Trade Entry and Exit Points

Spreadbetting on fundamentals only may not be a great strategy for the long term. Have you tried looking at the technicals i.e. recent support and resistance levels, trend lines, open and close levels etc – also if you are spreadbetting you need to have a good money management system in place for risk/reward ratios.
Its always great to have a big win but losses are inevitable at some time and you want to make sure they dont wipe out your account.

Entries are quite easy to find but on entry the one thing we can’t be sure of is the power of the move, will it go 10 in our favour then turn or are we in for a 3 figure move quite annoying to take a few and miss out on a hundred.

One trick I use to see if a move is imminent is to set up an average true range chart with a 15 moving average and a linear regression slope of 20 with the moving and linear changing colours for upward and downward movement so say the upward colour is black when everything changes to black and we see some separation and our entry strategy is met we go into the trade, now hopefully because of this we have entered at a time of momentum (caveat we know not which way the momentum will be) hopefully the trading system we use has picked this correctly for us, now assuming the trade is all good and going in our direction , I then personally start to manage my trades.  Of course all traders are different on this sometimes I use a 10×10 approach i.e. when it goes 10 in my favour, I will start locking in the moves 10pts at a time, this approach is ok but more difficult with fast moving instruments like the Dow or Crude; there I would like to see a 20-25pt move in my favour and then start implementing a 10×10, with the average true range method when the average true range crosses back over the 15 moving average depending on the state of my trade I would be thinking we are close to exiting, if at this time I was 40 pts to the good I might give it a 10pt window and then cut the trade.

I must also add the first thing I do every morning is do Fibonacci lines as these can be ideal targets, you just need to think of them as a roundabout where the instrument may go straight on over without any concern or make a u-turn.  I try not to place to much importance on them as they can influence your decision making but I like to know they are there, but that’s just personal preference,  I have yet to trade with anyone that does everything the same to me it’s about finetuning your strategy to one’s own personality and risk!

P.S.  The average true range is also a pretty good ranging indicator when everything’s red then pretty much the markets are in the doldrums to me not a good time to trade, hope this helps

Would you not have a problem closing (say) a £1k pp? I would have thought setting up say 5x £200pp and close over a few days? or am I missing something?

No idea, never had to close anything so big. I would say that when it gets that large, you would need to ring them up as you would a share broker.