Close Gold whole postion

I've decided to close my whole gold position. I don't like the way it's hanging around at the moment. I feel that whatever the result of the Greek elections it's not going to be good for commodities so better to be out of the market. QE is the thing we're looking and now this may happen at the 19th-20th June Fed meeting. It's election year and Obama will undoubtedly be exerting pressure on Ben for a quick fix to juice the markets going into November.


P&L -23
I was a bit annoyed at missing out on a shorting oppotunity when the market jumped after the Spanish bailout agreement. I was racking my brains trying to think of a similar scenario that happened before where I'd made a small profit in such circumstances but couldn't remember and didn't write it down so I didn't do anything. However, now I remember - it was when Bin Laden was assassinated. The market jumped up irrationally then and I was able to short it. Just goes to show how important it is to keep notes.

Bear Flag US Crude?

Despite my positive view on US Crude looking at the charts I have to wonder if there is a bear flag forming. I don't go in for a lot of technical analysis but in the past I have found bull and bear flags to be quite powerful formations. Overnight US Crude gapped up over 200 ticks from my cash in point last Friday. For a few minutes of faint regret at about 11:30pm last night having thought for a few minutes on Friday just putting in a stop at about +120 my feeling is that if you can get 50% of a move then that's pretty good and over a weekend you can never really tell what's going to happen.


If this bear flag plays out we could see a drop in Crude to 75-70 area.
I suppose it all hinges on the Greek election on 17th June. No doubt the Greeks will vote for whatever political entity that will promise the end of austerity politics and allow the party of early retirement, easy benefits and to continue. Sorry, but in the UK 70% of my aquaintances are basically socialists, even the ones who aren't(!), who think that cutting government debt is the incorrect and the government should continue to spend it's way out of recession. Because Cuba, who have probably out done every other nation on earth in government spending, is currently the most successful country in existence - an economic miracle. Obviously.

Returning to Spread Betting

After a long hiatus I have decided to tentatively dip my toe back into the spread betting / day trading arena. Basically my story is this. I first started spreadbetting during the crash of 2008 wanting to take advantage of the falling market by going short. Within the space of about a year I had succeeded in turning my initial stake of 1000 pounds into just over three grand. This is the truth - no outright lies or embellishments, I actually did acheive this. I told a few people and was very pleased with myself. I treated some of my friends to dinner at a restaurant. One friend even suggested I take out a grand and spend it on a new PC or something. I said "No - that's my stake. I'm going to build that into a personal fortune!"

Unfortunately, in one horrifying day I lost nearly one thousand pounds trying to be too clever. When the Bank of England first announced their QE policy I noticed that bond prices jumped and kept on rising without retreating at all. I thought I would try to take advantage of this when the second round of QE was announced by the US Treasury. Basically, I thought - "Wow! This is a sure thing. Set up my deals correctly and make easy money!" So I set up my deals accordingly, one below the bond price to sell if it was hit (ie a short) if no more QE was to be implemented, and one above to buy if that one was reached if the US Treasury was going to go ahead with more QE. What actually happened was that the market became incredibly volatile. Both deals were activated (I had implemented them without a "one deal cancels the other" setting and not given myself any outs ... any insurance), both deals were stopped out and in total both cost me about a grand.

I remember that horrifying day all too well. All that profit, all that work destroyed in an instant. After that I went a little mad trying to recoup my losses and bet all sorts of things. The result was I pretty much lost it all right back to my starting 1K. Then I stopped and decided this wasn't for me. But now I'm back. Older - maybe a little wiser (probably not) but willing to have another go. This time I will stick to indices, commodities and the odd share that I am familiar with.