6 lessons I have learned in my first year of trading

When I first started trading CFDs on eToro, I was highly motivated but had no experience at all. No wonder I had to learn a few lessons in my first year of trading. I thought I was doing the right thing, when I read tons of blogs, websites and books about CFDs, trading, chart analysis, fundamental analysis, indicators, strategies and even about myself. Despite the many rules and guidelines I have read, I needed to learn some lessons by doing it the wrong way first. After learning more and more trading rules I at least managed to finish my first year of trading with a small profit. So far, those have been my most important lessons learned:

stock picks from intelligenttrendfollower.com that are available on eToro

A couple of months ago I started following a guy on Twitter: Jay @intelligenttrendfollower. Every week he posts a selection of stocks he chooses for his trend following strategy . I like his trading style, since it is based on fundamental analysis combined with chart analysis. To be more specific: He searches for healthy companies with good performance figures on finviz. Then he compares the charts and checks them for big trends. I followed some of his picks and made nice profits with them. You can find more details on his blog. Unfortunately not all of his stock picks are available on eToro. So every week I check for available stocks first, before I start analyzing the charts. In order to help you save some time, I decided to share my list of Jay's stock picks that are available on eToro in this post.

Update 07.09.2017:
Unfortunately I realized, that eToro updates its portfolio permanently. They add and remove stocks and I do not know which criteria they are using. So the list below might not be correct any more and I do not have the time to keep it up to date. Therefore I will not continue this list.

Portfolio Review 01.05.2017

After the main portion of my eToro credits have been withdrawn from my eToro account, I took a break from ManualTrading to find new trading approaches. A few weeks ago I resumed my activities and would like to share my new strategy with you in this portfolio review. As always, the plain numbers first:

CopyTrading: -19,9% (last portfolio review: -21,2%)
ManualTrading: -11,0% (last portfolio review: -11,7%)
Overall: -15,7% (last portfolio review: -17,0%)



Remark: The graph above shows the profits relative to the money deposited on my eToro account. It doesn't consider remaining credits as well as compensation that I receive as popular investor on eToro.

Portfolio Review and adjustments 18.03.2017

When I first deposited money on my account, I received credits from eToro. After six months they have now been deducted which forced me to rearrange my portfolio. Here is my current portfolio status:

CopyTrading: -15,14%
ManualTrading: -8,11%
Overall: -12,01%

Strategy backtest pt.10 - copper trading strategy

In my last last portfolio review I was quite optimistic about being on the right path with my copper trading strategy. Just one week later the strategy revealed its weakness again by creating two lossy trades that ruined all profits gathered before. The overall result after 10 weeks of applying the strategy was thus disappointing:

• without trading mistakes: +2,33% 
• actually realized in my portfolio: -9,33% 

The following chart shows the performance in the course of time. The red line shows the "theoretical" development of my equity without trading mistakes. The blue line shows the actual development including the trading mistakes:

Due to these results I stopped applying the strategy but didn't want to give up that quickly. Instead I adjusted my backtesting tool, so that I can backtest this kind of trading system. My main focus was on finding better and fixed entry signals rather than relying on my chart analysis skills.

Portfolio Review 18.02.2017

I have been trading on eToro for nearly six months now, so time to share another portfolio review. Unfortunately I am still not profitable overall, but I have the feeling to make some progress on my manual trading:

CopyTrading: -10,92%
ManualTrading: -7,02%
Overall: -9,30%

Getting started with Metatrader 5

Today I made a big step forward on my trading activities. I decided to start trading with metatrader in addition to my current eToro portfolio, thus widen my possibilities. Read in this post why I choose metatrader 5 over metatrader 4, which broker I picked and which goals I set for myself.

Strategy backtest pt.9 - "past performance is not an indication of future results"

"Past performance is not an indication of future results" - you can read this sentence whenever the performance of a trader or a trading strategy is presented. Somehow every trader, no matter if professional or beginner, would agree that this is a very true warning. At the same time it also puts all the backtesting effort into question. In fact, after working on a suitable strategy for months, I learned how true this sentence is - fortunately without loosing real money...

copper trading strategy

Since I started trading on eToro I have been looking for a fixed trading strategy, that I could apply "without thinking". While studying my copper trades, I realized, that on many days the daily copper candlesticks show long upper and lower shadow. So I figured it could be profitable to trade an a daily basis. In this post I describe the strategy and present first results.

