Hi All

Looking to gain a small following for an experiment, gonna spreadbet 1,000 of my own hard earned with a view not to stop until I hit 25,000 or lose the lot!!

It'll be across a range of Index, equity & FX trades starting small and building the pot (or lose the lot) will be using flat stops and running profits with trailing stops.

If you want to follow every trade and watch the spiral up or down feel free to follow me on www.twitter.com/eyetrader - where I'll be simply be posting each trade as I click the mouse

BTW this is not spam, I'm not selling anything, I dont want any donations, more of a personal challenge that I'm going to conduct in public!!!! I'm hoping to see a few tips on here as well as my own strategies and ideas.

Lastly I'll be donating 5,000 of the profit (if/when I make it) to charity

May the slaughter commence :)

Eyetrader

This from a Wiki page on spreadbetting:

"..According to an article in The Times dated 10 April 2009 approximately 30,000 spread bet accounts were opened last year, and that the largest study of gambling in the UK on behalf of the Gambling Commission found that serious problems developed in almost 15% of spread betters compared to 1% of other gambling. In addition a report from Cass Business School found that only 1 in 5 punters ends up a winner. As noted in the report, this corresponds to the same ratio of successful punters in regular trading..."

Maybe it's just the yanks who are cr@p then.

:o)

Three of the best performers in my sbet portfolio at present are BRK (which broke upwards again today after a long sideways dawdle), Andor (AND), and City Natural Resources HY (CYN).

My 14k mission (post 12) had not gone well enough when I last reported, but is going better now. At present (by close yesterday) I am on track for a 65.75% gain for the 12 months. Needed to be doing better than that, but more comfortable with it now than I was at Xmas.

Got round to checking my account and 3000 is now 11227.71, so my previous guess wasn't too far off the mark.

Two positions currently open, one decently in profit, one showing a small loss. If both positions were closed as I type, I would be precisely half way to 25k.

Update on my 14k mission (see posts 10 & 12)

With 5 months gone, the 14,000 I started with on 1st October is now 18,215 (ie, up 4215 = 30%). Had I been withdrawing 375 per week, those withdrawals would have taken 7875, which would have made too big a dent. So that aspect of the original test would not have worked (and was always a very ambitious idea). Henceforth i will merely continue with growing the 14k pot to whatever level.

Since January 1st I've also been running another pot, starting with 3000 and spreadbetting along similar lines but less actively using barely 20% of the pot at any given moment. That now stands at 3839 (ie up 28% in two months).

Not much change to the SB account since I last reported two months ago. Managed to side-track myself back into FX for a few weeks in January with very poor results, but offset by profits in CEY and AUL and an excellent DJI long today; also took a small loss on RGM.

End result, 3000 is now 12,080.

Must admit, I've been feeling quite nervous about opening new positions since the New Year and have hardly traded at all. Actually, that's probably not a bad thing, apparently the biggest SB losers are those who trade too often.