FuturesTechs Blog

For this blog post we welcome a guest writer, Stephen Desborough, who has worked in the Futures industry for many years as a trader and is now a Performance Coach. He has helped many traders with his in depth knowledge of methods like NLP, approached from a traders point of view.

stephen@performance-coach.co.uk is his e-mail address if you wish to contact him.

Thanks for your contribution, Steve, and Season Greetings to you all!

Cheers,

Clive.

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As the nights and the year draw in, it is a perfect time to reflect back on 2008. As you look back, hopefully you will be able to relish in your accomplishments and the growth that you have made both professionally and personally.

Did you set any goals for 2008? Did you achieve all of the goals that you set for yourself? If for some reason you’ve fallen short, then ask yourself, “why?”. Is there something that you could have done differently, or is there something that you should have done, but for whatever reason you didn’t?

During this special time of festivities, and a well deserved break, spend some time brainstorming the past year and the year ahead. What do you want to achieve in 2009? What is important to you? What are your goals? How are you going to achieve them?

In 1953, researchers surveyed Yale’s graduating seniors to determine how many of them had specific, written goals for their future. The answer: 3%. Twenty years later, researchers polled the surviving members of the Class of 1953 — and found that the 3% with goals had accumulated more personal financial wealth than the other 97% of the class combined.

Some of the reasons that many of us do not set goals:

• Not being serious about your goals. Until you become completely serious about your goals, your chances of success are limited.
• I don’t know how to clearly set out my goals. “As I don’t know how to do it or what I really want. I wont bother”
• The fear of failure. “What happens if I do not achieve my goals?”
• The fear of success. “How will I cope with success and will other peoples perception of me change”

If you have no goals, you are not going anywhere. This is a key reason why people do not achieve their full potential.

So it is important to GAIN DIRECTION IN YOUR LIFE AND DEFINE YOUR DESTINATION.

Even people who do set goals, do not always get the result that they intended. Here is a technique that will help you towards setting and achieving your goals. The SMART criteria.

• S. The more SPECIFIC, that you make your goals the more chance you have of it happening.
• M. What has to happen ? what do you have to see, feel, to know, so that you can MEASURE your success ? Make sure that your goals are MEANINGFUL to you.
• A. State your goal in the present tense. AS IF you are already living the ACHIEVEMENT of the goal.
• R. Make sure that your goal is REALISTIC to you. What degree of certainty do you have to make this goal happen.
• T. Have a precise TIME of when you will have achieved the goal. Make sure that your goal is what you do want as opposed to what you don’t want. eg. “I don’t want my business to struggle next year”. change to “I want my business to flourish next year”. This is stating your goal TOWARD what you want to achieve.As your coach, it is my goal to help you achieve your goals. If you are serious about what you want in 2009 please contact me. stephen@performance-coach.co.uk

Technical Analysis is an essential tool if you are going to trade using CFDs or Spread Betting.

The vast majority of professional day traders use technical analysis in some way shape or form during their trading day. They are aware what the important technical levels are for the markets that they trade. some do this work themselves, some rely upon services like FuturesTechs, knowing that we’ve got an 8 year track record of providing this information to the bulk of the UK Pro trading community.

Many newbies to trading struggle with how to “structure” a trade. Hopefully we’ll shed some light on this with today’s blog post.

It’s all about the levels, and that’s what we do here at FuturesTechs each day: We look at the levels that the market may be looking at, where things may change, where the buyers may return after a sell-off, where the sellers may wake up if the market starts to rise. These are commonly known as support and resistance.

Support is the name given to downside levels; prices below here the buyers may have returned previously, or where they may return today. If we fail to hold support levels the bears are obviously dominating; not giving the buyers the chance to defend these key price levels.

Resistance is the name given to price levels above the market where there may be some”action”. Either we’re going to get to these levels and fall over, or the market should see a strong reaction if we break above them.

These levels are quite often something as simple as old highs and lows, however old they are. We have found markets reacting to levels from over 20 years ago. The market has a long memory, and with charts readily available to all and sundry there’s no excuse not to be armed with the important lines in the sand as you head into each trading day.

