Quick update and Week1 account results

Just a quick post to say that one of my positions Hardys Oil & Gas fell sharply and triggered its stop loss @176.80 for a loss of £19.70. Obviously a little dissapointed but I will probably try buy it again sometime at a cheaper price.
As for current account standings (profit/loss) these are at:

Account 1: Pro Stock Tips: (-£12.63)
Account 2: Position Trading Strategy: +£81.84

So after week 1 of my blog, the position trading strategy account is ahead.

Account 2: one stop loss triggered, two new positions opened.

Ok well today one of my open positions 'Hansen transmissions' hit its stop loss of 42.4, giving me an overall loss on the position of £4.70. When I checked later it had already gone back up to 50.0 so it could be a while before I am able to get back in  at the cheaper price. Part of the stategy dictates that you cannot buy the share back at a more expensive price than it stopped out at.
My two new buys were 'Punch Taverns' and 'Hardys Oil & Gas' for 74.6 and 196.5 respectively. Both these are old buys that stopped out at a higher price than I have bought them for today. In fact the Hardys share is at a pretty big discount at the older stop out price of 231.0. So I am hoping it will get back to around that same price at some point for a nice £35 profit.
I will be making a couple of trades on Account 1 tomorrow, so watch this space!

Account 1

One of the pitfalls of working from home is sometimes you get a project that needs completing quickly and as you dont have the usual work routine of actually leaving the workplace to go home on a night that means that sometimes you end up working very long hours sat in your home office. That's where I've been for the last 2 days!

So anyway as promised I'm going to go through one of the accounts and show my current open positions.
This account is the 'pro share tips' account, so I only open new positions in the account when I receive share tips from either of 2 sources. I'm not going to reveal my tip sources here so please don't ask, but I will be showing which new positions I open as and when they happen.

So the account started with £1k in it (around $1570) and is currently showing a slight profit of £0.64. Here are all my current open positions:

I've had one or two positions close before this point, either through hitting their stop loss or dropping in value after their trailing stop has triggered and therefore realising a profit. For the sake of this exercise I will forget about those previous trades and from this point on document the current open positions and any new trades I make.

All the above trades were based on share tips only. In my next blog entry I will show you my current positions open in my Account 2 - following a position trading strategy. See you then!

Welcome...

Welcome to my new blog. I'm starting this really as a record of my progress but also to compare 2 different spread betting strategies I am using on 2 separate accounts to see which comes out top after 12 months. I hope you'll stick around and follow my progress.
A short introduction about myself:
I'm male, 35 years old and I'm a self employed architectural consultant, so I'm in the fortunate position of being able to work out of my home office. This gives me an added advantage of being able to trade at any time of day during London market hours.
I began spread betting (or trading as I prefer to call it) around 6 months ago after reading a few books on the subject. I've been a regular investor in normal stocks for around ten years so I have a fare grasp on how the markets work. I have the usual savings, ETFs and ISA accounts so spread betting is just another investment vehicle that I am trying out.

I actually turned a small but not insignificant profit during my first 3 months of spread betting, but as I began to learn the ins and outs of the platform software I discovered that the company I traded with had quite limited features compared to other companies out there - and on top of that their spreads were quite wide. Obviously every little advantage helps, so I closed all my positions and withdrew my funds whilst I did my research into other spread betting companies to decide what was the best platform for me.
During that first 3 months I was using a position trading strategy and like I said it turned a nice profit for me. What interested me was how this strategy which leaves the stock picking completely up to you would perform against a strategy based on 'professional' stock tip advice.
So I decided to open up 2 separate accounts on 2 similar platforms (both in features and in spreads) and test each strategy against each other.
So there you have it, basically this blog will follow the progress of each of the 2 accounts for the next 12 months. I am already 1 month into this experiment, so the next post I make will show you what positions I currently have open in one of the accounts.
Hope you'll stick around and enjoy the rollercoaster ride that is spread trading!