Just wanted to share some recent profitable trades I placed in May… May was a very good month for me. I’m sorry this is a bit late! The first thing to note is the direction of the overall market in May… See below screen shot of the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 on the daily timeframes. They were both in a nice uptrend with the MACD opening up:
Markets overall – recent profitable trades
I like to get into trades when the markets overall are about to make a MACD cross over or that has just happened. The S&P 500 was a bit slower than the Nasdaq – you can see the cross over was a bit bumpy and happened mid month!
Now lets take a look at some trades I placed:
Seagate – recent profitable trades
This is an IT company. The trade I placed on this one was not for beginners – it’s not in a nice strong uptrend currently. However, I knew the price was in a habit of bumping against the EMA line at at the point I entered on 9th May, it had reached another low, and we had just had a MACD cross over. I set my target for the EMA line as I knew there would be some resistance there. Sure enough it reached it’s target by 15th May and was profitable.
GOOGLE – recent profitable trades
This one was in more of a typical trading pattern for my sytle of trading. It had started uptrending strongly after reaching overall lows. There was a support level at around the moving average cross overs and I entered at this point on 9th May, when the MACD was just about to cross. The price reached up out of a consolidation zone and hit it’s target on 11th May.
Easyjet
This was another one which was not in my typical trading pattern….. I don’t usually trade consolidations. You can see the price was moving sideways between quite a narrow channel. It made a MACD cross over at my entry point and I set my target for previous highs. This one was another profitable trade.
GOLD:
30m timeframe:
This trade was very typical of what I look for and it was profitable. I first checked the daily timeframe to make sure that the price was uptrending in the candles and the MACD. On the daily timeframe the price had just bounced away from a support level with a MACD cross over below the zero level of the histogram. Next I zoomed in and got in and out of the trade using the 30 minute timeframe above. I waited for a MACD cross over on the 30 minute timeframe and set my target for around the previous high.
For transparency I have copied below the relevant entries in my trading account.
Just to be clear, not all trades were profitable in May. I made a loss on Shell and a couple of other markets.
Please note any subscriptions taken via my affiliate link with Trading View may result in me earning a small commission. However, I provide complete transparency on me using Trading View personally – I publish my success on the financial markets via my broker reports and any profits earned were done so by using my own Trading View subscription, so I genuinely do recommend them and have been using the Trading View charts for many years.
The question of whether or not the UK elections will cause the UK economy to grow, is an interesting one, and one which we consider below. We consider the impact of previous elections on the FTSE 100 index as well as the impact of Brexit. Let’s take a look!
The previous three UK elections and their impact
The followingUK elections took place previously:
12 December 2019 – Conservatives
8 June 2017 – Conservatives elected
7 May 2015 – Conservatives elected
2010 – Conservatives and Liberal Democrats elected under coalition
1997 – 2010 – Labour was in power
OK… So now we know the history of who was elected previously, let’s compare this to the movements on the FTSE 100 index…:
As you can see the first time the consercatives were elected in 2015, the economy did start to grow. This continued until around June 2018 when the economy started, what I refer to as ‘stagnating’. It was moving sideways from the highest peak, until the Covid issue for a period of nearly two years. Obviously Covid’s impact was to drop the share prices like a ton of bricks! There was a sharp recovery to a point from Covid up to the time we finally left the EU via Brexit. From this point onwards, the growth in the economy has outstripped any performance previously. It seems when we are being told that Brexit has had a terrible impact on the economy, we are in fact being lied to. (I do accept that businesses have got a lot more admin to deal with, but it seems notwithtstanding this, the economy bounced back from Covid and exceeded any of its previous achievements). The economy has now reached its highest highs ever recorded!
My trading view charts do not go back far enough to consider what happened when Labour were in power. However, I found the chart below on the following website: https://www.statista.com/statistics/261764/annual-development-of-the-ftsenull-index/
According to this chart, the value of the UK economy bounced around when Labour was in power. It seemed to have two peaks where the second did not outperform the first so it was not really growing.
What will the next UK election do to the value of our economy?
