I hope the past week has treated you well despite the falling markets.

If like me you spread bet on UK and US shares and indices, it’s been pretty dicey with the markets going down for 5 days in a row.

At the moment I have 11 spread betting positions open – and 10 of them are long bets i.e. I am betting that the share price will increase.

All was going well until last Tuesday some data came out in China or something like that and the market took a bit of a dive (to be honest I don’t quite know what the problem was).

When this happens, it happens quickly because everyone panics.

Luckily I only had one position stop out due to a massive downwards spike in the price.

I made a post on the blog about the markets falling, you can read it here:

Spread Betting Woe as the Markets Fall

This brings me around to talking about Vince Stanzione (again) because this week I got an email from a subscriber who has also bought Vince’s “Making Money From Financial Trading” course in the past.

It read:

“Hi Ben,

many thanks for your thoughts on Vince Stanzione. I’ve fallen for his sales pitch a few times and even bought his Spread Betting course – would you believe, twice!!! The 2006 version is a lot more informative, and more clearly explained than the 2004 version, but I haven’t made any money from this yet. Personally, I think you’d need a “bank” of about £500 which you can afford to risk before making any headway – and, when I have, I’ll try it.

As you probably know, Vince is into other things apart from Spread Betting. Somewhere in my collection I have a DVD of him talking about Direct Mail Marketing, at which he is an expert. He comes across as pretty genuine and down to Earth, and offers to help anyone who contacts him with any queries on any aspect of marketing – copywriting, mailing lists and anything else

Mike”

Mike is correct, Vince has his fingers in a lot of pies including TV, direct mail, consultancy, financial trading, options trading and various other businesses.

I think the DVD that Mike is referring to is one from Pat Adams’ UK Masters Seminars held in 2003/04. I’ve got a number of these DVDs and they are great.

Stanzione also runs a couple of tipster services which I receive invites to join each year but I’ve never took him up on the opportunity. Perhaps one day I should look into it more.

Anyway, it was quite strange that I should get an email about Vince because just last week I was sorting through a load of old videos I have from 99-00. One set is called the “Profitmaker 5” seminar and, as far as I know, it was the first one that Andrew Reynolds held.

Vince appeared on one of the tapes explaining to the audience how to make money from direct mail and the internet. Pretty fascinating stuff.

8 years on from this seminar, Vince is still hard at it and making a fortune. Certainly someone who you should perhaps read more about, even if you aren’t interested in financial trading.

There’s plenty more on the site about Vince:

Vince Stanzione’s Seven Secret Keys Seminar

and

Vince Stanzione and First Information

I recently managed to get hold of the DVDs of Vince’s October 2006 £3k a seat seminar. I will write a review about it soon so if you don’t see anything in the next couple of weeks, give me a nudge!

If you are a regular reader of this blog and also my other bizoppsuk blog, you will know that I am actively spread betting a number of UK shares.

Well, the last time I posted my results to the blog, I was running a profit of £176.91. This was on the 16th February.

The following week, it had fallen slightly to £143.29.

However, like many people who are trading, my profits have now disappeared after 5 days of market losses.

Given my generous stop-losses I haven’t had many positions stop out – only 2 out of 13 but I am now sat on losses of £84.61.

It’s not a disaster but I’m surprised that the markets continue to fall. Something has obviously changed and it will be interesting to see what happens now.

Anyone want to make a prediction as to where the market is going over the next 5 days?

All of my positions are due to expire on the 20th March so they only have 11 days to recover and get me back into profit.

I’m not holding my breath though, I can see a bunch of losing trades come 2 weeks tomorrow.

Perhaps it’s time to have a clear-out and close the trades which are losing.

I will keep you posted…

Bit of a crazy week if you’re a financial trader with the markets looking like they are going down for a fourth straight day.

Like me, you may be asking:

What on earth is going on in the markets?

And more importantly, what happened on Tuesday February 27th?

But first, think about this:

What’s an ounce of gold or a share really worth?

Maybe that’s a trick question, but here’s the short answer:

It really doesn’t matter

The reality is, these are trading markets and they are all driven by sentiment.

We all saw how fast the equity markets collapsed on Tuesday.

Pure sentiment.

What matters, is the trend and direction of the market. You can only determine the trend by using pure market action.

The easiest way to do this is by using a program the tells you in plain english what the market is doing.

Take a look at these two new complementary videos:

(1) Here’s an Internet stock you might not want to own:

[link no longer active]

(2) Here is what an expert thinks happened to the Dow Jones and where it is headed. This might surprise you:

[link no longer active]

Time, perhaps, to stop worrying about which way the markets are moving and start thinking “it doesn’t matter“.

Over the last couple of years, Sally Nicoll has documented her spread betting experiences via a blog on Finspreads’ main site.

Sally has always had an interest in gambling which, according to her, is a family trait. As a writer “between jobs” she used £5,000 to start her trading career, depositing it into her Finspreads account.

Every-so-often she would write up her latest spread betting triumphs or disasters on the site and built up quite a following amongst spread betters across the UK.

After a couple of years and 20 posts it seems that Sally was contacted by a publishing house to write a book. Just last month this book was released.

It was called:

“Bets and the City – Sally Nicoll’s spread betting diary”

I’ve just read it in less than a day and found it an excellent, funny and familiar story. Sally made all the mistakes a novice trader always makes and manages to turn her £5,000 into less than £2,000!

If you are even slightly interested in spread betting then I highly recommend Sally’s book:

If you have been following this blog you will know that earlier this month I received an email from Finspreads’ analyst Sandy Jadeja. As far as I could gather, he was suggesting that I should be short the December Gold contract because Gold was in a downtrend.

Unfortunately, at the time I was long December Gold and so I was a little apprehensive about whether I should keep the position open or not.

Well, the email was sent out on the 8th November and the position expired last night. I had bought December Gold at 627.5 and the contract expired at 640.6 – a profit of 131 points!

I’m very glad I stuck to my guns and this is the first position that has closed in profit since I started my little spread betting experiment. Hopefully there will be lots more to come!

Check out the results at the BizOppsUK blog

I recieved a great email yesterday from a subscriber to the Free Business Opportunities Email Newsletter which said:

Hi Ben,

I’ve been a bizop junkie for years and have boxes of the damn things. Freelance photography, streetwise this and that, turtle trading, wade world trade(twice)- I’ve definately got the T-shirt.

I love the thrill(?) of getting these things in the post(I know, get a life)!Some of them even turn out to be useful!!!

Anyway, I have recently discovered your site and I must say I am very impressed and find your blog a facinating read – not least because I know some of the products you are talking about. I’ve just signed up for your news letter and am looking forward to recieving that.

Keep up the good work! We are all behind you (bizop-ers of the world unite – but only if we can find a manual for £49.95 to tell us how).

Regards
[Name Removed}

Very true…