Well I have been trading for around a month now so I thought maybe time to put something up here.
My overall strategy for trading is medium term profits, that is weeks to a month or three, one of the reasons for that is time constraints, I have a full time job at the moment and so that rules out day trading, as I do not have the time to watch the screen in the day and I could not even if I wanted to because my employers firewall and internet policies and filtering will not let me see what I would need. There are other reasons I may go into in later postings.
My trading station is my old laptop with a GPRS data card, its not a very modern nor high spec laptop, an old Dell latitude CPX, 650MHz PIII bought on eBay a couple of years ago, 18 months or so ago I upgraded it to 512Mb RAM, and six months or so ago upgraded the hard disk to 60Gb, I have installed Windows XP Pro. The data card is a Sony Ericsson GC79 I bought on eBay, and I use an Orange PAYG SIM card from my mobile handset and buy the extras bundle of four pounds for 4Mb of data or 30 days or one pound for a days unlimited access, the four pound bundle lasts me for the month very nicely with maybe half a dozen or more sessions.
I either log on in the morning on the way to work after 8am when the markets open or at lunch time in my car in the car park. Although it may sound cumbersome it works well, a little patience may be required ocassionally, I have done my analysis the evening before so all I need to do when logged on is make the transactions.
The other tools I have are a subscription to ShareScope Gold for the daily market data and other numbers I use when making my selections, if you are interested in a subscription then contact me via the contact page on this site and I can refer you, you can then get two months free subscription through their Refer a Friend scheme.
Currently I am concentrating on Contracts For Difference (CFD). The dealer I am using for this is Minicfds (www.minicfds.com), a part of IFX Markets Ltd a long established company, who are now owned by City Index another well established financial company in London with a good reputation.
Minicfds offer a 5 week training academy period where you receive weekly training course notes by post (not email real post) and in this period you can trade as little as one share at a time, of the dealers I investigated their rates seemed most reasonable, with no minimum deal charge, simply a flat .25% of the deal value, they also offer guaranteed stops if required although that costs extra.
The actual trading software is all web based java applets, it seems to work best in Internet Explorer, so although I normally use Firefox thats not a religon, I can be pragmatic about these things.
So far on my initial investment of only five hundred pounds sterling, I have made a little over 20% in this first month, thats after taking out all the charges, so I have now put another five hundred pounds in and am increasing and diversifying my holdings.
My plan is through reinvestment of profit and feeding in additional funds as they become available to grow the account to a level to produce a reasonable monthly income, so I can draw funds monthly and still keep growing the account. Well that is the plan, always good to have a plan, lets see what happens in reality.