Deleted Thread

Thrugelmir

lardellion said:

On the bright side, I reported some of the technical issues I had to the support on the exchange and they might compensate me some of the losses, that's at their discretion though.

Illiquidity in markets is far from uncommon when there's extreme volatility . If there's no buyers (on the other side)  then your stop loss will fail. There's not the fail safe guarantee that people imagine. 

Steve182

HansOndabush said:

Are you in the 15% group in profit over the long term then or have you only recently started?

I'm about even actually. Only playing with fairly small stakes and discovering that I can find trends in commodity prices which are a bit more more predictable than Crypto or stock market.

HansOndabush

Steve182 said:

HansOndabush said:

Are you in the 15% group in profit over the long term then or have you only recently started?

I'm about even actually. Only playing with fairly small stakes and discovering that I can find trends in commodity prices which are a bit more more predictable than Crypto or stock market.

I think you are right about gold; not so sure about your strategy. I mean for each of your stop losses, there is a buyer for that dip and if the dip is temporary, then they make the profit that you have forgone.

There can be many short reversals in an overall uptrend. So what happens when you are stopped out but the price then goes back up?  Do you then buy back again at a higher level or give up on that commodity?

Also if you are using a spread-bet platform as it appears you are, then watch out for fake spike downs in price. They do this to stop clients out at a loss only to move the price straight back up again. The spread market is made by the bookie and while it mirrors the real market, it does not have to all of the time.

Thrugelmir

lardellion said:

Thrugelmir said:

lardellion said:

On the bright side, I reported some of the technical issues I had to the support on the exchange and they might compensate me some of the losses, that's at their discretion though.

Illiquidity in markets is far from uncommon when there's extreme volatility . If there's no buyers (on the other side)  then your stop loss will fail. There's not the fail safe guarantee that people imagine. 

To be sure, the problem I had was with being unable to place any buy orders for a while, rather than not seeing them execute, so support chat people invited me to fill out a compensation form when I reported the bug. I'm not expecting to get anything though.

Like trying to book tickets for Glastonbury. The network pipes can only handle so much traffic concurrently. 

Steve182

HansOndabush said:

Steve182 said:

HansOndabush said:

Are you in the 15% group in profit over the long term then or have you only recently started?

I'm about even actually. Only playing with fairly small stakes and discovering that I can find trends in commodity prices which are a bit more more predictable than Crypto or stock market.

I think you are right about gold; not so sure about your strategy. I mean for each of your stop losses, there is a buyer for that dip and if the dip is temporary, then they make the profit that you have forgone.

There can be many short reversals in an overall uptrend. So what happens when you are stopped out but the price then goes back up?  Do you then buy back again at a higher level or give up on that commodity?

Also if you are using a spread-bet platform as it appears you are, then watch out for fake spike downs in price. They do this to stop clients out at a loss only to move the price straight back up again. The spread market is made by the bookie and while it mirrors the real market, it does not have to all of the time.

I generally start with a fairly tight stop so if I've called it wrong when there is no profit to bank my losses are limited.

If profits grow I don't move stops up in direct proportion to the gain, generally about half that amount, to allow for normal dips while providing some protection of the gain.

HansOndabush

Well each to their own. I don't use stops at all, prefer to take a longer term view unless I am trading for the short-term in which case I just monitor the price manually.

Steve182

Deleted_User said:

Steve182 said:

I'm about even actually. Only playing with fairly small stakes and discovering that I can find trends in commodity prices which are a bit more more predictable than Crypto or stock market.

"about even" lol ... that's what gamblers say when they've lost money

Disovering you "can find trends" ... but can't make money from them!

Seriously, are you in this to make money or for fun? If it's a leisure activity for you, then of course it's OK to do it provided you are carefull not to lose more than you can sensibly afford. OTOH, if the point is to make money, you should account for the total hours you put into it to work out your effective hourly rate of pay (a negative rate when you have overall losses, positive if you have overall gains - but it may well be laughably small when you look at it per hour).

I may be up or down a few hundred but peanuts either way...

I made a fair bit of extra profit last summer mirroring some of my own real share investments using leverage provided by the platform. Since them I've lost about the same, also betting on shares, so I drew most of the money from my spread betting account when I was about even. 

What's left now is just play money, my spread betting account is currently funded by about 0.25% of my portfolio, so yes it's just a bit of fun.

I analysed what I had been doing betting on shares previously and concluded that shares were simply too unpredictable for any short(ish) term betting strategy.  

It now seems to be working quite well with commodities....time will tell of course

Steve182

HansOndabush said:

Well each to their own. I don't use stops at all, prefer to take a longer term view unless I am trading for the short-term in which case I just monitor the price manually.

I didn't use stops initially, but saw a £5K gain turn into a loss betting on shares last year so decided to change strategy.