My Trades – August 2011

Hi and welcome to the first Trading Simply monthly report!

I provide these monthly trade reports in an attempt to be honest with myself on how I trade the UK stock market and for my own continuing learning. I also want to be transparent in everything that I do for the Trading Simply Blog.

In addition to the trading profits and losses, I also talk about important developments in the life of The Trading Simply Blog.

Key developments in August

This was the most important month to date in the life of The Trading Simply Blog as so many new initiatives were implemented in an attempt to provide a framework for the blog itself.

This meant producing content in a different format such as podcasting to avoid the usual ‘text based’ approach to blogging.

It also meant finalising the basic layout, design and feel of the blog to make it as user friendly as possible so that in the future, more time could be spent producing content rather than tweaking designs and colour schemes.

The most important initiative in August was to begin trading a new account specifically for The Trading Simply Blog. Details are below.

Podcasting

Wow! what a challenge podcasting is and I’m glad I did it. It is so much fun! I managed to produce two podcasts this month and want to crank out even more in September and beyond.

The technical challenge was immense as I am not that much of a geek but I managed to work around the technical gremlins the most troublesome of which was getting iTunes to automatically accept new podcasts as I publish them.

This has now been fixed and you can subscribe to the podcasts by:

• email and RSS
• iTunes.

I would recommend producing podcasts for your own blog or website if you have one as they provide an alternative way for your readers to consume your content.

More podcasts are on the way 🙂

The Trading Simply Newsletter

The Trading Simply Newsletter also had its technical gremlins which were eventually solved. The most important aspect of the newsletter is to show you how I make money from individual trades.

It was important for me to establish the TS newsletter in order to give away something for free. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scams in the stock market industry, typically making claims that they can show you how to make £500 a day with just two minutes work.

This means that giving away the techniques I use to make money from the stock market via a free newsletter seemed the obvious solution. I plan to build on the idea of giving away trading techniques in September by producing videos of the type of chart analysis I go through to pick shares. The best way to keep updated is to subscribe to The Trading Simply Blog by Email.

My Trades

Disclaimer: The trades published below are for educational purposes only. They are all closed trades. Please do not buy spread bets in the companies mentioned below because you will lose money.

[table “7” not found /]

Results

• Trading Simply + 2.0%
• FTSE -6.57%

Well the things that immediately jump out at you from the table of trades are that:

• All my losing trades were long trades
• All my winning trades were short trades
• All trades for the month of August were made during the first two weeks of the month
• Talvivaar Mining was the biggest winner
• Phoenix IT was the biggest loser
• The FTSE 100 lost 6.57% of its value and Trading Simply gained 2%

All in all a good month from a trading perspective since stock markets worldwide went into meltdown mode. The only way to profit from a meltdown is to go short. The temptation to buy/go long in these situations is high; ‘because the stock market has gone down so much, it cannot go down any further’ is the usual reasoning in these situations. Trouble is they often do go down further. Buying in these situations is simply not viable and I will either sit it out or go short with reduced risk.

Learning Outcomes for August

I learned A LOT in August.

Most of it was geek stuff to do with blogging. It felt awesome to learn how to record, edit, upload and publish to iTunes. All of this using free tools available on the internet.

There is also other ‘backend’ stuff such as setting up Email subscriptions for readers and finalising a format for the Trading Simply Newsletter.

I’m also especially satisfied with my trading results this month. August 2011 has been the most volatile trading environment I have ever experienced and to come out with a profit is awesome.

If I were in the first year of my trading, I would have sat on the sidelines and waited for the madness to subside and used a demo account to make trades through the volatility.

August reinforced the idea that I have to stick to my trading plan. As a result of the worldwide stock market crash, I have now added the following to my own trading plan:

In times of extreme volatility decide either to:

• reduce risk, use profit targets and use tight stops or,
• Wait for the madness to subside

Lastly, I would like to thank you all for taking the time out to read this post as it is rather a large one.

All the best.

Newsletter subscribers get additional commentary about my closed trades – its free.

Any trades listed above are closed trades as I do not make public open positions.

• SIGN ME UP! for notifications of updates/podcasts by email.

• You can also get the RSS feed as well.

• Follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

• Check out the podcasts

 

Please use the ‘leave a reply’ form below to agree/disagree or to comment on this post. If you really enjoyed this post, you can always use the Facebook ‘like’ button above.