The Dangers of Shorting Stocks We have already covered some of the dangers and pitfalls in a previous article so I’m going to keep this brief. For these reasons my shorts tend to be fewer and even more tentative than my longs. For one thing when you go long the worst you can do is […]

Triple Witching Hours Triple witching hour occurs four times a year, and is a time when traders should watch out. It’s actually when single stock options, stock index options, and stock index futures contracts all expire at once. In the United States it’s from 3 PM to 4 PM New York time on the third […]

USA Non-Farm Payroll Numbers The period surrounding the release of the non farm payroll figures is undoubtedly the most exciting time of the month for traders and for good reason. Recent research has found that US data releases on nonfarm payrolls, the unemployment rate, initial unemployment claims and consumer sentiment tend to account for the […]

Arbitrage Opportunities Arbitrage is the profiting from differences in price when the same security trades on two or more markets. With an increasing number of financial spread betting companies quoting prices, opportunities arise from time to time for arbitraging between them. Arbitraging involves exploiting the difference in asset pricing between two spread betting companies. Essentially […]

Hedging with Spread Betting Spread betting is not just about trying to earn a bit of extra money, it also has some seriously practical uses too! You can use spread betting for hedging. You may have heard this term before and thought hedging was the preserve of big business, or something you pay a gardener […]

Trading Reversals One of the conventional strategies for traders is to watch out for a market making a top or bottom and then taking advantage as the trend reverses direction. This is known as contrarian trading although many times this is referred to as reversal trading and requires traders to spot the point when a […]

Trading Breakouts Breakout trading relates to certain continuation strategies where costs are assumed to continue increasing (in an up trend) or decreasing (in a downtrend). While it’s quite possible to make a good income from trading within a range while the prices are varying between support and resistance levels, particularly if you are using spread […]

Stripping the Dividend Dividend stripping has been around ever since the shares have been traded, but with the advent of leveraged products on equities, it has come to make a whole lot more sense. The principle of dividend stripping is based on the way the share price fluctuates when the company is about to declare […]

Pairs Trading Have you ever wanted to short a stock, but were anxious that the markets could take off and you’d end up losing your shirt? Pairs trading is a trading strategy that empowers you to hedge against this risk. Holding single shares can be a tricky business. Even if you’re right about a share […]

Momentum Trading When something is described as gathering momentum, the image of a snowball growing larger as it rolls downhill comes to mind. In the share market, momentum trading works in the same vein. A trader will either buy or sell on a market when there appears to be more activity (on the buy or […]