Tony began trading in 2005, after deciding he wanted to invest $20,000 into the Australian stock market. His goal was to select a handful of stocks that would hopefully appreciate enough over a 6 month period to outperform the rate he was receiving through his savings account.

Once 6 months was up, he’d re-assess his holdings and set a new goal. It was a simple goal really, but a goal that he found so hard to keeping with early on that his attempts to reach it almost cost him his pride and dignity.

Selecting the stocks was not the hard part; no, what caused Tony problems was his inability to stop watching the day to day fluctuations of his stocks. He felt compelled to check almost hourly the price of each of his 6 stocks, whilst trying to run another business.

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What are you going to do now?

This morning I woke up to the news that in the US the Dow had fallen 2.8% (387 points) overnight, along with falls in other markets. The ASX XJO, the Australian top 200 index has lost 3.7% today in a 229 point fall.

Having been a member of a private forum that focussed on put credit spreads, I know there are going to be many traders that will have found the last two weeks of trading particularly stressful.

The posts I dreaded reading from members of that forum time and time again after falls like this can be paraphrased in five words; “What should I do now?”

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What are CFD’s?

I had planned on doing a post on CFD’s in the near future as part of a series on the many products available to traders, however I have moved this forward in response to a comment made on this blog asking to explain what CFD’s are. Brian did give a response but asked me to expand on it for the benefit of all.

The term CFD stands for Contract for Difference, and it is essentially a contract between you and another party (the provider), where by you settle the difference between the purchase price and sale price of the contract. If your sale price happens to be higher than your purchase price you make money, likewise, if your sale price is lower than your purchase price, you will lose money.

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What’s in your trading plan?

In his song “The Gambler”, Kenny Rogers sang; “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your money, while you’re sitting at the table, there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealings done“.

He could have been singing about trading, because I think those lyrics cover two of the main issues affecting trader’s success. They are… (more…)

Once the decision was made to found The Elite Insiders Group; BJ Dibbins, Dean Whittington and myself (Sean Rasmussen) got into action to put this blog together along with The Elite Insiders Group membership forum. The first question we posed was of course: What are we going to do that is unique to the rest of the market?

Well, that was a good question and we put our heads together.  It really didn’t take long at all to come up with the way we were going to help the average stock maket trading “beginner” to get established in their learning path to trading the market successfully. 
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