Considering it’s possible for Labour to come into power, we can probably expect the economy to start stagnating again. With either the Conservatives or Labour, it seems they were both against the Brexit vote, (they seemed to have spent more time trying to ‘undo the vote’ rather than implement it, and they were both on the same page on this. Given the Brexit vote seems to have had the most dramatic effect on our Economy in a good way and these two main parties were against it from the start, indeed they were arguing there would be absolute catastrophy as a result of Brexit, it’s very difficult to say what we can expect of them or how much, what they say, can be trusted!
The writer is unclear about what will happen but we do have the history there under each party as a slight indication of their performance. It seems however, that the UK citizens actually know better than both of them!
I hope you enjoyed this article.
For more great tips and advice on trading the stock market, please visit:
This month I made the biggest mistake trading – of my life. It’s a mistake I have learned from and one which I never, ever want to repeat. I failed to close a position when it was going against me. This was literally the most costly mistake I’ve ever made and i’ve never had suck a lack of discipline in my trading previously. I explain below.
Biggest mistake trading – EUR/JPY
I entered this market obviously with a view to making a profit. The trade went against me but it moved so quickly that I lost my discipline and control at the point where it was at my stop loss level. I usually close trades manually and I still am minded to continue this practice because it usually allows me to analyse what’s going on at the time, under a microscope, so as to not close trades prematurely. However, on this occasion, the EUR/JPY price sailed down so fast I was not thinking clearly and as it went further against me, it was even more difficult to close. I’m sharing below the point where I was sitting in the trade per the 30m timeframe. I exited the trade somewhere on it’s way back up after sitting there watching it until 3am… I had initially thought it was recovering but then the huge green candle formed with the enormous bottom wick, seen below. It was here I exited the trade because I had no idea where the price would end up and doing some analysis on the daily timeframe, I decided the price had the potential to soar down to the EMA line on daily timeframe, and this would have put me into the red for a value which would have represented about 75% of my entire trading capital balance! I felt obliged to close the trade on that large green candle. I felt relieved once the trade was closed.
You will see below that the price did in fact recover which is frustrating for any trader to note, following a loss – but especially following a particularly large loss! However, any decisions we make are ‘in the moment’ – we do not have a crystal ball.
What did it cost me?
This mistake cost me 10% of my trading capital balance. It was a very costly mistake. It should have merely cost me 1% which is my usual loss tolerance. However, it could have been worse and as I said above, I was filled with relief once I had closed the position. It has set me back in my overall growth plan for my trading account.
The lesson which has been learned by me
After this experience, I will never, ever, hold a position open again when it has moved against me and reached my pre-planned stop level. I also learnt something about myself – that I am capable of momentary lapses of discipline. As traders we need to learn from these mistakes, forgive ourselves and plan how to move forward effectively. Trading is very emotional and we are not algorithms. Trading can be affected at any one moment by personal circumstances or worries/concerns completley unrelated to trading. Even hormones can affect the way someone behaves on a given day. I am usually a very disciplined trader and I am disciplined in many different aspects of my life so I really did surprise myself this month – but knowing this was out of character, I am confident that I will never allow this to happen again. It was completely counterproductive – it will take me about two months to catch up and get back to the account size I would have been at, had I not made the error.
I am now forgiving myself and moving forward.
I hope you found this blog post helpful and it helps someone else to avoid losing money/perhaps it will help someone else to have the courage to close a position when things have gone badly wrong!
For more great tips and advice on trading the stock market, please visit:
In this article I discuss why most traders fail to make money on the stock market. The percentages of people who succeed against those who fail are striking – some brokers report it can be as low as just 3 – 5% of people succeeding. In this article we take a look at some of the key reasons people fail to make money in trading the stock market.
