Find Me Over At Seeking Alpha!

Sorry to all of you who had been reading my blog while it was active, I'm now a freelance analyst mostly covering the U.K. stock market over at Seeking Alpha.

I also cover a variety of dividend growth stocks or high yield investments over in the USA.

You can find me here: http://seekingalpha.com/author/nick-mackintosh

I wish all of you the best of luck in your investing endeavors.

Kind Regards,

N Mackintosh

March 16th

Results

Not much to really say about trading today, the markets are continuing to fall in the long term. I had not slept today and decided to trade the European Session at 7am (my broker is 1 hour ahead). So I went to a 5 minute chart to get a sense of direction and what traders were doing at the start of the day. Seems there was an interest in buying the DAX30 for at least the first hour or 2. So I placed my buy order then took profit 13 minutes later.

Job was done for the day and I hastily shut down my computer and went to bed!

Once again I could have left the trade open about 30-40 minutes longer and made over double my profits, but as I have learned once too many times if you try to be greedy you will usually get burned. Stick to my profit target for the day, then finish and do what I want without any worries.

Goodnight all.

March 15th

Results

Today was stressful, I reached my target early in the morning by shorting the Dow Jones at like 1am. I woke up the following morning and decided to be greedy and make more, big mistake.

Every market has been dropping like crazy across the world not only due to Middle East and North Africa, but now over Japan as well. Japanese Stock Exchange the NIKKEI, is down nearly 20% this week already, it has went back to the price it was at in April last year.

I looked at the DAX30 for the day and bought what I thought was a low point. I got stopped out for a loss, and then an even greater 1 when I retried a few minutes later. This wiped out my profits within 30 or so minutes. To make it back I done a technique called "scalping". This is when you change the chart to a 1 minute time frame, and you literally place a trade and close it within 1-3 minutes, its very fast paced and dangerous to new traders who are not experienced with fast swings.

Its basically like looking at a heart-rate monitor in hospital, the chart is constantly moving up and down where as say on a 15 minute or an hour time frame, it slowly forms the candles over that period. I made 8 winning trades in a row to recover my profits THEN I MADE THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN AND GOT GREEDY!

I was so angry with myself I stopped trading for that day taking a small loss. Below I will show you 2 charts, the first being the 1 minute chart and you will see all trades marked with an arrow of the direction, and the check sign when I took profit. The signs in white are profit, signs in red are loss.

As you can see from the bottom chart, if I had left my first trade I would have made a great profit and not have to deal with the stress of placing 10 or more trades trying to make it back. That is the nature of the beast I guess.

March 14th

Results

EUR/USD

Today was a very easy day, at the start of the Asian Session (Markets Opening) Sunday night at 10pm, I noticed the Euro gap up in price versus the Dollar, indicating more people were buying. So while people were taking profits and making the price fall, I short sold it to take advantage of that.

DAX30

This was a simple trade, just following the trend which has been down the past few weeks over the long-term due to Middle East, North Africa and now Japan.

That is all for now, will update this tomorrow.

Goodnight all.

March 8th-11th

Last Week's Summary


Tuesday 8th: £60
Wednesday 9th: £70
Thursday 10th: £60
Friday 11th: -£55.50


For the majority of the week posted above and this week coming up, I will be playing catch up on my big losing day due to my router failing for 15 minutes during harsh trading periods. Majority of trades were done on the German DAX30 Stock Index which I love to trade. Friday I just got on the wrong side of the trade, but that is fine, my stop loss was in place so only risked a minimal amount.

I have started to look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as it is 1 of the closely watched Index's in the world behind the NASDAQ and the SP500. I prefer the DAX30 due to Germany's very stable economy and the stocks which are mainly manufacturing and chemical companies.

As you can see my profits are a lot less due to losing 30% of my capital as I cant place as much volume, but will recover the account within 2 weeks I'm hoping.

Updating today's trades now so stay tuned!

Technical Difficulties

Sorry I haven't kept this as updated as it could have been, my BT router has been giving me problems, and randomly disconnects for 5-10 minutes.

I was placing a hedging trade last week on the Unemployment Changes USA news. What this means is while trading was quiet as traders were waiting for the figures, I wanted to both buy and sell short at the same time (meaning I am always break-even money wise). So I will be in at the best price and just close the losing trade after the trend has formed after the first 5-15 minutes, and let the profitable trade run until the movement ends for the day.

My BT router went offline after I had only placed 1 of the trades which was literally 2 minutes before the news. I couldn't get back online for some time and no stop loss was put in place as I manually enter stop levels after placing the trades. Needless to say after rushing to get my router back online by restarting it a few times, I managed to get back on my trading platform to see a third of my account gone. I didn't trade for the rest of that week, was too angry to focus on trading so I took a few days off to relax.

I don't mind showing people losing days on here as I have done in the past, but due to the size of this 1 loss, I won't be showing it due to family/friends reading this blog. This has set me back around 2 weeks. A small setback in the long-term scheme of things, but still 1 that should not have happened. Hopefully once fibre optic broadband is installed later this year, I won't have to worry about any of this again.

Started trading this week, need to make March as good as February was and I'm already off to a bad start! However this week has been easy. Will update the blog with all news/trades/pictures tomorrow.

Goodnight all.

February 25th

Results

Today was a terrible start for the London Stock Exchange, as glitches appeared to show wrong figures for everything so the market had to be closed for half of the day, this cost me some money in the beginning when I got quoted a different price than it actually was. UK News Story Here.

I basically done the same as yesterday and I saw an opportunity in Gold this time, as it will always remain as the safest investment in the long run. See the price going relatively cheap compared to this week at $1402 (we've seen it reach $1418 this week and $1430 back in December).

I actually failed at a trade the same point an hour earlier, but my instincts were telling me people were buying as it reached a low point twice (between the arrow signs) and didn't move any further south.

Price stalled and didn't have enough buyers compared to sellers to push it further out, so I bailed and sold at $1405.90. Unfortunately it did go higher later on in the day but hey, I cant get maximum profits every time! First attempt lost me -£66 but second time £114.

Most of the European Exchanges do seem to be recovering some of the huge losses they have suffered this week, but I stayed far away. I am not convinced that the crash is over, losing 5% of the market in 1 week is no joke. Let me give you a figure, the London Stock Exchange capital is worth $3.6 trillion and it lost 5% this week, meaning it lost around $180 billion. The same happened all over Europe, America/Asia also took losses but not as much.

Markets in the UK closed at 4:30pm as per usual and USA is getting ready to close at 9:00pm so that is it for the weekend!

I hope everyone enjoys the next few days, and I'll be back posting again on Monday.

Goodnight.