Nkechi was always telling me to have a go at day trading, she said I’d be good at it. I did have a look once but it seemed like too much effort for a ‘get-rich-quick’ scheme so never took it further.
(She’s on my mind all the time 😥😘).
Last month I decided to take another look and here I am, putting up a blog to act as a trading journal! I hope to make a success of it so that one day, somehow, she’ll say ‘I told you so’.
Plans, Strategies & Journals
I started by working through most of the online courses on IG Academy, they’re firmly in favour of writing out a trading plan, working out a trading strategy and maintaining a trading journal.
How to keep them?
There are some really good online solutions but none have a usable free version and I’m not prepared to pay just yet, a text file/spreadsheet solution would be too cumbersome and unwieldy. A WordPress blog on the other hand is just perfect.
I’ll create a custom post type for the trades and use blog pages for the plan and strategy. Blog posts, like this, I’ll use for any general points (shouldn’t be too many as most notes will be on the trades themselves). I’ll also want to add an analysis page, with charts and stuff, eventually.
Trade School
Trading seems to involve so much jargon! I’ve been watching a whole load of YouTube videos and some of them are quite incomprehensible.
Happily the IG courses have given me a framework to build upon and the videos by 212 Trading have been particularly helpful. I started from the first ones 9 years ago and worked up to about 4/5 years ago – quite a few videos, thankfully they’re all short. Loads more reading and watching to do though.
Paper Trading
I’ve set up a demo account on IG, this is so important to get a feel of how the software works, see how well my strategies perform, find out what fees are incurred, ensure I can make a profit. There’s so much to learn and I definitely don’t want to be caught out when I’m dealing with real money.
IG offer spread betting and CFD (contract for difference) trading. Spread betting is classed as gambling so you don’t have to declare tax, it makes sense to use that.
I made my first trades 2 days ago (the demo account comes loaded with £10,000 but I’ll be keeping my trades realistic). I made £220.10 the first day then £289.40 the next morning. It was all looking great but I was obviously becoming too confident because the next few trades were a huge loss -£289.90, completely negating the morning’s good work.
In the end, over the 2 days, I was £177.49 ahead. A good number of those trades were made using a £1700 margin, looking ahead I’ll keep the margin to a few hundred pounds and see how far I get with that limit.
I’m actually happy about the losses, they helped me to see why 77% of retail investors lose money on CFDs and spread betting (there’s a huge banner on the IG website about this, I think they have to display it by law).
Yes, I’ll be treading very carefully into my trading future, it will be fun!