#1 Reason traders fail to make money – risk management
New traders probably get sick of hearing about risk management but it really is critical to success. That is why we have listed this as the number one reason new traders fail to make money. Many of them tend to have poor risk management and they blow up their account within a few trades. Experienced traders know very well that in order to asssess whether a strategy is working or not, you would need to place in excess of 30 trades but probably more like 100 trades, and that even good traders can take four losses in a row before going back to making profit. So how does this affect a new trader? Some new traders will risk half of their account size (or the whole thing) on their first few trades… what if they get four losses in a row at this point? They may decide that the strategy doesn’t work, their broker is a crook, etc etc. They will have run out of money and they give up. It is essential to have a great plan in place for risk management. Luckily for you, you can get information about what this may look like, here:
# 2 – Reasons traders fail to make money – not accepting a loss
This is the second reason we have listed for new traders failing to make money in the stock market. They do not have the discipline to close trades when they are going against them. Probably the single item which distinguises a trader from an investor is that traders tend to cut off losses quickly and allow the ‘good seeds’ to grow. This results in far more profit than can be made by holding on to bad positions. However, the new trader is afraid, and does not close losses quickly enough. This can result in his/her losses amounting to more than the profits made or if they have not closed the trade at all, their margin requirement is now blocking them from placing further trades on what would be profitable positions elsewhere…They have in their heads visions of themselves driving Ferraris a few weeks after starting their trading learning journey!
# 3 – Getting into wrong trades and placing too many trades
I’ve put these two together because they are related to each other… new traders tend to place a lot of trades on bad positions. They are still learning, and they haven’t yet discovered how much patience and waiting is in fact involved in becoming a consistently profitable trader. They have in their minds, movies about wall street and people shouting “buy buy buy” and they enter the markets over and over again in what I refer to as a ‘new trader frenzie’. They do not do their technical analysis properly prior to entering each position and they are ‘rushing’ to make money rather than rushing to ‘learn’ how to trade.
# 4 – Not sticking to one type of strategy
New traders tend to place lots of different types of trades including breakouts, buying the dip, shorting the markets – these are all great ideas but they do not get to a point where they understand their statistical success rates. They have no idea how successful each thing is before moving on to the next one! Successful traders understand you need to place 30 – 100 trades on one type of strategy to understand how that strategy is performing. Constantly switching will not give the new trader the information they need. They will have no idea how many profits or losses in a row to expect because by the time they have received one loss, they have canned that strategy and started trying something new. Consistency and patience is key in becoming successful. There is another point to this which is extremely important – the new trader does not become better with practice as they would by sticking to the same strategy because their mind is all over the place and they don’t remember or start to learn, what to look for when entering a ‘buy the dip’ – they have switched strategy before noticing anything about the profit or loss they just made on the prior ‘buy the dip’ trade.
I hope you found this article helpful. If you are a new trader and you would like some guidance on how to get started in a profitable consistent way, please see the article we published here, about how you can work towards making £100 per day:
In this article I’m going to talk about how to avoid losing money with the spread and how it can affect your trading. It can block you from getting into trades if you are not careful, cause you to hit your stop more easily, and it may even result in you feeling frustrated with your broker, if you are not aware of what is likely to happen in advance and you have less of an understanding about the spread than an experienced stock market trader.
How the spread can affect your trading – How to avoid losing money with the spread
In short, the spread is the number in between the price to buy or sell. It is the ‘margin’ of profit which the broker makes between the buyers and the sellers. Since it is controlled by the broker, it is possible for the broker to change the spread at any moment “according to the risk in the market”… I put that last part in inverted commas because it does allow the broker to manipulate if they choose to and it is very difficult for the regulators to regulate this… New traders can feel like the price has been moved ‘deliberately’ to hit their stop, especially where it goes on to reach their original target and it was just because of the spread, that the trade was a losing trade.
Avoid losing money with the spread – Who needs to worry about the spread?
The spread is something which day traders need to be especially concerned with. It should not affect people who trade the higher timeframes so much but they should at least be aware of how it is possible for the spread to affect a trade. Why does it affect the smaller time frames more? This is because it represents a larger portion of the proft target/where you want your position to move from and to on the smaller timeframes. On the larger timeframes, like the daily timeframe, the spread will seem insignificant.