The best traders in the world react to a bunch of different things to put on their trades: They wait patiently for a piece of news to come out, or for a technical level to break or hold, or for the market to do a certain thing that they’ve been expecting. They wait patiently. Lots of money can be lost doing trades for the sake of it. Boredom or the need to be involved is a dangerous emotion that a trader has to deal with.

There is little point in trading in between technical levels. The levels are created because they are the prices where things changed previously. They are the “action areas”. Why mess around trying to put trades on in “no mans land”? If you want to buy the market, chose a support level and put your buy order at or above there.

If you need somewhere to put a stop order you can again use a technical level.

Here’s an example: We were bearish of the Eurostoxx 50 Futures today despite Friday’s gains. We had a bold resistance level at 2704. Our bold levels are the important ones. So if we’re bearish and the market rallies to a bold resistance we would suggest selling before the level with a stop above it. The high this morning was 2698….

If you had sold at 2690 with a stop ay 2710 (or our next resistance level at 2728, if you want to give it a bit more “breathing space”) you would have got short and never been far offside.

On the same report we have bold supports at 2640 (the overnight gap) then right down at 2467 and 2418.

So this is the bit that isn’t “harry hindsdight”, just in case you want to jump on the idea that I’m writing this after the event: I will look to cover the short trade at 2470, but if we hold 2640 today I would just get out and cover the trade for either a small profit or at worse nothing. I think we need to break 2640 today to give this trade credibility. In other words we are using another bold level (this time a support) to add weight to our trade. If we don’t break below 2640 then maybe the bears aren’t ready to push us lower just now.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE LEVELS.

So If you’re just starting out trading, whether it be with a Spread bet account, or CFD’s, or DMA (Direct market access) I would urge you to make technical analysis part of your daily process, AND TO TRADE THE LEVELS.

Be Careful!

Whether you’re trading direct market futures, or CFDs or Spread Betting, the lessons you need to learn to become a successful trader are the same, and they’ve been learnt, usually the hard way, by the best traders in the world. The reason they make money trading isn’t anything to do with the type of product they trade, it’s to do with the lessons they’ve learnt, and their day to day disciplined application of those lessons.

Why have I started today’s blog posting along this line? Because it’s the beginning of September, and we’ve just come out of a tough month. August can often be a tough month for traders, as I suggest in the “PS” from my last blog posting. The other reason I’m talking about this is because we’ve lost a few of our newer “individual” customers this month (which is unusual), and the main theme seems to be that they have lost money in August.

Why is August such a tough month? Because half the market participants go on holiday, and the lack of volume can wreak havoc. There are two very different conditions that can ensue:

The market can suddenly become extremely volatile, with moves making little sense. Moves also tend not to last too long, which can be a real problem for analysts like us and traders like you, who rely on sustainable trends unfolding.

Or the market can just go very very quiet and crab sideways with very little interest shown either way. Again this is problematical for many traders, as there are no big moves to get on.

We find it frustrating to talk about these sort of markets as we feel people don’t want to hear “the market not really going anywhere”. But if that’s what’s happening, then that’s what’s happening! This introduces a use for the FuturesTechs service that I’m not sure our newer customers are fully utilising. We will do our best to get you on the right trends at the right time and keep you in a solid move by sticking with the trend, but if things become messy and confused then we will tell you, and if you’re looking for a solid trend it’s time to step away from the screen. Either look at a different market, or catch up with that pile of paperwork that you’ve been meaning to deal with.

The best traders in the world abide by one word more than anything; and I’ve already mentioned it once today: DISCIPLINE. One very important discipline is to make sure you don’t over-trade, you don’t trade because you’re bored, you don’t trade because you need to make X amount by the end of the month. If there’s no clear trend then you are only going to give your money to the market, and there’s plenty of willing takers of your hard earned lolly.

So always be aware of market conditions, and on this note be aware that we are now entering a very interesting period of the year. The run it to Christmas is usually a time when there are strong moves in the market. Between now and November I’m sure we’ll identify plenty of big moves that can be jumped upon and provide profitable trading opportunities.

We may already have the first of these, with Oil selling off through key support (around $110 in Brent Crude) first thing this morning, and Gold Futures failing at key resistance (850) towards the end of last week.

