How to Manage Your Trading Around Your Life

LONDON, February 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

For many traders, trading is a part-time pursuit. But following the markets and organising your account can be difficult to manage around your work and your daily routine. Here, spread betting provider City Index explains how you can manage your trades away from the trading platform.

Getting a healthy work/life balance can be tough enough without throwing trading into the mix. Meanwhile, more and more people have added trading to their part-time pursuits as a source of additional income over the years, with spread bets providing a low margin entry level for many to the world of financial trading.

However, you cannot always be in front of your computer to seize opportunities or close trades quickly when the markets move and the state of play changes. These could be natural developments in market trends or rapid fluctuations in reaction to economic news. But because you are busy at work or spending time with loved ones, you are left powerless to manage your account.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to manage your positions while you are away from the trading platform.

Make a Plan

Formulating a carefully considered plan and strategy can be essential for success when trading. If you are unable to quickly react to market movements it may be worth switching to more medium-term spread betting. Otherwise you may find yourself under pressure to frequently check your positions.

Outlining profit goals, maximum losses you are prepared to take, the size of the trade at any one time and setting up entry and exit points into and out of the market using orders can also help to manage your account in the long-term.

Stop Losses & Limit Orders

Setting up stop losses and limit orders can also be an effective way of managing your trades when you are away from a computer, as it means that you do not always need to monitor your spread betting positions in order to maximise your profit potential.

Traders can use stop losses to automatically close a trade in order to help minimise losses. There is a small risk that the closing price could be different from the order level if the market prices gap when the markets shut and reopen the next day at a different price or in real time during the trading session. In which case, guaranteed stop losses are also available at an additional fee to protect against market gapping.

Meanwhile, limit orders can also be used to automatically close your trade at a predetermined value immediately be transfer profits into your cash balance.

Start Mobile Trading

With 2012 being championed as the year of the Smartphone, increasing numbers of traders are using mobile devices to manage their accounts on the move.

The City Index mobile trading platform was voted 'Best Mobile Trading Platform' at both the 2010 and 2011 Money AM Finance Awards and praised for its intuitive usability and the autonomy it offers traders.

The app is free to download for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry mobiles, so you can start spread betting and trading CFDs instantly and securely 24-hours a day. 

"Giving spread bettors the ability to trade whenever they want and wherever they are is completely where we feel the industry is going," said Joshua Raymond, Chief Market Strategist. "No longer are you restricted to making spread bets in front of the computer."

Risk Management

Careful planning and closing orders are just two parts of essential trading risk management. There are many more tricks and tools to learn in trading, yet mobile trading is providing traders with immediate access to their accounts like never before.

This is especially important for traders placing spread bets. As spread betting is a leveraged product, it involves a higher degree of trading risk as compared to other regular forms of trading. This is due to the fact that whilst you are only required to deposit a small margin to trade, your true exposure remains the full value of your trade. This essentially means that you may lose more than the amount of funds that you may hold in your account. Naturally, traders will want to manage their spread betting positions more closely.

It is also advisable to trade a variety of markets to spread your risk. Because if you place a large trade in one market, your trading account could live or die by that one market.

You can learn more about trading with a free City Index seminar. See a full list of forthcoming workshops at: http://www.cityindex.co.uk/learn-to-trade/seminars.aspx.

Spread betting and CFD trading are leveraged products which can result in losses greater than your initial deposit. Ensure you fully understand the risks.

About City Index:

Today more and more individual traders are discovering the benefits of derivatives, and many of them are discovering them through a City Index trading platform.

As a group, we transact in excess of 1.5 million trades every month in over 50 countries worldwide. We provide access to a wide range of instruments including margined foreign exchange, CFD trading and, in the UK, spread betting.

We constantly look to improve the performance of our platforms and expand our range of services. The result is that our customers benefit from innovative trading tools with transparent pricing, competitive spreads, and a high standard of customer support.

SOURCE City Index