I’m feeling chipper today, not delirious but more content than normal. The reason is equities are falling again and I am happier in my long term plays. I have two FTSE Dec bets open and intend to open another six building up to a 20 Euro short. At the moment with a lot of traders away from their desks volume is low and the market seems undecided. Into the first week of September we should see some action stirring as volume picks up and the negative sentiment prevails.

Oil and commodities are the main cause for concern as they will push the market around and especially the FTSE as it’s heavily weighted to miners and financials. My play is that I’m expecting a steady rise to 5800 over the next few weeks. Based however of prevailing news it may not reach this level so this is why I’m scaling into my short. At the moment we are at 5450 and I won’t be adding to my position until FTSE reaches 5550.

Happy Trading

Total Profit Week: -99.00
Account Total : 8,674.15

I seem to have developed an amazing ability to close my shorts as the momentum moves lower. I’m currently in a situation with no shorts after closing my last two short positions for a small loss. Why? I’m really not sure. There was a large move higher and I thought I would get a better chance at a short at a higher level. Greed, naked greed.

So now I’m sitting back watching the markets move lower without me and the lovely 13 euro position I had built up. If ever there was an example of bad timing I seem to have become it. For now sit and wait.

Total Profit Week: +51.00
Account Total : 8,773.15

This was a terrible week. I closed positions I should have left open and when I opened positions I moved my stop loss to break even too quick. More lessons to learn from.

US prices rose by 5.6% in the year to July so what does that mean to me. Well I cancelled most of my shorts but today felt like getting in again and placed another sell at 5515 and closed it after it went positive. Now why would you do that? Well my hope was that after a two day sell of in US equities a rally would follow and I would short at a higher price. Not so.

This is not very good trading from yours truly. I think I need to step back and re-evaluate my position. The market is a little misleading now too as a lot of traders are on holidays so the volume is not in it. Wait and see before I plunge back in after a fruitless few days.

I seem to have got things back to front again. For the past two days I have been scaling out on my FTSE shorts at break even point with the hope of re shorting at a higher level. My thinking goes something like this. The mood is defiantly on the upside for the moment and the bulls are in the driving seat. In such a position I was getting a little nervy about having 13 Euros on the short side as the markets rallied. So I chickened out. Yep I didn’t have the balls for it, better safe than sorry.

This leaves me with three shorts still open and one in profit. Of course if I had left the others I would be well in profit hence getting things back to front. My concern now is that the market has woken up to inflation, job losses and the economy and will head lower without me. So today I’m hoping that the DOW will pull the finger out and rally for all its worth or at least rally by week end.

Worse case scenario is that I short at lower levels than I got out at. That would be a bad week.

Total Profit Week: +262.00
Account Total : 8,722.15

I was stopped out of three FTSE short positions with a profit of 250 Euro on Monday. Yesterday after wondering where I was going to get back in Oil gave me the break I was looking for and with the FTSE rallying to over 5400 which is where I started scaling into my shorts. I now have three positions open with the last at 5485. I suspect slight gains to the upside and will continue to add to my current positions should we pass 5500.

The FED came out with their do nothing statement last night which everyone got very excited about and the DOW finished 330 points up. In news today BNP Paribas reported second quarter profits of €1.5 billion today, down 34% on the same time last year but better than expected. The main wait will be for Freddie Mac which is expected to announce a loss of 2.19 billion which could dampen the current market move.