Tuesday 26 November 2019

CFD trading update - play money

As most of my investments are long term 'set and forget' style (as I have a long term investment time frame and want to minimize fees, trading costs and 'churn'), I have a CFD trading account with Cityindex that I can use to 'play' at trading whenever I get bored with just tracking my NW each month. Even with that 'trading' account I've slowly gone from taking short term positions (having had very mixed results with my results at 'day trading' - aka "I don't know what the hell I'm doing") to having a couple of long positions that I'll leave open until the current up trend seems to have broken.

I've had a few Berkshire Class B CFDs for quite a while, and recently did some short term trades in Tesla (which I managed to eventually close out without losing money) and Google (which actually made a small profit when my stop loss closed out my long position at a small profit). I waited too long to reopen my position in Google after the price dip, so I've now just bought a few long CFDs in the iShares US Technology ETF.


I probably won't close out these positions (unless there is a market correction or the US looks like heading into a recession) as the margins are small enough to allow for some significant price dips without forcing me to sell, but I'll monitor the daily price movements just to give me something to do. The amounts involved in my CFD account are quite trivial - a balance of around $1,000 and daily movements of a few dollars up or down.

The movements in the Vanguard high growth fund (where we have about $1m invested in our SMSF) are material to my NW, but as I intend to hold that position (and add about $2K each month via super contributions) until retirement and beyond, the monthly tracking of the daily price movements are more of an academic exercise.

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