I am going to start doing some discretionary FX day trading. I will be trading the major FX pairs. Starting account balance is about £4700. I will be betting £0.5 per pip for every £100 i have in my account. So the first bet will be £23.5 per pip. I think i will be controlling about £235,000 worth of currency positions with my starting balance. Around 50:1 leverage. The plan is to make only one or two 'high probability' trades per day. I will report my progress at the end of the day. This is high risk trading, do not attempt unless you are prepared to suffer 100% (or more) account wipeout. This type of high leverage trading requires many years of experience. I will be using stop losses on all my trades, which will be held fairly close to the entry price, but still 10% (or more) of my account may be lost in single trade.
This will be spread betting, (using one of the better firms in the UK), 2 to 3 pip spread being paid by me, depending on the instrument. Tax free (in the UK). But in the end as a day trader you dont really save any tax as the extra spread paid on all your bets adds up to near what your tax savings are. I have access to 200:1 leverage with this spread bet firm, so could have up to 4 positions open if i wanted. But i rarely do more than one trade at a time.
But don't you pay taxes if you're a day trader ? I thought you needed a main stream of income to be eligible to the tax-free status ?
Oh not this again.. dont want this journal to off topic. As this topic (tax free status of full time spread bettors) has been discussed many times before. But from everything i know, straight forward speculative spread betting is tax free even if done full time. No one has ever been able to prove to me otherwise. Things get murky if your full time spread betting is part of some wider taxable business or behaviour.
Good week, although only traded 2 days. Over traded a bit on thursday took about 8 trades, and made a loss of about £350. Managed to remain calm even though i was over trading. Friday was much better made over £1100 in total to end the week up £744. My Bet size started at 23.5 pounds a point and dropped to 21 due to losses on thursday. On Monday i will be betting 27.2 pounds a point I know people will ask: My strategy is to sell resistance and buy support, so it is counter trend/band trading. I aim to hit singles, catch 20 pip moves, not 100 pip home runs. Code: Week1 Update =========== Starting Balance 4691 P/L +744 Number of Trades 12 Win % 33% Average Win Size 381 Average Loss Size -98 Ending Balance 5435 Performance since start of journal +16% Best and Worst Trades of the Week ==================================== Market Period Opening Size Closing P/L Spot FX EUR/USD 17-Sep-10 13059 -23.5 13041 423 Spot FX USD/JPY 16-Sep-10 8576.83 -22 8592 -333.74 The above USD/JPY trade was the biggest losser by far this week. This should have stopped out earlier but i lost concentration as i had another GBP/USD position on at the same time.