Michael Taylor

Michael Taylor made the move to trading the stock market with his own capital on a full time basis in December 2016. As well as ShareScope, Michael contributes to Investors Chronicle and other online publications. He has also written a free book on getting started in the UK stock market, along with a stock trading handbook – both of which are available to download from his website at www.shiftingshares.com

I believe that anyone can learn to trade if they are able to remain objective and are willing to put the hours in. I lost a lot of money early on by not having a proper strategy and following the crowd. If you want to make money then you need to generate your own ideas – I use SharePad to find and plan my trades, and ShareScope to run on my trading screens.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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