This weekend just gone, I attended the two day Trader’s University course (www.knowledgetoaction.co.uk). (See previous posts)

I stayed over in a hotel called Jury’s Inn in Chelsea, which is only two minutes walk from the seminar and got a good room. I’m not very good with mornings so I wanted to make sure I could get up as late as possible but still get there on time.

I arrived early and booked in. The room was great but the food was awful!

The course started the next morning and about 40 people attended. There was plenty of room and two massive screens to see what was going on. I sat down the front as I had forgotten my glasses, but wouldn’t have needed them anyway.

The presenter (Sandra) was excellent and gave the whole day an uplifting tone. She had just the right amount of humour to make you laugh but not to getting the way of her seminar and getting the information across. There were three other trader coaches there who helped with the exercises etc. and also Kelly who helped with the admin and bookings etc.

There was a lot of information to take onboard, and we each got a very thick manual of all the slides through the weekend.

As detailed in my last post, I changed my spread betting broker to igindex. (www.igindex.co.uk)

The course started by explaining what spread betting is and the differences between spread betting and contracts for difference (CFDs) and trading in stocks.

During the next two days we worked our way through the thick manual covering these topics:

·         Patterns in stock charts such as ascending triangles, flags and channels; these fall into two categories, converging patterns and pivot patterns.

·         Moving Averages

·         Indicators. We covered MACD, RSI, Stochastic.

·         Volume

·         Risk and reward

·         Power Play strategy or pivot strategy

For each topic we did a practical exercise to identify or work out the topic on charts printed in the manual.

The information covered was not complicated but there was a lot of it.

We also covered placing a trade and setting up sharescope. Traders University provide some filters and configuration files to load into sharescope so that you have all the necessary indicators etc in your setup that are used on the course.

After completing the course, I was looking forward to getting started.

I transferred £2K into my igindex account to get me started. The estimated return on investment for trading purely following their rules is estimated to be between 6-10% per month, which at 6% would double your initial capital in one year.

A lot of the trades do seem to make quite a small amount of money and at that rate of return I would need at least £30K in my account to be financially free just from spread betting. It would take me 4 years to achieve this with an initial pot of £2k.

The golden rules in spread betting are as follows:

  • Dont ever trade without a stop loss
  • Dont risk more than 1% of your capital in any one trade
  • Weight up the reward : risk ratio and make sure it is at least 3:1

I have three skype calls that last 30 minutes for one to one mentoring to come, and so hopefully that will be very useful too.

The traders university offers more one to one training, time on their trading floor and also training in intra day trading and FOREX trading. This can make a lot more money. Their courses are very expensive, with the top option costing nearly £15K.

The reason they start you off on the FTSE 350 only and only trade out of hours is to learn the process in a slower moving market. Once you have the basics they then teach on faster markets.

I have decided that if I can get their system to work, and it s really good, I will invest the money I make into the next part of their course, however, if I cant get this part to work, then I wont go back to them.

So in conclusion, I would at this point recommend the course to anyone wanting to learn spread betting. I cant guarantee the system works yet and as I have only placed a couple of trades, but I will talk about that in a future post and let you know how it goes and if I make any money.