Portfolio Review 14.01.2017

I didn't intend to publish another portfolio review just two weeks after the last one. But while reviewing my portfolio for myself I realized, that for the first time since I started trading, my ManualTrading portfolio has performed better (or less bad) than my CopyTrading portfolio:

CopyTrading: -8,03%
ManualTrading: -3,71%
Overall: -5,94%

Chart analysis on $Gold 05.01.2017

On December 8th 2016 I opened a buy trade on $gold on eToro at $1.177,30, just to watch the price of this precious metal to fall to $1.126,56. Fortunately I stayed patient and confident (check out my comment in this former post). Today my trade finally turned green. Here is my analysis whether to keep or close the trade.

Portfolio Review 01.01.2017

The year 2016 has come to an end, so it was time for a portfolio review. December has been a rough month for both CopyTrading and ManualTrading with quite some losses. Therefore the following numbers are somewhat disappointing:

CopyTrading: -7,74%
ManualTrading: -9,48%
Overall: -8,58%

The following graph shows the course of my equity:

Portfolio chart analysis 22.12.2016

Markets have been surprising in the last weeks. Not only did I make some bad trade decisions, no, all traders I copy right now on eToro are between 5 and 30% in red. So I am not the only one who got surprised and messed up. Anyhow, now I am here, two days before Christmas wondering what to do with those unfortunate trades:

Sell $Ger30: -33% and -38%
$Copper: Sell +23%, Buy -34%
Sell $DJ30: -11%
Buy $Gold: -21%

I am especially worried about the $Copper and $Ger30 trades so I tried myself analyzing the charts of those assets. The target is making decisions whether to hold or close those trades or to tighten the stop loss limits. As usual I like to share and discuss my thoughts with you in this post.

The natural gas experiment - the analysis

It sounded so easy - too easy. Making money by opening buy and sell trades at the same time without the risk of loosing money. I liked the idea, so I did some calculations (that I presented in this older post) and figured: This can actually work. So far it was only a theory. In order to find out if it really works, I started an experiment and opened a buy and a sell trade for $NATGAS at the same time. Just two days later the experiment was finished, when the sell trade hit the stop loss. Unfortunately the trading strategy didn't work. In this post you can find my analysis, why the theory was wrong.

The natural gas experiment - the beginning

Today I read about an interesting and simple trading strategy: "Go long and short at the same time and you will always make profit!" Hard to believe - it simply sounds to easy. Then I started making the math...

Strategy backtest pt.8 - trade orders

In the former post about stop loss limits I presented an easy to use strategy, with a good DPI value. However, there was one difficulty for everyday use: Opening of trades has always been on the closerate. This is a quite difficult for several reasons...

Portfolio Review 12.11.2016

It has been six weeks since my last portfolio review and those weeks were exciting. We have seen quite some volatitly, mainly due to the elections of the 45th U.S. president. There was a lot of uncertainty and also some fear of what might happen. Finally Trump is the one to move into the white house and the markets didn't collapse as some traders might have expected. In addition to those interesting market surroundings, eToro - today the only platform I am trading on - introduced a new investment product: The CopyFunds (check eToro's website for more information). So it was about time to review my portfolio, so here we go:

CopyTrading: +2,54%
ManualTrading: -13,54%
Overall: -5,22%

Strategy backtest pt.7 - stop loss limit

In a former post I already investigated different stop loss systems. I found that the "reinforced" approach was most successful, so I used that throughout my following investigations with a constant stop loss limit of 2%. In this post I present results of an investigation of the limit itself.

Strategy backtest pt.6 - delay factor

On every online broker, stop loss and take profit orders are not always executed at the rate determined by the trader. That's simply due to offers and demands of the markets. Compared to the "ideal" processes of my backtesting tool, this is a disadvantage. In order to account for these imperfections of the orders, I implemented a delay factor that is further described and investigated in this post.

Strategy backtest pt.5 - market trend

In the last posts about my backtesting I had a closer look at long trades, short trades and stop losses (check posts with label "backtesting" or links on the bottom of this post). I figured that a "long-only" strategy only worked in bullish markets while "short-only" strategies only worked in bearish markets. So it was important to work on general market trend indicators.