Looking at the top performing UK funds and investment trusts for 2013 for those who like their money managed throws up some fascinating facts with the benefit of hindsight. The top three top performing sectors in 2013 have been the North American Smaller Companies sector, UK Smaller Companies sector and the Japanese Smaller Companies.

Last week Chevron has revealed the cost of its massive Gorgon LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) project in the north west of Western Australia has increased for a second time, to the staggering figure of $54 billion.

Many of these traders shocked the world by virtue of the sheer magnitude of their losses and all ended up in prison. The one common theme from each of the trader’s stories is hubris – an all too common human emotion. That coupled with greed, ego and inability to accept that they are wrong were the other common ingredients.

Angus Campbell, Chief market analyst at London Capital Group, provides Spread Betting Magazine readers with an interesting take on just what their clients have been trading this year – were you in the majority or minority?

I’ve heard several allusions to the fact that, economically at least, it’s the 1970s all over again. Judging from the plethora of charity shops, pawnbrokers, and the ‘we weigh your old rags and pay you cash’ clothes banks populating the high street…

It’s not very often that I write anything at all related to macro economics, but here goes. Suppose you’re sitting in a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and, unfortunately, it’s sprung a leak. You could expend your energy by bailing out the boat using the bucket that (quite conveniently) you have on board. This will keep you afloat but will get you no closer to safe harbour.

Web sites like Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance also provide some great free tools for obtaining up-to-the-minute information and for maintaining portfolios, shadow portfolios and watch lists.

I’ve been thinking about how feasible it would be to play a game of ‘bigger and better’ with spread bets. This would be quite the opposite of the highly diversified long-term position trading approach that I’m practising in my trading tail.

As trailed originally in my news item CityIndex Moving to Daily Funded Trades – whereas I previously shied away from City Index and its platform siblings partly because of the way that the profit-counter was reset on a daily basis, I’m much more inclined to trade with them now that each position shows my total accumulated profit since the position was opened.

Covel’s trend following book includes many real-life track records achieved by real-life successful trend-following traders, and the associated equity curves are instructive (for me)