February 11th

Results

Closed P/L: £7.20

Today most of the news hit expected estimates so nothing really shocking. Most of the exchanges were in limbo and failing to move too much, so I focused on 2 things which were my trusted DAX30 and the FTSE100.

UK News

Producer Price Index Input, which is the price of goods and raw materials purchased by manufacturers, come in at 1.7% which is up from the expected 1.3%. The output figures, based on goods and raw materials sold, was also good at 1% compared to 0.4% expected.

Even though the news is great the FTSE100 opened at 8am continuing its gradual fall probably due to news that i mentioned earlier in the week. I got in at a bad time, but a big red candle formed at 2:45pm 10minutes before USA news, so my thoughts were people were expecting bad figures over there, which would have affected the DOWJONES eventually crossing over to Europe Exchanges.

So because in them 15 minutes I saw the price decline fast, I decided to short the FTSE100 and go against the good news, this ended up going bad and I pulled out 3 minutes later. I've put an arrow to show where I placed the trade due to what I saw, unfortunately was just people taking their profits which caused the price to drop for a few minutes.

DAX30 Trades

So going back to the German DAX30 Exchange for the day, this is the Exchange I enjoy trading the most, simply because Germany's economy is so strong, they really are getting screwed by being in Europe right now. I shorted it when it was going through a retracement caused by people taking profits, which is very risky, I didn't close the position fast enough to make profit so I ended up with a loss for that as well. So I then reversed the position and bought the stock, and made £40 profit. In hindsight this was bad, I set a profit target of 10 points, and that 1 candle alone made 30 points, so if I waited 30 minutes for it to close I would have made a potential £120 instead.

As you can see I bought it again once the price reduced and sold it 2 hours before market closed for another £22 profit.

I seem to have this bad habit of taking my profits too quickly rather than letting them run, this will really cost me in the long-term as they can really make up for some bad decisions. Trading has such a small margin for error, that if my profits were equal to my losses or only slightly better, I would need to be right a huge percentage of the time just to make a small return.

Also on a thoughtful note before I sleep, always trust the German economy and never sell/short the stock!

That is all for this week, and will look forward to trading on Monday!