Tag: Moneysupermarket

Slow Trader Diary – Week 26

One step forward, followed by one step back. Or was it the other way round?

When trading (or managing) a leveraged fund there is no hiding. Unlike ‘normal’ funds where poor investments can be ignored under the (incorrect) pretence that the share price will eventually return.

Often it doesn’t. And the loss is rarely admitted to – how many pension funds still hold Lloyds Bank since before 2008? The theory being that the offending share investment is not a loss until it is sold at a loss.

Peter Lynch – arguably the most successful fund manager – in his books, tells us of investments he still holds today – from decades ago – that will never recover to previous values.

A leveraged fund on the other hand, is brutal. If you go down a fraction you sell. You take your losses early is the mantra. Your failure is known right away. And you will have failures. Its part and parcel of the game.

Here are my failures (and win) this week: failure plural, win singular.

Firstly, we paid £24.79 this week in long interest. This is a charge IG make for carrying DFB (Daily Fund Bets) over one day. Day traders – those that don’t carry trades past one day – would have nothing to pay.

FX AUD/USD – £480 loss. Not my finest hour.

Halliburton – £558 loss.

We bought at the green arrow. Perfect, a 50% retrace and good price action. However, I (foolishly and unknowingly at the time) broke my rule of going against the trend. It was only clear to me after the share price went lower and stopped out that we were, indeed, trading against the recent trend. We had a lower high. Okay, it could be argued that the lower high was slightly hidden until the next move…? But still not a good trade.

Under Armour Inc. + £667.

This had everything we required. Trend, retrace and price action. The target price was set at purchase. This was a 3 to 1 trade. Meaning that we made 3 times more than our potential loss.

Should I have set a higher target? Maybe. Only time will tell. The target was my call at the time. And I still stand by it. We are short term traders after all. If a new high is made another buy opportunity will always present itself.

Trades we are currently in:

CLS Holdings. – 51.7 points down. We had sold this share at break even and bought again at a lower price. Not a great strategy to chase a share price down looking for a buy point. However, the chart and the fundamentals are good.

ITV PLC. + 12.3 points up.

Our target is a new high with ITV. Fundamentals are good too.

Moneysupermarket.com + 15.9 points up.

Our target is to simply match the previous high with this one. The big drop down, shown on the chart, leaves me a little nervous to take this share to a new high. Also, we have moved our (non guarantee) stop up. For a share such as this – one that has large moves – a guaranteed stop would (in hindsight) have been a good option.

Monster Beverage Corp. + 1137 points up. Don’t be confused by the amount of points. As US stocks are often much more expensive than UK shares we have large points movements in our US trades. However, in the tradition of good money management, we have a trade amount that matches the risk. For Monster that, in this case, is 0.7 pence per point. (In the case of Moneysupermarket, for example, it is £20 per point).

Pace. – 9.1 points down. This is a funny share chart and one that I will look to exit.

WPP. + 2 points. WPP is now trending down, so I will watch very carefully when the market opens on Monday to sell this share.

That is it for this week. As usual, I will post the fund position overall (which is done monthly) in the new month, probably next week. Have a great weekend.

B

June 27, 2015
How goes it? Week 25

For simplification, I’ve combined Slow Trader and Ferrari into one fund which we will refer to as Slow Trader Fund.

Our strategy in Slow Trader is to short term trade (using, primarily, daily close bars rather than intra day bars) shares in the FTSE 350, stocks in the S&P 500 and major foreign exchange (FX) currency pairings.

Arm Holdings. We came out at a little over break even. I moved our stop as I was not happy with the possible trend change of this share price. The share price did move below our buy point but has subsequently moved up again. We are out for the time being.

Halliburton Co. We set this share stop also to a little over break even. This took us out without lose and the share price has continued to drop. A good move on our part.

BT Group. Moving the stop too early is usually not a good thing. I feel that the stop should only be moved if something happens to make you change your mind about the share or the share price has climbed sufficiently to put you into a different price bracket. I got this wrong with BT. I moved the stop and got stopped out for £17 profit but the share turned and continued up!

Ashtead Group. – £311 lose. On reflection, not a good share to take. A ranging share price, rather than my strategy of taking trending prices, this share dropped well below my entry price – but has subsequently turned up again.

CLS Holdings. – £325 lose. I made fundamental mistakes with this one. Incorrect retracement level without price action. If I had waited (patience is the virtue of a good trader) and measured the retrace correctly this could have been a winner.

I bought at the red arrow, the green arrow was of course the correct buy point.

Card Factory. – £311 lose. This is a relatively new share. Only 5 years of fundamental information, I prefer 10 years.

We were in credit – having bought at the lower green arrow – but a sharp drop took us out. You will notice that I sell a share for a lose (or more accurately, I’m stopped out if a share price drops below what I think is acceptable).

FX AUD/USD. + £394. This is the first time you have been introduced to FX. This is on an intra day 4-hour chart so you can see the move.

We bought at the red arrow, we sold at the green arrow and we bought again (and we are still in) at the blue arrow. Easy! Okay, sometimes it goes ideally like this.

We also had interest charges (mostly for carrying shares over the weekend) of – £32.

We are currently in:

CLS Holdings. We bought again at the green arrow on the CLS chart above. Although the price has moved up we are still -3.7 points as this is the spread. The spread is how the broker (in our case IG) make their money. It is the same as when you go on holiday and change your sterling for euros, you have a buy and a sell rate.

ITV PLC. + 2.6 points.

Money supermarket. + 12.1 points.

Monster Beverage. + 568 points.

Underarmour. + 464 points.

WPP PLC. – 9 points.

FX AUS/USD. – 20.9 points.

Finally, anyone wishing to short term trade for themselves I am trialling a notification system to help you. You will get my information direct to your smart phone so you will need an account that you can action through your phone. More later.

B

June 20, 2015