trading "Other People's Money"

A short note today, to say that I took my "Alternative Equity Curve" account positive... simply to show that I could:




The significance of this is that I have now taken all of my deposited cash (plus £25 for my trouble) from the account while leaving about £300 worth of equity (i.e. accumulated positions + cash, not shown) in the account to continue trading. In other words: this account is now

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Two Lines are Better Than One! (or are they?)

If you've used the MetaTrader client terminal to trade foreign exchange currency pairs via a provider such as RPD FX, you will have noticed how the charts that are embedded in order tickets show two price lines rather than one. The lower line shows the bid (selling) price and the upper line shows the ask (buying) price.




I like this idea, and coincidentally I used the same idea in my Better

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Hot Off The Press: The New Look IG

Anyone who logs onto their IG Index spread betting account from today (Saturday 15 September) will notice a crisp new look, which I rather like. And if you don't have an IG Index (now simply called "IG") account, why not create one now?




All of the functionality that I like so much appears still to be there, and I've not heard otherwise, so it's well worth a look if you never have... or not

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Energising my spread bet portfolio(s) with Essar Energy

I was prompted to write this blog posting by an article on The Motley Fool titled 3 Oil & Gas Shares Rising Fast. I recognised one of the stocks -- Essar Energy -- as one that I took a punt on recently.

Here's what the trade looks like in a Capital Spreads account:




What you can't see there is that I have a stop order at 126 protecting protecting most of my profit... and that's guaranteed!

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An Alternative Equity Curve, Part 2

The Money In / Money Out (MIMO) Alternative Equity Curve that I discussed the other day has really grown on me as a way of demonstrating the performance of a spread betting portfolio in a way that is indifferent to whether one is day trading (putting money in and taking profits out regularly) or position trading (running a longer term portfolio with only occasional deposits or withdrawals).

To

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Trade of The Week: Cape Closed

I've featured Cape as my "Trade of The Week" before, and now I feature it again because I've closed the  trade with the result as shown in this IG Index P & L Breakdown Report:




This report, which is one of the things I like about IG Index, shows how the position trade ran for about six weeks to generate a £68.03 capital profit (P/L) plus £4.50 in Dividends (yes, you get them on spread bets)

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An Alternative Equity Curve

There are a few different ways of showing the performance of your investment portfolio, including as a traditional "equity" curve that shows how the total value of your portfolio has fallen or risen over time.

The problem is that this kind of equity curve is only really representative if you deposited an initial some which you never added to or took away from during the life of the equity curve.

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A Grand Day Out at RPD FX (and ETX Capital)

It's not very often that I talk about Foreign Exchange (Forex or FX) trading, but this may be about to change as I am embarking on the writing of a new book. Let's call it "Project X", or (even better) "Project FX".

As part of my "research" I was invited down to the offices of foreign exchange trading provider RPD FX in the City of London. If you've never heard of them, don't worry, because

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Trade of The Week: Inmarsat

This week's featured "Trade of The Week" is on Inmarsat, the Capital Spreads chart for which is shown below. You can see how I established a new long position at a price of 528.3 on 3 August, and how this position is nicely in profit at the time of writing on 6 September. This position trade is protected by a profit-locking guaranteed stop order, so now I really can't lose, and on Capital Spreads

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Deals, Dividends and Deductions

In this update I'd like to remind you of how your spread betting ledger cash balance -- which is not the same thing as you overall portfolio valuation, or your available trading funds -- is affected by three kinds of transactions: deals, dividends, and deductions.


Deals

In one of my spread betting accounts I closed several positions that I didn't wish to keep alive because the stop orders on

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Fancy a Trip to Las Vegas?

No, I'm not offering a trip to Las Vegas; nor have I taken such a trip recently except in the metaphorical sense that I will allude to shortly. But my attention-grabbing headline is relevant.

All financial speculation is a gamble, whether it is the noble art of serious "investing" or the more "risky" (apparently, but I don't believe it) pursuit of leveraged trading with spread bets or CFDs.

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Removing Currency Exposure with Spread Betting

It's a short update today because, well, I do have a life.

I wanted to highlight the fact that spread betting removes currency exposure from your trading. British spread bettors can bet on a US (or other country) stock or index, or a dollar-denominated commodity, without worrying about their "investment" falling merely as a result of the fluctuating GBP / USD exchange rate. Let the spread

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