Hello everyone and welcome to this site. My name is James Whyte and I’ve been trading in the financial markets for over 5 years and have been a full-time professional trader and investor for 4 years. My main focus is on trading currencies, gold, oil and the main stock indices. I am starting this blog to get more active in the trading community and to share some of my trading ideas to show others how to effectively control your risk and to make money consistently by trading the financial markets.
My Trading Style
My trading style is defined by controlling the engagement and only entering into a trade when I think the odds are favourable, the rest of the time I am out of the market. I make short term trades typically lasting a few hours and medium term trades typically lasting a few days. Before entering any trade I plan my exit in the event that the trade goes badly by placing a stop loss and I also plan where I will think about taking profit if the trade goes with me. This helps to avoid any confusion when money is on the line. Another vital component of my trading is how I limit my losses. My probability of success for any given trade is pretty good at around 65% but I still get strings of losses every now and then so by limiting my risk on any one trade to 2% of my total portfolio I can ensure that a reasonable string of losses will not result in the destruction of my account. Trade set ups can sometimes offer risk/reward ratios of 1:3 or more so sizable gains can still be posted whilst limiting losses to 2%.
Trade Set-Ups
I take a wide variety of trade set-ups but they usually fall into one of two categories:
- Medium term trades which are sourced by checking the daily charts at the close of the session. These can be reversals or trend following set ups depending on which is relevant at the time.
- Then we have my shorter term trades which are determined by economic data or geopolitical events. I will either position myself in the lead up to an anticipated economic announcement to trade the speculation surrounding it or react to the announcement as soon as it is been released.
Performance
These types of set ups have served me well since I started trading professionally back in 2008. Here is a breakdown of my trading results over this period:-
|
|
2008
|
2009
|
2010
|
2011
|
|
Total Trades
|
50
|
131
|
121
|
17
|
|
Winners
|
38
|
76
|
68
|
12
|
|
Success Rate
|
76%
|
58%
|
56%
|
70%
|
|
Yearly Return
|
109.54%
|
70.35%
|
36.48%
|
9.57%
|
Results for 2011 are shown up to March and will be updated at the end of every month. I have found that because of the short term nature of many of my trades I tend to perform better when the markets are more volatile. I feel that my trading has definitely improved over this period despite the fact that my performance has decreased (hopefully 2011 will rectify this trend). I also spent 3 months traveling in 2009 and 2 months in 2010.
I hope you have found the information detailed on this page interesting. If you have any other queries feel free to email me at whytehottrader@hotmail.co.uk and I will happily get back to you as soon as I can.
