Several weeks ago I decided to start trading again and this time I promised that I wouldn’t waste money on silly trades…

Listed below is my progress so far, each term is the P/L of open positions as of the close of trading on that date:

24/11/06: +£112.95
17/11/06: +£99.01
10/11/06: +£54.34
03/11/06: -£21.46
27/10/06: -£38.59
20/10/06: -£24.52
13/10/06: +£12.82

As you can see, my trading started well, then went a little downhill but has now come back into profit as of the close last Friday the 24th November.

Today my position in Gold expires and so we will see whether I was right to ignore Sandy Jadeja’s advice about going short December Gold (see blog post from 8th November).

Mine was just a small punt on the price and at around 1800GMT today I should find out whether I was correct to stick with my long position. I expect the price to be volatile on the last day so I could end up losing money even though I am currently in a reasonably healthy position.

All my trading decisions at the moment are based on the ideas I got from Vince Stanzione’s home study course. As I have previously mentioned, I bought Vince’s package a couple of years ago and it was the first “business opportunity” I ever invested in.

Since I read that 2004 edition I have read the 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006 editions.

If you don’t know who Vince Stanzione is, he is featured on the site:

Vince Stanzione and First Information

Last week I managed to get hold of Darren Winters’ home study course, “The Path to Financial Freedom” which consisted of a large printed manual and 3 videos featuring Darren speaking at a WinInvesting seminar. I will do a review of the material shortly. Stay tuned!

As you may be aware if you subscribe to the free Business Opportunities Email Newsletter, I have recently started a spread betting experiment, resurrecting my account with Finspreads.

My last trading exploits ended disappointingly in early 2004 when I decided to cash out the 10% or so I had left of my capital.

However, I have been receiving both emails and text messages every morning from Finspreads ever since. They contain news and views on the trading day ahead as well as market prices.

To be completely honest, I almost never read them. I really should unsubscribe and have only stayed on the list as they are free…

For the first time though in over 3 years of getting these alerts, I got an email this afternoon from Sandy Jadeja about a:

“Possible Opportunity in December Gold”

Sandy Jadeja is a Chief Market Analyst according to the email, although it doesn’t state that it is for Finspreads.

His email states:

“I have been watching the December contract for Gold and noticed that it has risen 12.18% in just 23 trading sessions.However considering that the metal had declined 25% from its May $753 high to a low of $563 in October, the trend has clearly been down. With the recent short term rally of this low, Gold has traced out a corrective ABCD pattern right into resistance at $625 -30If this level holds the metal back then Gold may drop down to support at $613 or lower to $602. Otherwise a move higher may see Gold trade to its next resistance level at $642 -44"

On reading this email, I’m not too sure what he is trying to tell me. Is Gold going up or down?

Who knows…

If the trend is down, should I be short Gold now? I can tell you that I’m not.

A successful trader once wrote that a market is never too high to go higher and never too low to go lower (although if a market goes to zero it can’t go lower!)

All I know about Gold is that it is at around $621/oz as I write.

We will have to see how it goes from here but I have a feeling that Mr Jadeja is trying to tell me to go short on the December Gold contract. This contract expires on the 27th November so I will report back after trading has finished on that day.

Back in 2003 I was working in a deeply boring and poorly paid job. On a weekend I would get the Observer as I particularly liked the “Cash” section of the paper.

I suppose I liked reading about making money by traditional means i.e. savings and shares.

However, one weekend the Cash supplement featured a spread betting millionaire who they described as a “hi-tech messiah who wants to spread his betting secret”.

There, on pages 2 and 3, was a large feature about spread betting the financial markets. It centred on the achievements of Vince Stanzione who had “… made £2m from internet gambling on market price movements”.

Now, I left university in June 2000 so I completely missed the tech boom. This is probably a good thing. Back in those days I was so skint that I had to pray that my Switch card would let me buy £5 worth of booze on a Friday night!

Around the time of the dot com bubble I had read about a group of amateur investors making outstanding returns through spread betting on share prices.

This feature was great, it really got me excited about trading. Of course, looking back now I realise that it was pretty much an advertisement for Vince Stanzione’s trading days but it worked on me!

On Googling Vince’s name I quickly found his website and read with delight the great secrets I could learn about from Vince i.e. “make £400 a day, tax-free”.

After a little consideration, I faxed off an order form for £297 and eagerly awaited my home study course. A few days later I had the course and read through it all, watched the video and got very excited about my new little cash-cow.

I was really pleased with the course, I thought it was great.

So, I registered for an account with Finspreads and loaded up some money – I think it was £1,000 at first.

Then I got started with Finspreads’ 8 week training course. Trading with pennies I didn’t really make or lose any money but soon I decided that I wanted to trade Gold.

To cut a long story short I traded for around 6 months and lost around £2,000. I did everything wrong, everything that Vince said NOT to do, I did.

I overtraded, I day-traded, I always wanted to trade Gold. I made a complete mess of it.

The only time it was going well for me was when I went on holiday and had an open long position on the German DAX 30. Every day I was checking the paper in Gran Canaria and finding that the DAX had crept up slightly. It was great!

By around June 2004 I had had enough and closed all my positions and emptied my account. One particular time I got a margin call at work and was terrified because I couldn’t get access to a PC! That was the worst point and when I finally realised that I was under-capitalised which caused me to make silly mistakes.

Since then I have done absolutely nothing with Finspreads but my account remains open.

What I had decided is that I wouldn’t trade again until:

(a) I had cleared all of my debt and
(b) I had built up some money which I could afford to lose.

So, in the last 2 years or so I have been reading trading books, watching seminar videos and DVDs and learning as much as I can about financial trading.

I’ve seen loads of Vince’s seminars – the 2000 and 2002 events from Milton Keynes, the “Seven Keys Seminar” from 2004, the Ed Downs and Martin Pring one day session from 2004, the huge two-day “Masters” workshop. I’ll admit, I got hooked on the learning process.

So, I’ve decided to start trading again but this time in a very boring, business-like and professional way.

The idea is that I will update you on my progress via this blog, or maybe via a new one. That way you can add comments etc and see how much money I (hopefully) make.

I made a site about trading whilst I was learning the ropes. You can see it here:

http://www.FinancialSpreadTrading.co.uk

Also, I found out that Vince Stanzione is holding a one-day event later this month so I decided to write a little about his Seven Keys seminar from 2004. Read it here:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/vince_stanzione.htm

And, of course, there is information about Vince’s “Making Money From Financial Spread Trading” course on the site:

http://www.BizOppsUK.com/vince_stanzione.php

Stay tuned for more information about Ben’s spread trading exploits!

Thanks,

Ben