Does the spread cause you to lose trades? How to avoid losing money with the spread
Yes and no! It does for newer traders because they are not aware necessarily of what it is, or how it can affect their trades. It can for day traders too – especially if they are unware of it or they are not paying it the attention it deserves. It shouldn’t do for people who trade the daily timeframe so much – but it depends on the size of the spread and this is unique to each market!
Lets take a look at how the spread can affect trade set ups
Let me give you some examples… I have deliberately picked a stock with a large spread. I have chosen a small timeframe trade set up to illustrate how it can affect you… Consider the trade set up below. I typically like to enter a market after a MACD cross over. I like to take profit at the previous high (or at 1.5 x my risk) and set a stop at the previous low. Let’s take a look at how you can avoid losing money with the spread in relation to trade set ups:
As you can see in the above picture, the planned entry would have been at 43.51 and this would have left plenty of room to make a profit up to the target price of 43.84. The risk to reward ratio on that set up without the spread would have been quite good (you can see the place I would have set my stop and that the stop distance is a lot smaller than the profit target distance). However, once you add in the spread, on entering the market, your entry price would bump up to where you wanted to put your profit target. It has completly anialiated your trade set up. At that point you could proceed with the trade, and end up risking more than you will win, or you could exit the trade in a loss (because you have just effectively paid for the spread – to the tune of where the chart has bumped you upto!).
Can the spread affect your win rate?
In a word, yes. The chances of you hitting your target can be affected by the spread. It depends a bit on how you have set your chart – is your chart showing you the price ‘inclusive of the spread’ for a sell order, or the price exclusive of the spread? Lets take a look at what can go wrong with this and how you can avoid losing money with the spread specifically in relation to win rate:
Using Cranswick again as the example, lets say you wanted to sell at the price of 43.90 but your chart is showing you the price excluding the spread. It may not be obvious to a new trader that the price may never get to their target, because they would need to reduce the target by the spread to make sure it will get there before hitting resistance and coming back down. In the example above, while the normal (exclusive of spread) chart is showing the price is at 43.90 the position held with the broker will only show that the price is at 43.52 so the trader may find him/herself in a position where the price never ends up reaching the target and it’s possible it will go back down from there and hit the trader’s stop. This can therefore affect the trader’s win rate! At this point, some new traders will be extremely upset and frustrated with their broker because they do not understand how the spread works or how to set up their charts properly! What was planned to be a profitable trade, will end up being a losing trade, simply because the spread was not taken into consideration.
So what can you do to combat these problems with how the spread affects your trading?
In short, you can avoid losing money with the spread by making sure you are aware of where the spread inclusive price is before making decisions, you can set your charts to show you the price inclusive of the spread, whether that’s a buy or sell (you may need to keep switching between the two, so show the ‘buy inclusive price’ at entry, and then when you are waiting to sell, change the chart to show you the ‘sell inclusive price’) but you would in any event, need to be aware of the distance of the spread in general, before placing the trade, so you can analyse whether or not the cost is just too great and whether it will completly anialate your trade setup or not!
Another way to combat the spread is to simply avoid markets where the spread is high! I delieberately chose Cranswick to illustrate these examples because I know that the spread is high on this market. However, you could probably safely trade one of the more popular markets, even as a day trader on the smaller timeframes, without getting into too much difficulty – for example, markets like Apple, Microsoft.
Also know that the spread moves around at times of genuine volatility – such as during interest rate hike decisions being made in FED/bank meetings, major news etc. It may be a good idea to avoid trading markets with higher spreads at these times because the fluctuations will make the spread even worse on all markets.
I hope you found this article on how to avoid losing money with the spread, helpful.
For more great tips and advice on trading the stock market, please visit:
In the interests of being completely transparent with my success and win rates on the financial markets, I am publishing my performance stats here. I hope this gives you some confidence that I am a genuinely successful trader and there is money to be made on the financial markets. I trade with Capital.com. I do not have any affiliation with them. They send me weekly updates of my performance via email. I am sharing a screen shot for you.
