Sunday, November 30, 2008

Weekly Futures Positions Review - November 30, 2008

Top posts from the past week:

A review of my futures trades from the previous week:

Other existing positions I've got:
  • Short the British Pound - Last time I shorted the British Pound, it turned out to be a quite profitable trade. I plan to hold this position until the GBP hits a 15-day high against the US dollar.

My wish list...and it looks like these commodities are at least starting to form a bottom, at last:
  • Sugar
  • Coffee
  • Natural Gas
  • Silver

Open positions

Date Position Qty Month/Yr Contract Entry Price Last Price Profit/Loss
10/10/08 Short 1 DEC 08 British Pound 1.6870 1.5371 $9,368.75
11/26/08 Long 1 MAR 09 Cotton 46.42 48.00 $790.00
Net Profit/Loss On Open Positions $10,158.75

Account Balances

Current Cash Balance $39,577.74
Open Trade Equity $10,158.75
Total Equity $49,736.49
Long Option Value $0.00
Short Option Value $0.00
Net Liquidating Value $49,736.49

Cashed out: $20,000.00
Total value: $69,736.49
Weekly return: -4.1%
YTD return: -9.4%

***"Cash out" mostly means taxes, but lately I've also been using it for living expenses, and also to finance a cool new time management software startup that is starting to lift off.

4 comments:

diego said...

Hi Brett,
on what do you base your entries and exits? Do you use programmed algorithms or just intuition, or both? Have a profitable speculation.

Brett Owens said...

Hi, thanks for your comment.

I typically enter long positions on 20-day highs, and exit on 15-day lows. With the reverse guidelines for short positions.

Pretty simple, but it'd worked pretty well for me, and I get in the most trouble when I ignore these simple rules.

Here's a previous post I wrote about entries and exits after reading Winner Take All: http://commoditybullmarket.blogspot.com/2007/12/weekly-positions-update-121607.html

John said...

Brett:

How much leverage is required when trading currency positions? Also, have you traded currencies that are not Dollar based? For example, shorting a british pound against a Norwegian krone?

Brett Owens said...

John, I usually try to have $15-20K of cash for every currency contract, at a minimum.

I believe you can get > 10:1 leverage with currency contracts, so it's easy to leverage too high - which I've personally done.

Have only traded $-based contracts personally.

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