Spread betting is another way of buying and selling shares. Instead of buying the actual stock when we purchase through our broker, in spread betting we are literally placing a bet on the stock that it will either rise or fall as defined by the spread. The spread is the price to buy and the […]
Category: Michael Taylor
The Trader: Working Through Rough Periods
Unless you’re an Instagram trader, set with a laptop by the pool and a Lamborghini in the background, everybody goes through rough patches in trading. It is a fact. So much of this business is uncertain, and ironically people want to get into trading for the ‘freedom’ it provides. But free we are not, and […]
The Trader: A Day In The Life of a Stock Trader
One of the questions I’m frequently asked is how I structure my day. Time is a trader’s most important currency because sometimes it can be the first person eats, the second person goes hungry. Being alert and organised is the key to performing well. My day starts early compared to most at 04:45. Before I […]
The Trader: Knowing Your Market
We have covered many aspects of trading in previous articles, such as Why You Should Be Using R, Exit Strategies, and How To Avoid Blowing Your Account, and having had conversations with recent traders it is clear that knowing your market in what you trade is a necessary criterion. This article will introduce new traders […]
The Trader: Examining Retail Trading Behaviour
One of the many oft-repeated quotes around traders is that 90% of traders lose money. However, this depends on how one classifies a ‘trader’. Many people – and I can believe that it is 90%+ of people – lose money when they enter trading. But often newcomers aren’t coming into the market prepared. There’s a […]
The Trader: Taking advantage of SharePad News
A few months ago, I wrote about how to optimise your news feed on ShareScope Pro. My suggestions to improve the news feed have been taken on board and are now available on SharePad too. In this article, I’ll show how you to set up your news feed in order to get the best out […]
The Trader: Five rules for new traders
A combination of market volatility and being locked in during lockdown has led to many turning their eye to getting involved in the stock market. The failure rate for traders is estimated to be around 90%, and many of the spread bet firms report that 70%+ of clients lose (the real figure I believe is […]
The Trader: How to Avoid Blowing Your Account
The market is moving with extreme volatility in recent weeks. This offers traders many opportunities to prosper and profit, but volatility is a double-edged sword. It can be your best friend one day and your worst enemy the next. Many traders love volatility when the trade is going in their favour, but struggle to deal […]
The Trader: Why You Should Be Using R
R is a component in trading that we use to define risk. It is a crucial aspect of trading systems and by thinking in terms of R we can improve our results. In this article I will introduce to you the concept of R and how to use it for your own trading. It is […]
The Trader: Why the trend is your friend
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Whether or not you agree with Jane Austen’s opening line in Pride and Prejudice, by the end of this article I hope you will agree with my version. “It is a truth […]
The Trader: Exit Strategies
In April 2017, I had a real nightmare. I had been trading full time on the market for four months and had had enormous success buying bubbley story stocks and riding them upwards. I was convinced that I knew what I was doing. I made all the classic mistakes of complacency, which turned into denial […]
The Trader: Optimising Your RNS Feed
In this article, I’ll show you how to clean up and manage your RNS feed by adding a filter and removing noise, colour coding your RNSs, and highlighting words and phrases within the stories itself. We’ll also get rid of all stocks without EPIC codes. The RNS feed is an important part of the screen […]
A market of stocks or a stock market?
January was a good month, despite the FTSE 100 closing down nearly 3.5% and the outbreak on coronavirus soon to kill us all. Or is it? Well, it’s been declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organisation. But what seems likely is that the media has whipped up the story in order to […]
Taste the Feeling
Taste the Feeling is a Coca-Cola slogan from 2016. I think it’s a very good, because Coca-Cola isn’t just a product. It’s a religion. The fervour seen during the launch of New Coke, launched in 1985, as a response to Pepsi’s taste tests showing consumers preferred a sweeter alternative, showed that it wasn’t about the […]
Why mindset is the most important factor
“Nature versus nurture” has been a debate that has raged for hundreds of years. Sir Francis Galton (pictured above), who was a Victorian era statistician and psychologist (amongst investor, explorer, and other disciplines) coined the phrase in his book Hereditary Genius. He had been influenced by Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, and so in […]
The Wright brothers were not capitalists
Warren Buffett is famous to have said “If a capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk back in the early 1900s, he should have shot Orville Wright”. This is because the airline industry is deemed to have sucked huge amounts of money and destroyed shareholder value more than any other sector. But is that fair? […]
Cups and bowls
Cups and handles, and bowls, have been very popular with trend traders. These patterns can be powerful as they show sentiment of the stock gradually changing and buyers slowly overpowering suppliers of the stock. This is a classic cup and handle pattern. The cup is the deeper bowl, along with a handle which is the […]
Is there life on the High Street?
With Debenhams going bang, the demise of Mothercare, and Carpetright finally succumbing to their challenges (Carpetright was taken over – but at a price only slightly higher than the all time low), the narrative of the high street being dead seems to be coming true with every new departure. Thomas Cook went bust a few […]
Support & Resistance
Support and resistance are two common concepts when it comes to technical analysis. They are the most basic but also the most important points when plotting levels on a chart. Technical analysis is a self-fulfilling prophecy as many traders and investors look at the same levels on charts, and therefore support becomes support because people […]
Two Technical Analysis Tools You Need: Candlesticks and Volume
We briefly touched on technical analysis in my previous article ‘The Four Stages of a Stock’, and in this article I want to introduce some simple technical analysis components, which, if understood, can provide a lot of clarity on price action in the market. Candlesticks are said to have been invented by a Japanese rice […]
Why shorting is good for investors
Although I am much more of a trader myself as I rely on trading profits to pay my bills, I do think investors have much to be gained learning from the art of short selling stocks. There are several reasons that will be explained in this article, but first it is important to understand what […]
The Four Stages of a Stock
Technical analysis is either loved or hated. Many people like to claim it as ‘voodoo’ and trying to predict the future, but the fact is that technical analysis is useful simply because everyone looks at the same charts and sees the same patterns. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who do not bother to learn […]