We’ve been in these markets for years, and been analysing them for professional traders since 2000. We’re giving you the chance to share this wisdom on a daily basis, for just 50 quid a month. Can you afford to pass up this opportunity? Do you want to make money trading, or become another one of the 80% who fail?

You decide.

www.futurestechs.co.uk/subscribe/

Cheers,

Clive.

I’ve just spent the last 5 days in Las Vegas; my first time there. Wow! What a place. I was immediately impressed with the sheer size of it all, especially casino complexes like Caesars Palace and the MGM Grand. While the main reason for the trip was purely for pleasure I couldn’t help but draw a few comparisons between trading the markets and playing the tables. I’m sure we’ve all done this before but here are a few thoughts I had. I’d love to hear any thoughts any of you have ever had on the subject!

The House always wins in Vegas. That was pretty obvious from the size and scale of things, and the money that had been spent. We were staying at the Ballagio and it was clear that they weren’t making their money on the “all you can eat” buffet breakfast, not with the amount of food that some people had piled onto their plates, sometimes for several trips in a row!

The house in the case of trading is the Exchanges, or sometimes in the case of smaller punters, the Spread Bet/CFD firms. But the Exchanges can rightfully argue that they haven’t, as is the case in Vegas, invented an uneven playing field in which they will always come out on top. They are there to provide the playing field, which is “level” for short traders and long traders, all of whom simply pay commission and clearing fees. In other words they’re providing the hotel and gaming-room, but not taking money out of the trading.

It’s a widely know fact that spread bet firms (and CFD firms, which is maybe less widely conceived) do sometimes take the punters bet and don’t “lay it off”. They have structures and models in place to manage the risk they take on. I am going to write about this at further length some other time as it’s one of the most contentious issues in this arena, I feel, but it shouldn’t be: The retail customer, in the main, is not being ripped off by the Spread Bet firms. After all, it’s you that decides when you want to buy and sell something, and you’ve been told the parameters with which to do this way in advance, which is where there is a firm comparison with the Casinos.

The big casinos on the strip are merely there to serve people’s insatiable appetite to chase the dollar. They facilitate the dream. The fact that a quick look around you at any of these establishments should tell you straight away who’s winning out of the deal doesn’t put you off: You still fancy the idea of walking away one evening with pockets full of chips.

There are countless books on people who have beaten Vegas, mostly to do with counting Cards in Blackjack. I read such a book; based on a group of MIT students with exceptional mathematical brains who worked tirelessly to devise a system that told them when the deck was predominantly filled with high cards; a prime opportunity to bet large as the chances of scoring 19 or 20 and beating the house increased dramatically. One line that interested me in this particular tome was that you didn’t need to get consistently high cards to win; you had to get higher cards than the dealer.

The key word for me from the above paragraph is “system”. Obviously these guys were exceptionally bright, and the system was extremely complex, and even then it wasn’t guaranteed. But at least they had a system. I was amazed a few times while I was watching or playing the tables the number of people, particularly playing roulette, who were putting on too many chips per spin of the wheel for the venture to ever be profitable. They clearly didn’t understand the odds, and were doomed to fail on this basis. There’s a valuable lesson that can be translated to the markets; know your odds. Know your market. Have some sort of system.

This is where I think technical analysis always scores big. It can allow one to develop a systemised approach to decision making for traders. When you are developing a system consider the following: You need to find a way to enter trades, and then potentially have a different system for running a trade for maximum profit. There’s no point in developing a fantastic way of spotting entry points if it then fails to tell you when to get out.

Finally back to Vegas: I noticed more than anything that the gaming rooms were highly charged and highly emotive places, with people making and losing money all the time. This got me thinking about human emotion, and how this can have such a profound effect on decision making. I did it myself a few times: If I was on a losing run at Blackjack I’d simply put a bigger bet on because I needed to get out of the rut. Clearly this was an emotionally based decision, and clearly it was wrong (judging by the amount of times it failed!!!). So my final thought is this: Emotion is inevitable, whether you’re playing the markets or playing Craps. Your best chance of winning is by sticking to a system that reduces the emotion. I’ve seen many people write that technical analysis allows you to eliminate the emotion from trading. Rubbish. You cannot eliminate emotion, but you can find a way to manage it so it doesn’t take over and end up costing you chips… or is that ticks!!