Thursday 3 July 2008

Forex CFD Trading Update: Jun 2008

My AUDUSD CFD trading on my CMCMarkets account went well during the month of June - about the only thing (financially) that was positive about June 2008. My account balance finished at $2938.81 - a gain of $650.29. I traded less frequently than the previous couple of months, keeping winning positions open a bit longer while the trend continued, and only doing short-term trades while I was watching TV in the evening and could keep an eye on the price action.

I did a bit better using stop and limit OCO orders for positions kept open overnight or while I was at work this month - one useful tidbit of information provided at the CityIndex seminar was to set stops based on the recent market volatility, rather than stick to a set stop of say 13 pips from my order price. The limits were generally set based on recent resistance levels. A couple of times the trends reversed just short of my limit, and I had to take a smaller profit later on (when I was back at my PC), but at other times the limit closed out my order just before the trend reversed, which was very satisfying.

Overall my CFD trading with CMCMarket had produced a net loss of just over $2,000 (~40%) since I started trading in April '07, but this calendar year I've made $1,738.56 net profit, and my net loss for the financial year ending 30 June was only -$290.26. If my forex trading continues to be mostly profitable from now on, I might break even sometime this financial year.

It's interesting to note that excluding the cost of the 2 pip buy-sell spread incurred on each trade I would already be in positive territory. That's one reason that I'll stick to my CMCMarkets account for forex trading and only use my new CityIndex account for trading Stock indices or commodities - CityIndex spread is 3 pips for trading the Aussie. So far I've dabbled in crude oil and gold CFD trades with my new CityIndex account, and managed to lose around $100 of the "free" $250 provided by CityIndex in just three trades! The minimum gold CFD is a bit too costly relative to the meagre $500 "seed" money in that account, so I'll probably stick to trading the ASX index in the evening - trying to pick the rebound in the ASX that often occurs if the Australian market has been sold down during the day, and the DOW opens positively overnight. We'll see how that theory works out.

I'll start tracking my Index CFD trading results from next month.





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