Archive for June, 2009
Top Trader 2009 Competition
RBS marketindex is launching a competition to find the best CFD trader. You trade using a demo account and each week there will be prizes for whoever increases their account by the most. Registration is open from the 29th June and the competition starts on July 6th. Prizes are £5000 cash, a Dell laptop and an iPhone 3GS 16GB. As this is a [...]
Trader, investor, gambler – which one are you?
If you have any sort of involvement in shares, commodities, currency, or derivatives of these, then you will probably fit into one or more of the ‘investor’, ‘gambler’ or ‘trader’ categories. What is the difference between them and where do you fit into these categorisations? Investor An investor is someone who buys something in [...]
Review: Cityboy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile
"Cityboy": Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile is a novel by Geraint Anderson based on the years he spent working as a utilities analyst for a variety of banks in the City of London. Geraint first started writing an anonymous column called ‘Cityboy’, which appeared each week in the free evening paper ‘thelondonpaper’. The column became [...]
Review of CMC’s CFD and Forex trading platform and service
CMC are a well known CFD, Forex and spread betting company. I signed up to try the service. Signup procedure You have to choose whether you want a CFD, Forex or spread betting account. The spread betting account is web based and the CFD and Forex accounts are run from within a Java application called MarketMaker. There is no need to sign up [...]
Get a Forex MetaTrader demo account for free
I was looking for a free MetaTrader demo account and the one from Alpari fits my needs nicely. The signup procedure is very quick. Just fill in a few basic details, download/install MetaTrader and you are ready to start. You can choose your initial balance when signing up. I haven’t worked out how to add more ‘money’ to the demo account [...]
Avoid getting screwed by your CFD / Forex trading broker
If you read trading forums such as trade2win and babybips then every so often you’ll come across someone who is asking for advice as it appears that they have been well and truly ripped off by their broker. I’m sure most brokers are honest but here are a few things you can to avoid the risk of bad things happening to you. When you start [...]
Review: Who runs Britain by Robert Peston
Robert Peston is the BBC business editor. You’ll probably know his name because when the credit crunch was making headlines, Robert Peston changed from being someone who just reported the news to someone who was the news. His reports became closely followed by the financial world and what he said could move individual shares and even influenced [...]
My first trading mistakes
I first opened a CFD trading account about three months ago. In that time I've already made quite a few mistakes but hopefully I've learnt from them. Here are some of them. Not checking the spread before entering a trade If for example the index is moving in a range of say 10-20 points and you want to do a short term bet then opening a trade [...]
Review: Diary of a CFD Trader by Catherine Davey
Catherine Davey is a regular writer of trading articles. Perhaps to prove that she could put her money where her mouth is she decided to spend three months (14 weeks) trading CFDs and write a diary of her progress to show that it is possible to make money this way. As she soon discovers it isn't as easy as she initially though. Her [...]
FTSE 100 CFD Trading: 2nd June 2009
The day started well with me spotting several trends and managing my risk well. By 2pm I was up 22 points. Things went wrong after this when the market got more choppy. My biggest loss was in the afternoon around the time that the US housing data was released. The index started moving fast and I tried to profit from the surge upwards. I was too [...]