To watch me achieve this win rate/these results, please visit my Patreon page where you can watch me trade live:
In this article I want to share with all the mothers and especially single mothers, how you can make money flexibly as a mother, around looking after your children. The money you can make in the way I will share below, can be done around looking after toddlers and babies, from home (or a beach if you prefer!!). There is a limitless amount of money which can be earned in this way and mothers do not need to make a choice between earning good money and being the best mum they can be. If you are interested in this, please read more below! Whether you are a stay at home mum, one who has a job (and you are fed up with that) or you just want additional income, this article may very well help you!
A bit about me… how I make money flexibly as a mother
I did leave school with some good grades and went on to become qualified as a professional person- my trade is that I’m a chartered accountant. However, you do not need these qualifiactions or grades to make the money that I make flexibly on the side of earnings from my job. In my spare time, I learnt very slowly and diligently, to trade the stock market. I’m currently earning over £1k per month in additional, flexible, almost ‘passive’ income from the stockmarket and these earnings are snowballing at an exponential rate.
When I came back to work following my maternity leave in my job, what I found was that my career had taken a knock. People seemed to look at me as less capable or unable to perform the same duties even though I was basically the same person. They do try to be flexible at work but ultimately, the workplace is not yet flexible enough for mothers juggling childcare – especially of younger children. It has occured to me, since I’ve been making money on the stock market, that this could help a whole host of other mothers who are struggling with their jobs since having children, or just struggling with ‘juggling’ everything.
How you can earn money flexibly as a mother, like me
If you want to follow the path I have chosen, you can learn to trade, with me! I can teach you to make money flexibly as a mother. I have a free You Tube channel where I share daily updates on the financial markets. I also run a Patreon page where you can watch me place live trades in the markets and I explain constantly, my thinkining on where to get in, where to close positions, and what i’m thinking while they are open. So where should you start?
I would encourage you to start with my free blog article on ‘how to make £100 per day’, linked here:
This is a good article as starting point. It should direct you to then consider my articles on Risk Management which are essential for you to become successful at trading:
On this blog you will also find lots of helpful articles on technical indicators and analysis which you will need to use to be able to analyse the charts and make decisions about buying or selling stocks, commodities etc.
You can also see my success rates, which are posted regularly to this blog per reports I receive from my broker, here:
I publish my rates of success and profits so that my readers and members can have complete transparency and trust in what I teach them. I follow my own teachings and execute trades ‘with them’ on the basis of the strategies I teach.
I hope you enjoyed this article and you have decided that this is the start of your journey to financial freedom and being able to juggle life as a mum, the way it was meant to be!
I wish you the very best of luck with your journey. If you were inspired to start trading with this article and you have found my teachings helpful, please say hello – I would love to hear from you. If it helped you to make money flexibly as a mother, I would love to know that I have helped another mother in this way.
For more great tips and advice on trading the stock market, please visit:
In the interests of being completely transparent with my success and win rates on the financial markets, I am publishing my performance stats here. I hope this gives you some confidence that I am a genuinely successful trader and there is money to be made on the financial markets. I trade with Capital.com. I do not have any affiliation with them. They send me weekly updates of my performance via email. I am sharing a screen shot for you.
To watch me achieve this win rate/these results, please visit my Patreon page where you can watch me trade live:
In the interests of being completely transparent with my success and win rates on the financial markets, I am publishing my performance stats here. I hope this gives you some confidence that I am a genuinely successful trader and there is money to be made on the financial markets. I trade with Capital.com. I do not have any affiliation with them. They send me weekly updates of my performance via email. I am sharing a screen shot for you.
To watch me achieve this win rate/these results, please visit my Patreon page where you can watch me trade live:
In the interests of being completely transparent with my success and win rates on the financial markets, I am publishing my performance stats here. I hope this gives you some confidence that I am a genuinely successful trader and there is money to be made on the financial markets. I trade with Capital.com. I do not have any affiliation with them. They send me weekly updates of my performance via email. I am sharing a screen shot for you.
To watch me achieve this win rate/these results, please visit my Patreon page where you can watch me trade live:
